On Sept. 11, 2001, Jason Read awoke to the sound of his mother's sobs as she watched television.

“Look what's going on!” she said, pointing to the images of the World Trade Center on the screen.

At 21, Read was the youngest person in New Jersey to be named chief of a rescue squad, the Amwell Valley Rescue Co., stationed one hour outside Manhattan.

He was a baptized Lutheran who “has a big heart and is not afraid to show that heart,” says his mother, Joan Read.

Jason was a competitive rower who says, “My dad always instilled in us this belief that we were leaders.”

Shortly after the second plane crashed into the south tower, Read was racing to a command post to help coordinate 800 rescue workers in a staging area and field hospital.

“The feeling at Ground Zero was very positive,” Read adds. “It was: ‘Okay, we've got to find people alive.’ I developed quite a strong bond with a lot of the guys I worked with, but I don't know their names. They are just faces behind respirators. But I trusted them with my life and they trusted me with theirs.”

Read worked for the better part of the first week with little, if any, restful sleep.

“Early on Friday morning I stopped to rest for a bit and the next thing I knew, a medic at the southwest treatment center started an IV on me and wanted to take me to a hospital, but I wouldn't let them,” Read says. “There was just so much work to be done.”

The huge effort took its toll.

“The scene at Ground Zero was enough for any normal person to have nightmares for the rest of his or her life,” he says.

Amid the horror, Read says two particular moments will mark his life.

He describes the first: “We were pulling out quite a few young guys, guys close to my age, who were not intact.

“I remember one of the fire department chaplains leaning over, giving the last rites to a number of very young guys that we had to take away. You look at the loss of life, see him administer the last rites. … It provoked me to want to become a Catholic after I had gotten a handle on things.”

The second: returning across the Hudson River to Jersey City at 1 a.m. on Sept. 15, Read was caught between the ruins he had come from and a cheering crowd that received him.

“Everyone started singing and cheering,” said Read. “We looked like we'd been to hell and back, covered with pulverized concrete and building materials. And there were all these little children holding candles and singing the national anthem. To go from the worst of the worst and see this, it was a profound experience.”

With the drop of the adrenaline rush and a moment to reflect on what had just happened, the trauma would now take a personal toll on Read.

Doubts and questions filled him.

“I had a sense of apathy about all things in the world that had meant so much to me,” Read says. “Did I really want to row anymore? Did I want to be chief of a volunteer rescue squad? What did it mean? All those people had been killed. Game over. Mortality became reality in a matter of seconds.”

The day after returning from Ground Zero, Read went to Mass.

His dad was Catholic, though not practicing, so it was the only Church he remembered having gone to at all, many years before.

Coming back to the Mass, he says, was “emotional and revitalizing. I prayed very hard — for the first time in my life.”

There were some questions that only God could answer.

Yet this moment was not enough to heal the deep wounds of the disaster. That would be a long process.

Read's mother was worried about the changes she saw in her son after Sept. 11, as the silence grew and he would wordlessly go straight to his bedroom after supper.

“There were night sweats, nightmares, withdrawal, communicating in monosyllables,” Joan Read remembers. “This wasn't my son. And I told him, ‘I'm really worried about you.’ He kept saying, ‘I have everything under control.’ But I was worried.”

One day, when she asked him to do a small chore, he exploded, saying, “You have no idea what I have seen! You have no idea!”

At first Joan was surprised, but as she sought to understand, she realized this explosion was really an opening of his heart, the first step of a healing process. He had finally acknowledged what happened to him.

“I told him, ‘Jason, I totally understand, and I love and support you,’” she recalls.

That love helped him get better. “Will he ever forget what he saw? No,” says Joan. “Is he beyond it? Yes. Does he use it as an inspiration? Absolutely.”

That's where Read's rowing comes back into the picture — in a big way.

“The spring after Sept. 11, he came to Columbus and we trained together,” recalls a teammate, Bryan Volpenhein of Ohio. “He was searching for a reason, for a meaning in life and what he should do next. Rowing gave him a way to put his emotions into something.”

The search also drove him to find meaning in life in a deeper way than he had previously known.

Father Tom Mullelly, chaplain of the Olympic rowing center at Princeton University, had been a friend of Read's since the summer of 1997. Now he helped the athlete in his search for a deeper faith.

At the Easter Vigil Mass in 2002, Read came into the fullness of the Catholic Church.

He called the day “one of the happiest days of my life.”

“I'm a better brother, uncle and son,” Read says. “Now I understand how precarious life can be, how quickly things can change. And I am grateful for each and every moment.”

The internal victory was echoed by many external victories as Read won medals and championships in rowing.

“After Sept. 11, I changed my approach to rowing,” he says. “I no longer was fueled by vengeance and anger to beat other crews. My desire was to become the absolute best rower — for America.”

These achievements were crowned in Greece, at last year's Olympics. Read led America's men's-eight team to win the gold.

“I have a larger purpose, and I'm not ashamed to say that I'm doing this for my country,” Read says. “Just remembering the spirit of volunteerism and the resilience our country showed — that's so emboldening to me. If you can harness that kind of positive energy, you can do great things.”

Genevieve Yep originally wrote about Jason Read for Faith & Family magazine, the Register's sister publication.

www.FaithandFamilyMag.com