Marine Cpl. Peter T. Regan spent 12 straight days clawing through wet concrete, twisted metal and wire in the massive rubble pile that once was the World Trade Center. The stench of death was overwhelming. Covered in gray muck, he scooped and scraped with his bare hands, under and around cracks and crevices. He found nothing. He was searching for his father, New York City firefighter Donald Regan, one of the nearly 3,000 innocent victims who were buried under the collapsed towers after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "I showed up and just dug with my hands, digging through the pile," the corporal said. "A shovel didn't work. It got really frustrating because I was digging with survivors of my father's company and we'd be digging for so long and find absolutely nothing. It was total misery. Three-thousand people were in there, and we couldn't find anyone. Where did everybody go?" Three years ago, Regan was a civilian on a four-year waiting list to get into FDNY. His dream was to be a firefighter, and he hoped to be good enough some day to qualify for a slot in his dad's elite company. But in September 2002, he was on a much different mission. He was poised to exact justice for the death of his dad and the other innocent victims of al-Qaida terrorists. Along with his fellow Marines and sailors aboard a three-ship U.S. amphibious ready group, Regan was prowling the waters of the Arabian Sea. As fate would have it, they were positioned at what Navy Capt. Alan M. Haefner, commodore of the three-ship deployment, describes as the "tip of the spear." There was no place on the planet Regan would rather have been. "I'm happy I'm on the float, that I'm doing something for a reason - fighting terrorism," Regan said. "From where I am now I don't think I'm in a position to topple the terrorists that caused Sept. 11. But if I had the chance, I'd be eager and willing to do everything I could at all costs to kill them."

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