Chicken Soup for the Soul of America by Jack Canfield Read Free Book Online

Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey.
    Summers was one of the few lucky ones. He lived. Had Newman not stopped amidst all the panic that surrounded them, Summers is certain he would have perished.
    â€œIf he hadn’t led me, directed me and pushed me, I was so woozy I would have probably sat down and lost consciousness. Who knows what would have happened?
    â€œSteve saved my life,” Summers said. Yet, in a startling revelation, Newman made the same declaration to him.
    â€œYou probably saved my life, too,” he replied. “If I hadn’t helped you, we both might have been there when the buildings fell.” Through the sacrifice of one, two lives were saved. It was volunteering of the tallest order.
    Robin Gaby Fisher

    Â©Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

More Than Chocolate
    I arrived at Ground Zero as part of the Emergency Animal Rescue Services (EARS) team on September 19, a week and a day after the terrorist attacks. Although there were plenty of agencies providing food and drink to the rescue personnel, everyone was still mostly running on adrenaline. There was so much to do, so much chaos and wreckage—so much energy tied up in helping in any way it was possible.
    The devastation at the WTC area was unimaginable. Over three hundred search-and-rescue canine teams had come from all over to help find survivors, and when it became obvious that there were precious few of those, the teams looked for bodies. Many of the human/dog teams weren’t strictly search-and-rescue; if someone had a drugor bomb-sniffing dog, they came, too. Everyone wanted to do something .
    EARS helped at a triage area for the dogs working at the site. When a team came off a shift, they brought the dogs to us for cleaning and decontamination. There was a lot of asbestos in the omnipresent dust that covered the animals’ fur. Plus the dogs had to trample through pools of foul and unsanitary water that collected as a result of the rain and the hose jets directed at the rubble to keep the dust out of the air.
    After the dogs were clean, veterinarians did exams, paying particular attention to the dogs’ eyes, noses and feet. Many of the dogs needed eye flushes because of the abrasive nature of the dust. Others had minor cuts on their feet that in that environment could have become easily infected.
    One man, a police officer from Canada, had heard the news and decided to drive down immediately. He and his large German Shepherd, Ranger, had arrived on the 12th and, within hours, had begun that amazing duet called search-and-rescue work: the dog’s instinct and intense concentration combined with the handler’s keen attention and response to the dog’s cues. Back and forth, over and over, the pair scoured the surface of enormous piles of broken concrete, twisted metal and shattered glass.
    When the police officer’s days off from his job at home were finished, he didn’t want to leave what he felt was such important work in New York. He called his police station up in Canada and requested to take his vacation time. They refused his request.
    â€œThen I quit,” he told them and hung up.
    When the people in his community heard about this situation, they immediately took up a collection to show their support of this man. The police station received so much flak over their unfortunate decision that they called the man and told him to stay as long as he liked; his job would be waiting.
    It was late in the afternoon on the day I arrived in New York when Ranger and his handler came to our triage area. We scrubbed Ranger down and passed him over to the veterinary team. I noticed Ranger’s handler sitting in a chair close by, staring straight ahead. He was a large man and looked like a combination of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo—bald head and camouflage fatigues. The adrenaline had finally run out and the reality of the disaster