Mrs. Kassenbaum, a Red Cross volunteer and retired mental health specialist, arrived in New York on Sept. 15 to a terrible eeriness.

"When we landed, there was absolutely no telephone service," she said. "None. I couldn't even use my cell phone to call headquarters and say, 'Where do you want me to go?' So I hiked out, caught a cab and said, 'Take me to the greater New York headquarters building on Amsterdam."'

She arrived to chaos and received orders to go to Red Cross headquarters at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge the next morning.

"When I got to my hotel, I had to crawl under police tape to get in," she said. "The whole area was declared a crime scene."

For the next two weeks, Mrs. Kassenbaum helped screen non-Red Cross volunteers to make sure they would be able to handle the tremendous pressure, she said.

She came home exhausted after two weeks but returned around Thanksgiving.

Grace Kassenbaum, of Aiken, spent several weeks as a Red Cross volunteer in New York City immediately after the attacks. RON COCKERILLE/STAFF

"At that point, I was working within easy walking distance of ground zero," she said. "And we were dealing with so many of the people that were indirectly affected, like all the people who had lost their jobs or had nowhere to go - that kind of pressure."

After two weeks, she was so exhausted she was almost incapable of work herself, she said.

"But I know that we did fantastic work," she said. "We helped a lot of people and got them through it."

Back home, she began losing weight and developed a fear of falling down stairs.

"I'm very fortunate," she said. "My husband is a psychiatrist. He understands."

She has since been diagnosed with a moderate case of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, which many people who were at ground zero early on developed. Time and a recent 10-day vacation to Costa Rica have somewhat assuaged the malady.

But she won't hesitate when called to the next disaster, she said.

"I will go because I know in my heart of hearts this is sort of my retirement mission," she said.

Red Cross volunteer Marilyn Swanson, an Aiken nurse who worked at a first-aid station at ground zero for two weeks in October, doesn't want to talk about her experiences there.

"It was about as close to hell as I ever want to be," she said. "It was so negative that I don't want to bring other people down. I don't think most people need to hear the stories that I heard there. It was so bad that I don't even like thinking about them."

Kelly Hamilton, the minister to students at First Baptist Church in Augusta, visited ground zero in May while in New York with a group that had gone to help a Manhattan Baptist church administer its tutoring program, food bank and clothes closet.

"For me, being there at the site was a sobering, eerie type of feeling," Mr. Hamilton said. "There was an old graveyard right beside it. The reality of the tragedy on Sept. 11 struck home looking at the cleanup with that graveyard there."

Augusta computer engineer Howard Ensley volunteered through the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. He went in February, March and again in June.

Mr. Ensley interviewed people applying for financial support from the United Way relief fund - displaced workers, residents and those who had lost a family member.

He worked across the street from New York City Hall, about two blocks from ground zero.

"It was hectic and stressful because you had to be part psychologist and part psychiatrist," he said. "You're not really trained to do that, but you would have to just listen to them. Some of them were very bitter. Some of them were still suffering from the trauma. You can't imagine the effect of plain old ordinary everyday people being attacked like that. A lot of them are still suffering from that."

Augusta Red Cross volunteer Bob Thoresen, a licensed clinical social worker, volunteered as a mental health technician two weeks in October.

He worked at the respite center, providing mental health services to the rescue crews, firefighters, police and other Red Cross volunteers who were affected by their work experience at the disaster site.

"As far as the actual ground zero site, I don't think the TV coverage or the photographs that appeared in newspapers and magazines could do justice of how devastating the site was," he said.

Red Cross volunteers were not allowed to go below the surface at ground zero, but Mr. Thoresen did view the site from the perimeter.

"It just sent chills throughout my body to think of the lives that were affected, the families and certainly our whole nation and the world, really, for that matter," he said. "The world is a different place than it was prior to Sept. 11."

Martinez resident Carlo Caputo's two nephews work a few blocks from the World Trade Center and saw the towers come down. One of them had to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to escape because the subway trains were not moving, and there was no public transportation.

Mr. Caputo visited the site during the Thanksgiving holiday with his 18-year-old twin sons.

"It was just unbelievable," he said. "It's just something you see in the movies, in science fiction. Even the media accounts you saw on TV, the planes crashing into the buildings, is something that is hard to realize."

Reach Sylvia Cooper at (706) 823-3228 or sylviaco@augustachronicle.com.