A Decade of Hope (11 page)

I can't explain why I'm still here.

People who come to interview me tell me that God was with me that day, and it's really a miracle. I cringe a little when they say that. Are they saying that God was with
me
that day, and that God was not with the other guys? I believe that couldn't be further from the truth. So I've gone through periods where I wonder why we lived and other people didn't. I just know it's not that I'm a better person than anybody else. I knew half of those firefighters who perished in the World Trade Center personally, and they were great men.

So sometimes I wonder:
Why am I deserving of this gift?

Sometimes my survivor's guilt is tempered by the fact that my job was to go into those buildings and try to save someone, and we did that. And not only did we do that, but I got the chance to bring all my people home that day. All the guys who were working for me were in the same spot that all the guys who died were in, and we just happened to be in that one little pocket, and we all lived.

Now you can make the argument that if we had decided not to stop and save Josephine Harris, we would have died. That's true: We would have died. And stopping to save her was against the grain, as we were definitely going through that fight-or-flight syndrome, and we had decided on flight. We were getting out of the building. And we saw her there, and again, one of my guys, Tommy Falco, says, “Hey, Captain, what do you want to do with her?” I looked at her, and I had a desire to rescue her. But I had opposing desires: I had a desire to save my life and get out of that building. This wasn't like a typical fire, where you are trudging your way through high heat and fire licking over your head and the acrid, killing smoke that firefighters always believe they will get through. Because we all could see, in our mind's eye, what was about to happen, which probably made it a little scarier. But my instincts, which grew from the culture of having been a fireman for twenty-two years at the time, told me to put ourselves into harm's way to save someone, and we did that. We wanted to stop and save her. I don't think I could have left Josephine behind. And, you know, you can say we were given the ultimate payback.

Whenever I go to work, I always have in the back of my mind the possibility that today could be a day like Pete Hayden had. [Pete Hayden was the first arriving deputy chief at the World Trade Center on 9/11.] There's a man I respect more than anyone will ever know, because of his ability and competence on that day of all days, September 11. In the Fire Department we read, we study, we prepare, and we train, but that was so out of the realm of what anyone was used to. At one point when we were trapped in the rubble, we experienced an explosion. It shook the staircase we were in, and Josephine Harris got a little upset. We calmed her down, and Tommy Falco looked at me and said, “Hey, Cap, what do we do now?” And I just looked at him and said, “I don't know. I'm making this up as we go along.”

I just had to inject a little humor into the situation, but it's true: There wasn't a manual for this, a book or a course that we could have studied. We just had to rely on our past experience and things that we trained for. And focus—just focus on what our situation was and how we could make it better, and possibly get out of there. I feared that the next attack may be worse, and I just hoped that my experience and my knowledge were going to be able to keep up with it.

I took the terrorism course at the West Point Military Academy. We looked at terrorist events, the history of them, but not so much from a strategic or tactical standpoint. In our training we tried to anticipate different scenarios and evaluate how we would deal with them. It was scary, because we had to try to think along with the terrorists, try to think of what they could do and how we would handle it.

The Fire Department has made some substantial changes. We lost a tremendous number of people—about seventy—who were off duty, who weren't part of the responding units but just showed up. We don't want that to happen again, so guidelines have been set down that instruct firefighters not to respond directly to the scene anymore: They must report to their firehouses and wait for instructions. I think we're a lot better prepared than we were, but I don't know if we can ever reach a good enough state of readiness unless we were in an active state of war—like when the London Fire Brigade was getting hit all the time in World War II.

I made an effort to go to the funerals of the guys I knew. There was never a shortage of funerals to attend. I remember one Saturday there were eleven, and when I looked at the list I realized I knew seven of these guys personally. Which ones will I go to? It was hard, especially in the early days, when I wasn't sure how my presence was going to be perceived.

I experienced reactions that ran all across the spectrum. Some family members were so happy to see me—you know, thank God somebody got out. And I've had the opposite reaction from people I'm sure were going through different phases of the bereavement process. There were two widows who were actively angry at me, and I just couldn't see why. One was a close friend of mine and Judy's, and I asked a family member who had retired from the Fire Department, “What's going on?” He knew where I was coming from. He said, “Well, she's going through a lot right now.” And I said, “Well, a lot of people are going through a lot right now.” So some of the post-9/11-era process was pretty painful.

It's still hard, and it's left a scar on me. As a battalion chief I worked in a firehouse in Greenwich Village that lost eleven people. I'd be upstairs in my office, and there'd be an announcement over the intercom that a lost firefighter's family members were visiting. They'd have cake and coffee in the kitchen. I would let everybody go down, and I would go down later—just kind of sneak in to see what kind of reception I would get. I would wait and determine if they were happy to see me, or they didn't care, or if they were angry. But generally my experiences with them were great, and I always understood why family members wanted to interact with the firefighters.

Judy knew many of the people who were killed too. She does physical therapy, and many firefighters who were injured on the job over the years went to her office for treatment. We would compare notes—hey, you know this guy, you know that guy—and she took the losses very hard. She would try to protect me from certain things, but as time went on and the list of the dead grew, we started becoming numb.

