“Instead of an injured stowaway, we were eight miles out at sea at the tail end of a hurricane, facing an armed barricaded EDP who was bleeding. On top of all that he was from Africa where the threat of AIDS is really big. We had no specialty equipment, no Tasers, no heavy ballistic vests, nothing. I looked at John and said, ‘Okay, here we go.’” – John Busching
John got a call at the tail end of a hurricane to participate in one of the most dramatic rescues in NYPD history. Eight miles out to sea, the police were told that a crew member on a container ship was bleeding and needed to be transported to the hospital. Swinging wildly in the wind, John and his partner, each attached only by a single cable to a helicopter hovering eighty feet in the air, descended to the deck of a container ship. Once they were on board, they learned what they were really facing—two stowaways armed with knives threatening to kill anyone who tried to take them off the ship.
From the day John Busching entered the NYPD Academy, his goal was to get assigned to the Emergency Service Unit. Six years later he reported to his first ESU assignment - Truck Seven in Brooklyn - where he raced from barricaded perpetrators with hostages, to armed robberies, to take-downs of serious criminals.
Perhaps the most dramatic part of John Busching's story is his desperate attempt to reach Port Authority cop John McLoughlin, who would be the last person pulled out of Ground Zero alive. John crawled on all fours deep into the fires and dust just hours after the Twin Towers fell. When he finally reached McLoughlin, he was still alive but his lower body had been crushed under concrete blocks and steel beams. "Dante's Inferno could not have been worse," John said. "It was like looking straight into hell." Despite the fact that he thought he was going to die if he stayed with McLaughlin, John would not leave. He administered life saving medical treatment for twelve hours while a team of thirty people, rotated in and out in groups of four, worked furiously to dig McLaughlin out by hand. Oliver Stone's film, World Trade Center, was based on John Busching's rescue of John McLoughlin.