A Decade of Hope (42 page)

As we were walking down the hall to catch up with our group, Undersecretary Wolfowitz says, “Could you come back, and bring more firemen with you?” I said I was certain I could, and they asked that I come with no more than ten, which would be broken up into two groups of five, so as not to overwhelm the patients.

Since then those trips down to that hospital, which I make every three months, have been my therapy. Commissioner Sal Cassano gives us a vehicle, and the Fire Department gives us the diesel fuel at the firehouse. We drive down, we take all of the outpatients, the corpsmen, the chaplains, the doctors, and any family members to a pub. Anything they want to eat or drink is on us. Next morning, we go to Walter Reed, and then to Bethesda, and we bring them FDNY hats and shirts. We just sit and shoot the breeze with these kids, and they love it. They all know when the Fire Department's coming, because they all wear Police Department shirts: Look what the cops gave us. And now I'm taking my grandsons down there in two weeks. My daughter-in-law thinks it will maybe stop them from wanting to go into the service. I honestly think it's going to be a push to get them in. But we don't know.

Whenever you feel low, and like it rained and you just washed your car, or, Oh, damn, the wind just blew your hair away, think about the kids who have been shot up. Brendan Marrocco has no arms, no legs. I walked over to him, asked what he did, and kissed him, telling him, I'm a fireman, I kiss everybody. I started talking, goofing around, now we're friends. I met a kid two years ago who looked like our newspaper delivery boy; half of his calf had been shot away, and they were debating whether to save his leg or not. He had just finished running one hundred miles in Florida to raise money for special operations marines.

I just showed my wife a letter. I gave a kid in the hospital a pin, one of those little pins I keep with both my sons' photos on it. His mother called me, then wrote me: Can I buy a pin? My son lost his, and he's petrified that he can't find it. I told her to just send me her address and I'd send one. He was blind in one eye and wanted to join the Fire Department as a paramedic. Where do these kids come from? Seeing them, their strength, is my adrenaline.

 

When I moved into this house, I was a young fireman, struggling, working two jobs
,
going to school
.
My wife was working. We were driving an old beat-up car. Some forty-odd years later we're still in the same house, with different furniture and a newer car. We eat out more. I haven't changed. I could probably own a Jaguar, a Cadillac, a Lincoln, any of these things, if I wanted them. It's not me. I am what I am.

Before 9/11, I expected to spend my retirement playing golf and chasing grandchildren and watching my sons get old. We would save as much money as we could.
One day
, we thought,
they would benefit from that, and their lives would be better.
Both the boys were struggling, John more than Joe. Every two or three weeks John's car would break down, and I'd go to the gas station, drive him home, and then go back to the gas station and tell the guy, Fix whatever has to be fixed, give me the bill, and just tell my son you had to change the wires, and charge him twenty-five dollars. And we did this for a couple of years. That's what I expected my retirement to be like.

September 11 changed everything. Everything. My sons were such good people that we had to maintain their standards and stand up for them. I would never get involved in any of the controversies, the angry issues around the 9/11 hearings and the memorial. There are a few family members who always refer to the murder, the murder, the murder. Maybe it's because of my affinity toward the military, but I believe that this was our Pearl Harbor. This was an act of war, and the people who were killed that day were the first victims of that war. I always felt that my sons were doing their jobs as a policeman and as a firefighter, and that they were killed in the line of duty. I never used the word “murder,” but I can understand why people do so. The people who were murdered were the ones in the planes and buildings, who were killed with box cutters, by crashing aircrafts, fire, and collapse, victims trapped in an environment that they had no control over. These people were victims. When I meet people related to them, I talk to them, and I end the talk by saying, Your son, your daughter, they were victims, my heart goes out to you. My sons went to work to save your son, your daughter; they were heroes. Some people don't like to hear my honesty.

Understanding that caused me to stop going to a therapy class out here on Long Island. The therapist asked us to bring a photo and story about our lost loved ones. So each person got up with his photo and told a very moving story. I said to my wife, I think I screwed up. I brought a classic picture of my two kids: There's John the firefighter holding a police shotgun with a cigar in his mouth, Joe the police officer, a cigar in one hand and a firefighter's Halligan tool in the other. And neither one smoked.

Does losing them hurt? You bet your ass it hurts. There are days when I don't want to see people. I have a nice patio. I go out there and I read, a lot. If there's a real bad day I get in my car and I go to the beach in the winter. Jan does the same thing. My therapy every day was being at the site, seeing unbelievable things by young men and women who gave everything they could, to try and make sense of what happened.

Debra Burlingame, an attorney and 9/11 activist, is the sister of Charles Frank “Chic” Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77. On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked his aircraft and crashed it into the Pentagon. During the hijacking Chic died fighting for the control of his plane and the safety of his passengers.

 

 

 

T
o understand how my family felt about Chic's career choice you have to know a little bit about my dad. My father was first of all a career military man, and was in the service for twenty years. He was air force, so it was all about airplanes.

In some branches of the services—for instance, in the navy—the family is left behind during an overseas deployment. But in the air force the family goes with you, so our formative years were spent on military bases, on them or near them. My mother was nineteen years old when she had her oldest, Chic, and was twenty-three when she had her fourth and youngest, me. Because she had so many children in such a short period of time, we were not only close in age but were a tight family who helped one another in our learning and relied on one another as companions. When you live on a military base, everything that happens away from the base is on the outside: The park's on the outside; job's on the outside; school's on the outside. And as a child, you very much have the feeling that you're in a special, closed, very safe community.

From the time Chic was a very young boy, I can't remember him really wanting to do anything else but be connected to flying. In fact, one of the photographs that I most cherish is of him with the first airplane he ever built—from scrap lumber he found in the alley behind our house in England. He was six years old, and its wingspan was bigger than he was. He not only built this rather complicated plane, but on its wings he painted the letters U.S.A. Here he was in England and already hoping to be an American military pilot.

