Area chaplain remembers 9/11 service

Nearly seven years later, the Rev. John Boyles can still see the parking deck of cars.

Coated with dust from the remnants of the fallen towers, it took him a minute to realize they belonged to many of the victims who had died more than four weeks earlier in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“It literally was like going into a ghost town,” said Boyles, who toured Ground Zero a month and three days after the attacks.

He was in Lynchburg working as a chaplain for Centra when the tragedy occurred. As part of the Association of Professional Chaplains, he received a call a month later to report to New York to help the American Red Cross provide spiritual care to those in need.

He spent 18 days in New York filled with late-night dinners and countless encounters.

Helping others was a path he said pleased his mother, an Army nurse, and his father, the late S. Julian Boyles, a military man who often spoke of the rubble he saw in war-torn countries.

Now that rubble was closer to home.

‘The pit’

When Boyles arrived at the Red Cross disaster headquarters in Brooklyn, he learned he would be the senior officer of several professional chaplains — and many of them, he said, were much more qualified to lead.

Nevertheless, he helped them coordinate their efforts, which included a family assistance center where victims’ families gathered, as well as morgues and trash sites at Ground Zero.

“We called it ‘the pit’,” he said.

The Red Cross provided food, lodging and clothes for the team. The hours were long — morning work started at 7 a.m. and they didn’t get back to their hotel rooms usually until 9 p.m.

Boyles, now an interim pastor at a Bedford County church, was meeting people constantly, but he said in only one instance did anyone act angrily toward him. The teams soon realized, he said, that the people of New York were glad they were there.

Even in late October, Boyles said the debris was still falling near the towers. He described the smell as that of wet ashes.

As rescue workers labored and distraught family poured in, Boyles said the team’s only goal was to point them to the people who could help ease their grief. An example, he said, was taking care of death certificates for victims’ loved ones.

All people

One of Boyles’ last jobs while in New York was to coordinate a team of 80 chaplains providing spiritual care to families during a late-October memorial service.

Boyles’ team worked with the local clergy by the hundreds. It wasn’t the time or the place, he said, for people to be divided about aspects of their religions.

“God is a lover of all people,” said Boyles. “Though we look at him differently, we can all work together to get the job done.”

Still on call

Boyles retired as a chaplain for Centra last December after 16 years. He hasn’t returned to New York since 2001, but said he would be willing to serve again if a similar tragedy was to happen.

Tonight he plans to show a presentation of his experiences to Mentow Baptist Church in Huddleston, where he serves as interim pastor.

He acknowledges that due to the war in Iraq some audiences may have different mindsets now compared to days immediately after the tragedy, when people came together.

But now, with years removed and an ensuing war in Iraq, he said Americans have splintered back into divided groups.

From ferry rides with family members who lost loved ones to kind interaction with New York police and cab drivers, Boyles said it was an unforgettable experience to watch Americans help each other in such trying times.

“When the going gets tough,” he said, “the tough get going. The American people are a tough people.”