Ordinary Heroes

by Joseph Pfeifer

  Covered in light gray powder, with eyes so red they appeared to be bleeding, I must have looked like a ghost of myself. My body ached, and I could see in the mirror my face was filled with sadness. Ginny was overjoyed I had come home, yet she was afraid to hear any details of the horrors of the day. We climbed into bed and tried to sleep. I was never so happy to be home with my family and next to the woman I love.

  9

  THE PILE

  My eyes were open but I couldn’t see clearly. I blinked a few times and opened them again. Just a blur.

  At midnight, after our emotional family reunion, I’d taken a shower and tumbled into bed. I could no longer move, not even to eat. I slept until 6 a.m. and awakened with eyes so puffy it pained me to open my lids. I had lived through 9/11, but now it was difficult to see.

  I flashed back to childhood, when I was in second grade, just before Christmas, and woke up unable to see out of my left eye. It was swollen shut and painful. For a healthy kid who had never been sick enough to stay home from school, the situation was bizarre. Dr. John Scalzo, our family physician, came to my parents’ house, examined me, and told them it was very serious; I needed to go to the hospital. I was immediately admitted. The next morning, I woke up and couldn’t see out of my right eye.

  Pediatric experts Dr. Eden and Dr. Kaufman were called in. They diagnosed a disease very rare in children: herpes zoster ophthalmicus, a shingles virus that could lead to permanent damage, even death. Blisters were forming over my eyes and it was progressing. In December 1963, my only hope was for doctors to push penicillin, delivered via a spinal tap. In twelve to twenty-four hours, they’d know if it had worked. Otherwise, I might die.

  I could not be under sedation for the treatment and I was scared out of my mind. My parents were not allowed to be with me in the room. I knew I had to be courageous enough to listen to what I was being told, to be completely still. As Dr. Scalzo squeezed my hand, another inserted a needle into my spine. Despite the fear and pain, I didn’t move.

  The next morning, I woke up and I could see. After a week in the hospital, I spent several additional weeks with my face covered in hideous-smelling ointment. I recovered completely, the only evidence some scars on my forehead; eventually my treatment and recovery was written up in a medical journal. But that nightmarish childhood event traumatized my whole family.

  As I blinked and thought about my parents’ fear for their son’s life, memories of the previous day’s horrors at the WTC flooded back. I could feel the grit from the debris in my eyes; rinsing my eyes did nothing to alleviate the pain or clear up my sight. I called Dr. Tom Cunningham, my friend from grade school and college roommate, now a cardiologist.

  “Tom, I can barely see.”

  Tom started crying. He’d seen the collapses on TV. Knowing I’d be in the thick of it, he had accepted that I had not survived. Thrilled to hear my voice, he hung up and arranged for me to see an eye doctor at 6:30 a.m. Ginny drove me to his office on the Queens–Nassau County border.

  Dr. Willy Ky and Dr. Leslie Goldberg told me the grit from the collapse had worked its way under my eyelids, causing inflammation. I could only imagine what the grit was made of: pulverized glass, concrete, Sheetrock, and other toxic building materials. Dr. Ky removed fifty bits of debris, placed drops in my eyes, and told me to return to see him the next morning, when they’d take out fifty more pieces. That became my morning routine for the next three weeks, even on weekends.

  After Dr. Ky’s treatment, I could see well enough to drive to the Duane Street firehouse. Ginny understood when I insisted on going back to the site that morning instead of staying with her. “I have to find my brother and the other firefighters,” I told her.

  I arrived at about 8 a.m. Some firefighters had gone home to sleep for a few hours; others stayed the night. Grim-faced men sat around the kitchen table. A few watched TV news replaying the events of the previous day and the response of the U.S. authorities.

  Belonging to a firehouse meant you had dozens of brothers and sometimes sisters, especially after many years in the department. Since the FDNY tends to run in families, many people had relatives and close friends who were missing. The joy of seeing people alive the previous night had given way to heartache.

  The FDNY was just starting to grasp the size of our losses. Asked on television how many people had died, Mayor Giuliani shook his head and replied, “The number of deaths will be more than any of us can bear.”

