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ATHENS - He was young. Too young to have lost so much hope. Too young to have discovered the other side of faith.
He was just a college kid going to work, and maybe that was part of the problem. This irrational sense of guilt. After all, his loss could not compare to the significance of others. His sacrifice would certainly not be as great.
In retrospect, the only thing Jason Read left behind in the dust of ground zero was his innocence.
It is nearly three years later, and half a world away. Read, an Olympic rower, just took part in a world record performance by the men's eight team. All around, friends and teammates are chattering and laughing.
Read grins softly and talks easily. No longer in the boat, he is now in the past. He is recounting the things he's seen and the lessons he's learned.
Without warning, he begins to cry.
"I carry it with me every day," Read said. "It gives my life purpose."
He was upstairs in his mother's home in Ringoes, N.J., on the morning of Sept. 11. Read had been up much of the night doing homework for his classes at Temple University and had slept late. As he came into the living room at mid morning, he could hear his mother sobbing quietly in front of the television.
He was 23 and the volunteer chief for the Amwell Valley Rescue Squad. Within hours of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Read was working as the communications officer at Liberty State Park in New Jersey. He was in charge of mobilizing the doctors, nurses and paramedics who had come from around the state and were waiting for New York's wounded to arrive.
As the sun disappeared on Sept. 11, it was clear there would be no massive evacuation of survivors from across the river. So Read put on his life-saving gear and went to New York to search the rubble for hope.
He, and others, worked day and night. Clocks were ignored and lives were put on hold. Read began with the zeal of someone who was certain they were doing good. He knew people could survive days without food or water. He heard about the pockets of air that could sustain life in an avalanche of concrete.
But, by the fifth day, Read was spent. He'd found no survivors, only bodies. Bodies of men and women, no older than himself. He was there less than a week and he'd seen things that would burrow in his head for a lifetime.
He took a ferry back to Jersey City, where crowds still came to gather with goods and supplies for the people arriving from New York.
"We looked like we had been to hell and back," Read said. "We were covered in soot and building material and pulverized concrete.
"And there waiting for us were these little children holding candles and singing the national anthem. To look at their innocence, to know they were not old enough to understand the full implication of what had happened and to see them coming up and giving us flowers and poems they had written, it was such a contrast of human nature and human experience.
"To go from the worst of the worst to having these little girls come up and hang on you with your gear on. That's when I lost it. I had no idea how to get home, I lost all bearing. I sat down and cried my eyes out."
It barely got better in the coming months. He was having nightmares. He took a semester off from school. He would lose himself in rowing exercises.
Just about the time he was preparing to take on the world, it seemed to turn on him.
"How," he asked, "do you work your way through an event when 3,000 people are murdered in an hour and a half?"
Everyone saw the same images from ground zero. The flag. The firefighters. The rubble. They were in newspapers, magazines and television.
For Read, they were also trolling in his mind's eye, capable of appearing any time. For Read, there seemed to be no escape.
The smallest things would bring a rush of emotions. A song on the radio would remind him of what was playing on the ferry back from Manhattan. He went through grief counseling but called that a Band-Aid.
"He was really withdrawn, silent, sullen. I caught him crying several times," said his mother, Joan, who came to Greece to watch him compete. "At one point, I leaned on him more than I probably should have and he blasted me. He said, "You have no idea what I've seen!"'
If his innocence was shattered, his sense of spirituality was awakened. Born Lutheran, Read had not devoted much time to his faith.
But now he was interested in Catholicism. After discovering a body, Read watch as a priest issued the Last Rites.
He talked to the chaplain at Princeton, where his rowing team was based, and soon began taking Catholic instruction. By the following spring, he had converted to Catholicism.
Read also was throwing himself into rowing. It was the one thing, he said, he felt control over. Along with teammate Bryan Volpenhein, he was out on Lake Carnegie a couple of days after returning from Manhattan.
"We didn't talk about it a lot. We sort of let him do his own thing," Volpenhein said. "He was searching for reason, for the meaning of life, for what to do next. Rowing gave him a way to put his emotions into something."
Just before 9/11, the U.S. men's eight team had returned from the World Championships in Lucerne, Switzerland, where they placed a disappointing fourth. Two years later, the team won silver in the World Championships in Milan, Italy. Then came a World Cup victory earlier this year.
Now, the team is a day away from a possible Olympic gold medal. The team, with eight rowers lined from front to back in a boat, narrowly defeated favored Canada in the preliminary round and will compete in the Olympic final Sunday afternoon.
Read said winning that race would be the happiest moment of his life. It is not so much the value of gold he seeks. Nor is it the weight of Olympic history.
When Read talks of winning, it is the sound of a national anthem being played in celebration that he wants to hear. It is the sight of a U.S. flag being raised in triumph that he craves.
He is not looking to replace the images already locked in his memory.
Just, perhaps, to balance them.