We became concerned about our kids and how they were dealing with what was happening. A couple of days after September 11, I came down to the kitchen and I was just sitting in the rocker having a cup of coffee when my eight-year-old son, John, came running in to give me a hug, and then went running back into the living room. I looked at Judy and said, “That was nice, but where did it come from?” She said, “Well, I think he just figured it out.” He had just figured out that I was inside when the building came down. And when I finally went back to work, he would ask me, “Did they catch bin Laden yet? Did they catch him?” His perception was that [bin Laden] was coming to get me. My youngest daughter, Jane, said, “You're not gonna go inside those buildings again, are you, Daddy?” And I said, “No, those buildings are gone. I can't go in them anymore.” It's hard to figure out the way they think, you know? My oldest daughter, Jennifer, was a freshman in high school at the time. We had a parade of people coming into the house to see how I was doing, and she would stay on the perimeter the entire time. She wasn't part of the conversation, but she was listening, just trying to make sure everything was okay, that I was okay.

Right after September 11, I was on medical leave, and my son was playing a baseball game not too far from our house. My muscles were still shaking, and I could just close my eyes and reexperience the collapse. But I went to his game, and it had a very calming effect. I try not to miss anything that our kids do, to the point that I'm almost obsessive about it. My oldest daughter is a dancer: We would go to every performance that she had. My son is playing college baseball now, but at the time he was in Little League, and I made every game. I would work out all kinds of work exchanges, what we call mutuals. I would use comp time. Since that time I may have missed maybe three games.

So there is a new sense of joy in immersing ourselves into what our children are doing, and really appreciating it. I'm very, very proud of my children. All three of them have achieved so much in a short period of time. They are very loving and sensitive, and they are humble. But every once in a while, I'll be sitting watching a concert, or go to firehouse picnics and things like that, and hear guys talking about their kids, and remember that there were a lot of my friends who had kids. Those kids don't have fathers anymore. And they don't have that aspect of a father's or a parent's love in their lives anymore. So one benefit that my own kids have is the presence of their father.

Religion and God play a big part in my family. A lot of our education comes from the mass media, and they choose not to highlight religious ideals. The best is not brought out. I don't know that much about the Islamic religion. They believe that you are a believer or a nonbeliever, and you would think that they would want to preach peace and tolerance. But there's not a whole lot of tolerance in that statement: You're either with us or against us. I was raised a Christian, and you're taught to love your fellow man. In my mind that's what religion is all about: to give you a sanctuary from the everyday and learn what God's message is and try to apply that to your daily life, to make your life and the lives of the rest of your family better, and to make your friends' lives better.

You know, if you put people in the same room and they talk to one another, they will get along. They may have different opinions about things, but it seems like when communication breaks down is when things start to deteriorate. For these people to have developed such a hatred for us, dancing in the streets after September 11, we must wonder: What are we doing to make them so mad?

We didn't do anything; they attacked us. I've heard people talk about the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, saying, “Well, if we didn't do that, maybe the World Trade Center wouldn't have happened,” and I say, “Excuse me, the World Trade Center happened before.” It was in 1993, only a few years earlier. People have to start developing a tolerance for other nations. There seems to be a tremendous loss of respect for other countries and their laws and their way of life in America and Europe. That's the big thing: We have to fight this tremendous loss of respect for other people.

I was recently talking to a train conductor I know, and, noting that the anniversary was coming up, he asked, “How do you feel about it now, nearly a decade later?”

I answered, “Well, some days it feels like it was twenty years ago, like it was such a long time ago. Some days it feels like it's September 12, 2001. Some days it feels like I am still right there.”

I was never as proud to be a fireman as I was that day, a day that was shrouded with so much grief and bereavement, with 343 firemen lost that day. By attaching the number 343 to them it is like saying that they are heroes because they died. But it was easy to die that day. What made them heroes was what they were doing before the building came down, and people lose sight of that. They lose sight that they were witness to the most heroic actions any of us have ever seen. Most people watched the events of September 11 through the lens of a camera, but I saw it from the inside of the building. I saw what was happening inside: Courage under fire. People like Mike Warchola, Faustino Apostol, Patty Brown, Billy Burke, Terry Hatten, Orio Palmer. The hairs on the back of my neck just stand up as I remember their faces.

And the list goes on, all courage and heroism. Listen to the radio recordings of Orio Palmer calling for a “hand line”: “We've got numerous involvements of fire up here. We could use a couple of hand lines.” He was going to fight acres and acres of fire on all those floors with a couple of two-and-a-half-inch hoses. But I was thinking the same thing:
We can do this, we gotta give it a shot. We can do this.
We were going to attempt the impossible—damn the impossible. There were people up there that needed our help. That is the Fire Department, a selfless profession: You put other people's lives ahead of your own, and, boy, was that principle on display that day.

A few years ago a group of retired firemen in Florida asked me for Josephine Harris's phone number, because they wanted her to come down and give a speech on the anniversary of September 11. I called her to warn her, “You're going to receive a phone call from these guys; they're okay,” because she's a private person. The guy who reached her called me back and said, “Well, she'll go if you go.” And so I went down, and three thousand people had gathered in a Baptist church—it was a huge place with a very active retired organization. I opened my speech by saying, “Well . . . you know, there was a lot of heroism and courage on display that day, and I'm not sure if you could see it through the lens of the TV camera, but you could feel it. The altruism that was there was remarkable. But a lot of the heroism that you saw on display that day was because those guys were of a generation that had been broken into the job some fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago, and received all the lessons, the esprit de corps, and the organizational culture of the department. And if that earlier generation hadn't taught us those lessons, what you saw on September 11 would have been a lot worse.”

This is why retirement celebrations in the Fire Department are such a big thing and are so well attended. Each of us realizes that this man really contributed. He made our careers better. He taught us a lot. Guys don't forget that. They respect it.