Vets help to rebuild World Trade Center

Vets help to rebuild World Trade Center
By Gregg Zoroya - USA Today
Posted : Tuesday Aug 9, 2011 7:58:38 EDT
NEW YORK — The battered desert combat boots that iron worker Richard Farrell Mohamed wears on the job at the site of the destroyed World Trade Center are not the usual footwear here.

Mohamed, 28 — who grew up a tough kid of Egyptian, Russian and Irish descent from Rockaway, N.Y. — wore the boots when he went to war in Iraq after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

On that clear day, he watched the Twin Towers fall on television while he was in English class at the Lindenhurst High School Alternative Learning Center in Long Island. On this day nearly a decade later, he was helping to rebuild what al-Qaida destroyed in an act he says determined the course of his life.

“You grow up here; 9/11 happens. You join (the National Guard). You go to war.; you come home. And then you’re rebuilding,” he says. “You’re like a full part of this whole thing.”

About a thousand workers are building five office buildings on the World Trade Center site — including the 1,776-foot centerpiece, WTC 1. For some, the job has a particularly special meaning. Labor officials estimate that a few dozen or more military combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, like Mohamed, are on construction crews working at the site.
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Vets help to rebuild World Trade Center