Watching from Lowell, then standing in the wreckage

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, Lt. Colonel Debra Ashcraft was hundreds of miles from the smoke, watching a television screen in Lowell, Massachusetts, as the towers fell. Within days, she would be standing in the wreckage of lower Manhattan, wearing the uniform of a Salvation Army officer and doing the things she had been trained her whole life to do, without ever knowing this was what the training was for. She did not go to Ground Zero seeking a place in its history. She went because she believed she had been called there, and because, for Ashcraft, now Lt. Colonel, the call had never really stopped since the day her mother first walked into a Salvation Army looking for help.

"I've always felt incredibly honored to be an officer with The Salvation Army," she said. "We serve because people are hurting, and that's what God has called us to do."

From her mother asking for help to her becoming a Salvation Army officer

Her journey to ministry began long before 9/11. Raised in a family with limited financial means but abundant love, Colonel Ashcraft grew up attending The Salvation Army after her mother discovered its programs as a teenager. Through the organization, she learned to play music, participated in youth programs, and found mentors who encouraged her to pursue college. She believed them, enrolled, and became a registered nurse, the first in her extended family to earn a degree. It was in a hospital, tending to bodies, that she first felt God asking her to tend to something larger. She answered that call the way most honest people answer it, not with certainty but with faith that certainty would come later.

That same spirit guided her to New York in September 2001.

What The Salvation Army did at the Ground Zero command post

Each morning before sunrise, her team traveled from a Salvation Army camp in New Jersey into Manhattan. Assigned to an incident command post near Ground Zero, they served meals, distributed supplies, listened to exhausted first responders, and offered emotional and spiritual support to anyone who needed it.

"The Salvation Army became a place where people could pause," Colonel Ashcraft said. "Sometimes someone needed food. Sometimes they needed someone to listen. Sometimes they simply needed to know they weren't alone."

A firefighter once took her hand after finishing a meal she had served him. He told her his wife had asked how he was surviving each day, and that he had answered honestly. He said it was because of The Salvation Army.

It is a small story. It is also, in its way, the whole story.

"My first thought is only to liken it to The Salvation Army being known as the 'mother of Ground Zero,'" Ashcraft said. "We bandaged cuts, fed people, listened to them, encouraged them and reminded them that what they were doing mattered."

Going back as lead chaplain

Months later, Colonel Ashcraft returned to New York as lead chaplain for a second deployment, by which point the crisis had changed shape without losing its weight. The fires were out. The grief was not. Around shared meals, firefighters and construction crews and recovery workers began to say aloud what they had been carrying silently, and Ashcraft learned something about ministry that no seminary can fully teach.

"The ministry of presence is one of the greatest gifts we can offer," she said. "You don't always need the perfect words. Sometimes people just need someone willing to sit with them."

What she remembers 25 years later

More than two decades later, Ashcraft still becomes emotional every September 11. The memories remain vivid—not only because of the tragedy, but because of the extraordinary compassion she witnessed.

She remembers people donating supplies by the truckload, volunteers stepping forward without hesitation, and first responders determined to care for one another.

"The need was overwhelming," she said. "But so was the generosity."

For Colonel Ashcraft, that remains the lasting lesson of 9/11.

"The Salvation Army was there because people were counting on us," she said. "That trust is sacred. Every day, we're called to serve in a way that's worthy of it."