September 11, 2001 – January 2002 — Brooklyn Navy Yard & Lower Manhattan
Baptist Press, November 15, 2001 names Dr. John and Kaywin LaNoue by name as coordinators of the SBDR teddy bear ministry at the personal request of Mayor Giuliani's office. This is the first HEC dossier in the entire Walking with God Legacy Repository to receive direct external named-witness corroboration of Voice 2 from a contemporary primary source.
On September 11, 2001, Dr. John LaNoue — age 70, one year out from cancer surgery, radiation, and chemo-hormone therapy — received a call from his daughter Lydia in New Jersey and then called Mickey Caison at NAMB Atlanta. Caison: "Pack your bags, come to Atlanta, I need you both in the disaster volunteer center." Within days, the LaNoues were organizing the national Southern Baptist Disaster Relief response to the worst terrorist attack in American history. They served for more than three months.
The 319-day SBDR response deployed 3,800 volunteers from 32 state conventions, served 1.29 million meals, cleaned 643 apartments below Canal Street (commercial cleaners were charging $6,000–$12,000 per unit), distributed 21,000+ teddy bears, and deployed approximately 100 Baptist chaplains. This was the watershed event that grew SBDR from a regional network to a national chaplain corps — 52,000+ trained volunteers by 2006, 95,000 today.
Chapter 18 is the only US-soil disaster response in the entire memoir. Every other chapter takes Dr. John overseas. This is the chapter in which the lay-volunteer humanitarian model — built over 30 years through Mexico City, Peru, Iran, North Korea, and Bosnia — was deployed in the most heavily-televised disaster in American history, and was sufficient.
The TBM mobile kitchen template Dr. John designed in 1972 fed first responders at Ground Zero. The chaplaincy model built through Oklahoma City in 1995 became the FBI's first call before the second tower fell. And the lay-volunteer evangelism model — 150 Baptist workers per week for thirteen weeks, cleaning apartments while wearing yellow SBDR jackets, refusing the $6,000–$12,000 commercial cleaning fees — produced what Dr. John named as "the real ministry of evangelism" of the entire deployment.
This is the chapter that demonstrates that the model worked at home, at scale, in the worst US disaster of the era. And the watershed event that grew SBDR from 20,000 to 95,000+ trained volunteers was 9/11 itself.