Gregory Rodriguez, 31, the head of computer security for Cantor Fitzgerald, worked on the 103rd floor of 1 World Trade Center. After the first plane hit, he telephoned his parents' home.

"He told his mother to let Elizabeth, his wife, know he was okay," Orlando Rodriguez said. "We all thought he'd made it out safely. That's the last we heard of him."

Like thousands of other frantic relatives, the Rodriguezes searched local hospitals all last week for word of their son. When they weren't searching, they gathered at a midtown hotel with relatives of the more than 600 missing Cantor Fitzgerald employees.

"Early on, the CEO at Cantor told us nobody from those floors had surfaced," Orlando Rodriguez said. "We had to reach the unfortunate conclusion that our son is dead."

But unlike so many angry Americans we've seen in the news the past week, the Rodriguezes are horrified by all the calls for massive retaliation, for war in the Middle East or central Asia.

"Not in my son's name, you don't," Orlando Rodriguez told me yesterday. "[Revenge] is a very strong emotion. It seems like the reasonable reaction at first. But indiscriminate retribution is not going to help."

As Rodriguez talks, he is sitting at his desk in Dealy Hall at Fordham's Rose Hill campus. An immigrant from Cuba who arrived in this country as a teenager in 1955, he has taught sociology at Fordham for more than 20 years.

An Active Life Cut Short

On his desk is a photo of him and his son. It was taken during a hiking trip in the White Mountains of New Hampshire a few years ago.

Gregory Rodriguez, who lived around the corner from his parents in White Plains, Westchester, loved music and the outdoors, his father recalls.

Father and son would often take camping trips together, but lately Gregory's passion had turned to scuba diving.

His most recent diving trips were to Puget Sound in Washington state, and off the coast of Guatemala.

Now the professor must explain to his students how this horrific attack, a calamity that took his only son, will change our nation in ways few of us can yet imagine.

One thing Rodriguez is sure of: Making war on other countries will solve nothing.

"We as a nation should not use the same means as the people who attacked us," he said. "We are a better people."

'Horrible Cycle of Violence'

America is not alone in this kind of experience, he said, and he pointed to places where terrorism was answered with force and resulted only in more violence — places such as Northern Ireland or Israel.

"This war will lead to the same horrible cycle of violence," he insisted.

So what is the proper way to respond to these atrocities, he is asked.

"What happened with the previous World Trade Center bombing is the right way to go," he said. "Find the culprits, put them on trial, lock them up."

But those who committed that first attack are behind bars and now we have an even more barbarous assault, he is told.

"I know there is anger," he said. "I feel it myself. But I don't want my son used as a pawn to justify the killing of others. I'm not willing to give our government carte blanche to take away our freedoms in the name of public safety."

His view is not a popular one in many quarters. When those mighty towers collapsed, so did our nation's sense of invincibility.

But amid the loud cries for revenge and retribution, we make a huge mistake to ignore those isolated voices that seek to remind us that war has rarely been the mother of peace.

In Orlando Rodriguez's case, he has earned the right to be heard.

E-mail: jgonzalez@edit.nydailynews.com

Copyright 2001 NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

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