Lifestyle

Rebuilding

In early September 2001, Geoff Newson was a Marine stationed on a warship in the Pacific Ocean. He and his crewmates were docked in Australia for training and a few days of R&R when the planes hit the World Trade Center, and their lives took a sudden turn.

By the time the sun rose over the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers on Sept. 12 — 10 years ago today — Newson’s ship was steaming toward Pakistan. Months later, he’d be among the first boots on the ground in Afghanistan.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Newson was on the front lines again, working security operations for bomb squads and supply convoys. A second tour in Iraq ended when his unit was ambushed near Fallujah, and he was seriously hurt in a grenade blast.

Several months later, Newson was discharged with a Purple Heart and a sergeant’s rank. As a civilian, though, he’s still confronting the aftermath of 9/11, and still on the front lines of a communal mission. As an apprentice steamfitter for Local 638 — a job he landed through the Helmets to Hardhats program, which places vets in construction jobs — he arrives early each weekday at Ground Zero, where he’s one of several thousand workers who are building gleaming towers literally from the ashes.

A native of Portland, Ore., Newson lives with his wife and four young children in Auburn, Maine, commuting to a shared Harlem apartment for the workweek. (His oldest son, now 15, lives in Oregon with his mother.) Broad-shouldered and lean, he’s got a Marine insignia tattooed on his right forearm; alongside it sits a smaller image of a grenade, marked with the date he was attacked.

After quitting time one day last week, Newson, who’s now 33, took a seat in a pedestrian plaza across from the Tower 4 site, and spoke about the path that brought him to Ground Zero and why rebuilding the site is more than just a means to a paycheck.

I signed up when I was 18. My father had retired from the Army, so growing up I was an Army brat. I was proud of him, but I wasn’t one of those people who are like, “I always wanted to be a Marine.” It never crossed my mind.

I found out I was going to be a dad, and that was the catalyst. I was just getting out of high school, and all my friends were going to college. But when that happened, it was like, OK, it’s not college, it’s not partying, it’s time to man up. You’ve got to do something you can make a career out of, and I knew this could be a path. I graduated in June of 1996, I signed up in August, and I shipped in February of 1997.

I went to the Middle East, to Korea, doing training missions. Then I got an offer to go on a “float,” where you’re on a ship for six months, going through the Pacific. We stopped in Australia and did four days of training in the bush, then we had a few days of relaxation. And that’s where I was on Sept. 11.

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It was kind of surreal. We were out at the bars, when all of a sudden the lights come up, the music comes off, and they tell everybody to report back to the ship. We get back and they say, they just bombed the World Trade Center.

We knew what was coming. And literally, we got on the ship, they took a count, and we pulled out of port. We stopped in East Timor, and then it was a straight shot to Pakistan. We went into Pakistan to set up, and after Thanksgiving, we went into Afghanistan. Besides the special forces, we were the first major troops that were in country.

I got home in April 2002. Then at the end of 2002, word came that we were going into Iraq. I went over in January, and the night of the invasion, March 21, I was in Iraq. I was there nine months, doing security operations. In January of ’04, I went back; I got married right before I left.

In March, we were on a security convoy around Fallujah, and got ambushed. I ended up taking shrapnel from a hand grenade. A 5-millimeter piece of metal went through my face and buried in the back of my skull. I got medevac’d through Baghdad all the way to Germany. I was there five days, then came back to the states. I got out in November.

When I left the service I had no clue what I wanted to do. My wife is from Maine, and we wanted to start a family, so we moved back here. I didn’t know anybody, and I struggled for a while. Finally, a friend of a friend gave me a job digging foundations. I did that for five months, then my wife’s uncle said, “Hey, I can get you in as a carpenter,” so I did that for three years.

One of the guys I’d served with was from New York, and his whole family is in Local 638 — it’s a generational thing for them. In 2008, they were doing a tribute to veterans in the Labor Day parade, and he said come down and walk with me. I came for a visit, and I met some of the union leadership.

In two weeks I got a call, and they said we’d like you to come join. They gave me a number for Helmets to Hardhats, and I got into the apprenticeship program.

Normally, there’s a test, and you have to wait — there’s a whole process. But with Helmets to Hardhats, they’re putting you right into the pipeline and putting you to work. And the union is so pro-military, which makes the transition easy. They love to get military because they know they’re going to get people who take pride in what they do, who want to be the best at whatever we’re doing, whether it’s pushing a broom or welding a steam pipe.

I came into the union in December, and by the end of January, I was working down here. ConEd has steam lines that run throughout the city, and what we do is, we tie into their lines, and branch off into lines that heat and cool a building. The pipes come in 40-foot sections, so we’ll put it in 40 feet at a time. We take the steam lines up through the building, building up on each floor.

Coming down here, I really didn’t know what to expect. I had no context of the magnitude of it. I walked to the side and looked down into this massive hole and I didn’t know what to say. I’d never seen a hole that big anywhere, let alone in the middle of New York City. I couldn’t fathom it.

After 9/11, we didn’t have time to allow the emotions everyone was feeling here. It was like, what we trained to do, we are now going to do. This is the real deal, and you have to have your mind straight.

Now, working down here, I feel like I’m starting to go through those emotions. Especially as you see actual buildings coming out of the skyline. To me, what it says is, no matter how bad we think things are or how bad they might get, as Americans, we’ll always rise, we’ll always come out.

I was talking to my mother a few days ago, and I was saying how few people have those times where you can stake your name in history. And I have a couple of those. I was in Afghanistan, I was in Iraq, and now being here, I look at it and say, I’m building something that the whole world is looking at. Tourists come here every day to see this. They’re amazed that from the ashes, from the rubble, we’re building these beautiful buildings.

It makes coming to work special. You have a purpose. I’d say the vast majority of people working down here feel that way. And I think it’s especially true for the vets. Like, this is something special that I’m doing, this is not just my job. You’re almost continuing your service to the country, because we’re not just building this for New York, we’re building this for all Americans.

My hope is to stay here until it’s all done. After this building goes all the way up, our company has Tower 3, and I want to go right over there and take that one to the top.

My oldest kid is 15, my 5-year-old just started first grade. And when the textbooks are written and they start teaching this, they’ll know: I was there. People are going to come in from all over the world and look at those buildings in awe, and they’ll be able to say, yeah, my dad built those.

chris.erikson@nypost.com