"The smoke rising out of it was a strange color, almost like death itself, like the whole heart of New York had been just torn out of it," says Alan Ouellette. An independent trucker and Vietnam veteran from Bozrah, Conn., Ouellette recalled his impressions on Sept. 16 as he delivered a load of supplies for the World Trade Center rescue effort. "I've seen battlefield dead, they turn a grayish-purple color after a couple of days, and that was the color of the smoke rising."

A few days earlier, Ouellette and his wife Kathy were at home watching the horrifying news. "Kathy and I decided, jeez, there must be something we can do." He offered to carry loads for the Red Cross but never got a call back, so he called the Salvation Army.

"They took me up on it immediately," he says, and arranged for him to get the load on Saturday. Part of the relief supplies were packages assembled by students at the Kelly Middle School in Norwich, Conn.

"Those kids did such a fantastic job, it was amazing," he says. "I did a few tours in 'Nam and that leaves you kinda hard. But what they did just warmed the soul. They had collected food for the rescue workers, sorted it and boxed it, and wrote marvelous letters of encouragement on the outside. That filled up about a third of my 53-foot van."

He drove his Freightliner Classic show truck, The Dreamweaver, to another Salvation Army post in Hartford where hundreds of people came streaming in with medical supplies, food, water, dog food for search animals and other items. He took the load down Sunday to the American Stevedore's Warehouse in Port Newark, N.J., directly across from the WTC site.

A few days later as the rescue effort became one of recovery and rubble removal, officials asked a willing USA to hold off sending more donations. There was simply no more room to hold it all.

"I don't consider what I did any big deal," he says. "I told them if they needed me again, anytime, I'd be there."