Actor Rob Riggle recalls helping clear Ground Zero after Sept. 11 attacks

Pete Grathoff, The Kansas City Star on Sep 9, 2026

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Acting wasn’t always the goal for Rob Riggle while he was at Shawnee Mission South and then the University of Kansas.

Hoping to be a naval aviator, Riggle joined the Marines at age 19 while in Lawrence. But he later decided to take a leap into show business and started working two jobs. During the day, Riggle was on active duty with the Marines and at night rehearsed for acting jobs as he said in a story on the Marines Corps website.

After guest roles on the sketch comedy “Upright Citizens Brigade” in the late 1990s, Riggle completed his Marine Corps duties, but remained in the reserves. Acting was on the forefront of his mind. And sure enough, he’s gone on to star on “The Daily Show,” “Modern Family” and “The Hangover.” His latest movie, “Don’t Move,” debuted Tuesday night in Kansas City.

But it wasn’t a simple transition from military service to Hollywood. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which took place 25 years ago, pulled him back to the Marines. That included time helping clean at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center buildings collapsed.

“I was sad, I was angry. I felt like I just endured some sort of sucker punch,” Riggle said in an interview earlier this year. “But I was also in a rare situation. I lived in New York City, in Manhattan. My reserve unit was in Manhattan at the time, and so I was activated that night, and I worked on the rubble piles throughout the month of September, and I was able to do something. I was able to contribute. I don’t know if you can remember back to that time, but everybody wanted to do something. They felt compelled to help, to donate blood or to donate clothes, they just wanted to contribute to helping. And I was actually in that rare position to actually go down to Ground Zero and work and be part of the bucket brigades and help. And so that felt good to me. It felt good to be able to help like that.

“And I was a young captain in the Marine Corps, and my nation was just attacked, and I was furious about it, so I volunteered to go back on active duty, and I did.”

In his book “Grit, Spit, and Never Quit,” Riggle described seeing rescue workers in New York City, physically large men who had been trained for this type of work, break down crying in the days after the attack.

Air raid sirens went off a few times while Riggle was working, but there wasn’t a concern of another jet hitting a skyscraper. Instead, the sirens sounded when there was danger of another building collapsing and the workers sprinted for safety.

At times, the bucket brigade was stopped because a body or body part had been located in the rubble and had to be taken to the morgue. Riggle hoped beyond hope that someone would be pulled alive from the carnage, but he never witnessed a happy moment like that.

Tears came to his eyes during those days, too.

The strongest memory Riggle has of those days is the smell at Ground Zero.

“Wet, mashed concrete mixed with the odor of burning metal,” he wrote in his book. “It was a distinct and awful aroma, one I’d never experienced before and hope to never experience again.”

Despite the awfulness of it all, Riggle was happy to assist in clearing the area. Later, his reserve unit was called up and he was sent to Afghanistan.

After his military commitment ended, Riggle jumped back into acting, getting his first big break as a featured player on “Saturday Night Live” in 2004-05.

But the anniversary of Sept. 11 always brings back memories of Ground Zero.

“Those were tough days for everybody. It was very surreal to be down there at Ground Zero,” Riggle said. “It was very surreal to see those buildings that had been gutted and the towers that had collapsed and all the concrete dust that was like moon dust and the smell of burning metal.

“It was very intense and very surreal and hard to process. It’s like anybody who’s in shock. Those first couple days, everybody was in shock and trying to process what had happened and what the scope and scale was, because we didn’t even know what the casualty numbers were. They could have been a lot higher. So it was a traumatic time, but I felt blessed that I was able to be there and help in whatever way I could.”