Duke Exeter

The United States Navy has a warship whose bow was made from the World Trade Center. The men who built her lost their own homes in the middle of building her. They did not stop. In 2003, twenty-four tons of steel pulled from the wreckage of the Twin Towers were trucked south, out of New York, to a small foundry in Amite, Louisiana. Population about 4,000. The steel was to be melted down and poured into the bow stem of a new amphibious warship. The Navy had already chosen the name. USS New York. The men at the Amite foundry were metalworkers. They had melted steel their entire lives. Scrap is scrap. It goes in the furnace. This did not go in the furnace like scrap. Witnesses said the workers handled it the way people handle relics. Some of them reached out and touched it as they walked past, gently, the way you would touch a coffin. Nobody told them to. Nobody could have explained to an outsider why grown men in a foundry in rural Louisiana were laying their hands on twisted beams from a building fifteen hundred miles away. One man who had worked at that foundry for forty years was scheduled to retire before the pour. He postponed his retirement so he could be there when the towers went into the fire. On September 9, 2003, they poured. Seven and a half tons of World Trade Center steel became the stem of the bow. The leading edge. The part of the ship that touches the ocean first. The ship was built at the Avondale shipyard in New Orleans. Keel laid in August 2004. Twelve hundred Louisiana workers. Welders, pipefitters, electricians, shipwrights. Then, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina came up out of the Gulf and drowned the city they lived in. Their houses were under water. Their neighborhoods were gone. Some of them lost family. The shipyard itself was hit. There was every reason on earth for the work to stop. The twelve hundred came back. Men who were sleeping in shelters, in trailers, in cars, showed up at the yard and went back to work on New York's ship. A firefighter from New York who came down for the christening said it out loud, the thing everyone in the yard already knew. This ship shows the strength of the country, past 9/11, past Katrina. Two cities, two disasters, one hull. She was christened on March 1, 2008, at Avondale, with the families of 9/11 victims in the stands. In the fall of 2009 she sailed for the first time, down the Mississippi and out into the Gulf and up the East Coast. On November 2, 2009, she came up the Hudson River into New York Harbor. She stopped in front of Ground Zero. The crew manned the rails in dress uniform. The ship rendered honors, a 21-gun salute, to the empty sky where the towers had stood, from a bow made out of them. Five days later, on November 7, she was commissioned into the Navy in New York, in front of thousands. Her crest shows a phoenix rising out of two gray towers. Her motto is on the crest. "Strength forged through sacrifice. Never forget." She is 684 feet long. She carries 800 Marines. She has deployed all over the world since. And at the very front of her, below the waterline, cutting through every wave she has ever met, is seven and a half tons of the World Trade Center. The steel that fell on September 11 was twisted, black, and buried. Louisiana dug it out, melted it, and sent it back to sea. Pointed forward. Hitting the waves first. 🇺🇸