That's what he wanted to be. All four of us siblings had aspirations, and were encouraged to have them. I thought all kids were like that, that all families focused on each kid, and said, “What are you going to be when you grow up? What will your contribution be?” And we rooted for one another. I found out much, much later in life that that's not the case among many people. Chic's grades were good, and he was an Eagle Scout, played the trumpet, was in the French club and the Key Club. He also played in the Annapolis Drum and Bugle Corps. But knuckling down and studying was something he had to really force himself to do, because he was an action kid. I have a tape recording of my father interviewing him, during which they get into a sort of argument because Chic wanted to get a car. He was then a junior in high school, and my father wouldn't let him have one, saying, “You go through a set of tires on that bike of yours every month, so I'm afraid of what you'd do to a car.” So he didn't get a car until he was a senior.

Chic wanted to go into the air force because of my dad. He focused on that, but he ended up not getting an appointment, which devastated him. You can get a congressional appointment or a presidential appointment, and Chic ended up getting a presidential appointment from Lyndon Johnson to the Naval Academy. I think he got the appointment because our father was retired air force. Although he had no influence, it was something that stood out on Chic's application.

When he finally got the acceptance at Annapolis, we were all not just proud but greatly relieved, because he could be a pilot and that's what he wanted to do his whole life. We, his siblings, were emotionally invested in that with him. When he got emotional, we got emotional. And when he was joyous and deliriously happy, we were too—it was that way with our family.

I will never forget taking him to the airport for his flight east to Annapolis in '67. I was thirteen, a ripe age to be so in awe, for to me he was a man, a full-grown man. When I saw him in his uniform with his classmates, those cadets were like gods to me. He really thrived at Annapolis, and his whole thing was, he wanted jets. He didn't want to just fly, he wanted
jets
. He wanted fixed-wing, and he wanted jets. We sweated with him till he got there, but he just excelled in the cockpit. He got a degree in aeronautical engineering, and [he] ended up as a carrier-based pilot on the
Saratoga
, a ship built, I've come to learn, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. So it was ironic for me to go to the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a board member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

Chic was the guy who was always stuffing suggestion boxes. He was like that in the military. He was certainly like that at American Airlines, where he got a job after a brief period working as an engineer at Lockheed. He really believed in writing letters of advice to presidents of the airlines. He was an inspiration for me, because he was confident that one person could make a difference. It was simply in his nature to try and improve a situation. And he loved people, the kind of guy who was always crossing the room to introduce himself to strangers, but not in a self-promoting way. He made people feel at ease and so was very much loved by his peers.

I remember having to fly shortly after 9/11. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, after almost thirty years of living in New York, as I had lost both my mother and father recently and wanted to be closer to my family on the West Coast. Plus, I was starting my own production company. I had to fly back and forth quite a bit in those first days, and initially it was very difficult for me, because I was on American Airlines flying back and forth to the scene of the crime. I actually had to fly the very flight number that Chic flew on 9/11: Flight 76 to Dulles and Flight 77 back to LA. The crews on those planes all knew Chic very well, and they would come over to talk to me and tell me great stories about him. My brother Brad just can't fly on American anymore, because he looks a lot like Chic, and he can't take it. A flight attendant came over to him once, put her hand on his face, and said, “Oh, you look so much like him.”

When the first plane hit, I was asleep in California, as it was just before 6:00 A.M. A few minutes later my sister-in-law, my brother Mark's wife, called me from Pennsylvania. She said, “Debra, I'm sorry to wake you, but you need to go put on the television set right now.”

My legs swung out of bed and I was holding the phone as I walked over to turn my television set on. I asked, “What's going on?” And she said, “Just turn on the TV.” Of course, there were the smoking buildings, and they were playing the tape over and over of the second plane hitting, and I was in . . . I was shocked. I kept asking, “What's going on, what's going on?” She said, “A plane hit the first tower.” And as I was watching the second plane hit, I reacted to that with her. It was just an utter and complete shock.

I said to myself,
This is my hometown
. The last Mother's Day that I had spent with my mother, who had died ten months earlier, was at Windows on the World [a high-end restaurant on the 106th floor of the North Tower]. It was just a completely surreal, disorienting, shocking experience. I knew that it was terrorism. I knew too that this was beyond just a terrorist incident : We were going to go to war. Of course I know now that while I was staring at the television, Chic would probably have just been killed—a little after 9:00 A.M. American Airlines Flight 77 left Dulles International Airport in Virginia at 8:10 A.M. and crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 A.M., killing all 64 on the aircraft and 125 inside the Pentagon building. Chic died on the plane before the crash, when his plane was breached.

But interestingly, when I watched that morning I never thought of Chic, because this was in New York and Chic flew out of Dulles. What I did think of, as I watched the replay over and over, were the pilots. Not understanding how the attacks happened and how the cockpits had been commandeered, I had an image of the pilots up in the cockpit and was just thinking,
Oh, my God, those poor pilots. Those poor pilots.

I had been a flight attendant for seven years, and I spent a lot of time up in those cockpits talking to those guys. I knew the procedure on airplanes really, really well. A grave worry went through and around my head, because when you see a plane that has turned like that it can only mean an emergency. Chic used to say the first person at the scene of an accident was the pilot, because the plane noses in.

A friend of mine called whom I had flown with as a flight attendant with the former TWA. She asked me if Chic was involved. And I said, “Oh, no. Chic flies out of Dulles. Chic wouldn't be in New York.” Looking back, that didn't even make sense, because those planes weren't necessarily from New York. I had no reason to know where those planes came from; I wasn't thinking logically at the time.