  But New York wasn’t alone in suffering. The previous night I had seen snatches of footage on the firehouse TV about an airplane hitting the Pentagon and another crashing in a field in Pennsylvania. None of it made sense to me. I would learn that terrorists with ties to a group called al-Qaeda had carried out four highly coordinated attacks. During his address to the nation, President Bush had said, “The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”

  American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 with ninety-two people aboard, had taken off from Boston’s Logan Airport at 7:59 a.m., destination Los Angeles. Hijackers had overcome the crew, commandeered the cockpit, then flown the plane into floors 93 through 99 of the WTC North Tower at 8:46 a.m. From the street, I had witnessed the exact moment of impact, which had killed everyone on board and many inside. For the first time, I realized which floors had been destroyed by the aircraft. The flames had certainly spread to other floors as well.

  United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 with sixty-five people aboard, had left Boston at 8:14 a.m., also headed to Los Angeles. It had crashed into floors 77 through 85 of the South Tower at 9:03 a.m., even as people evacuated. The damage was much lower down, meaning that those people above had little chance of getting out.

  American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 with sixty-four people on board, had taken off at 8:20 a.m. from Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., headed to Los Angeles. The terrorists slammed it into the western walls of the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. The casualties were much lower because it wasn’t a high-rise building, but horrific nonetheless.

  United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 with forty-four passengers, took off from Newark International Airport at 8:41 a.m., heading to San Francisco. The hijackers intended to crash it into the White House or the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. As the crew and passengers fought to retake control, it crashed into a Pennsylvania field, near Shanksville, at 10:03 a.m. All of those brave people were killed.

  I had trouble comprehending the staggering scale of the events that had occurred the previous day, and I had no time to watch TV or read the newspaper. Ginny sitting at home in Queens knew more about the big picture than I did.

  By the time I arrived at the firehouse, the FDNY had gone to an emergency command structure. Some units would be assigned to WTC rescue operations, others to respond to emergencies in the rest of the city. To increase staff availability, firefighters would be working twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off until further notice.

  Many of the guys with Engine 7 and Ladder 1 were anxious to get back to the WTC site to start searching; everyone assumed we had many people alive and trapped. I shared that feeling.

  The previous day, Ron Schmutzler, the captain of Ladder 1, had left the firehouse at 8 a.m., took a train home, and was helping another firefighter with a chore when they heard the news on the radio. When the buildings collapsed on television, they started to cry, knowing the guys from their firehouse were in the middle of it.

  “In my mind, they were all dead, there was no one going to survive something like this, and I knew I had to go in there and help,” Schmutzler said. “I had to dig these guys out not knowing if there was going to be another collapse, another bomb, another explosion or whatever it was.”

  Schmutzler took the time to write a quick letter to his wife and kids, telling them he loved them, basically saying goodbye.

  Then his son walked through the door. “There
were tears in his eyes.” Schmutzler hid the letter. The boy pleaded with him not to go back to work. The captain spent a few minutes talking to him about why he had to go. “If it was me in this collapse, I would be inside that building, alive, praying that my friends would come to rescue me. How would you feel if you found out that there were firefighters that stayed home when they should be in there rescuing me?”

  “Then go,” his son said. “But if you die I’ll never forgive you.”

  “Well, I’m not going to die,” Schmutzler had told him. “I’ll be back.” But he couldn’t be sure.

  The following day, Schmutzler knew how his men felt and wasn’t going to hold them back from saving their brothers, even if it meant exposing themselves to danger. He announced that whoever wanted to go to the site could, and whoever was not yet up for it could hold off. “If you were ready to go down, you went down,” Captain Schmutzler recalled. Otherwise, “you stayed in the firehouse and took care of the guys as they came back.”

  For those who went, there were rules. “Go in teams of two,” Schmutzler told them. “One guy falls in a hole, we will have a guy there that knows you fell into that hole.” Someone passed around extra surgical gloves for picking up body parts.

  “Hey, guys,” Schmutzler said as a group was getting ready to leave, “if you hear three horns it means something might be coming down, so keep your eyes open when you’re walking around down there.” Members of Ladder 1 started walking south to the site since their rig had been destroyed.

  I put on my dusty bunker gear and started walking as well. My eyes were still scratchy and inflamed, but I could see. Nobody was on the street in lower Manhattan except emergency workers. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to be on duty, but I had no thought of waiting to report until I was next scheduled to work. I had been first at the scene. In the FDNY, we take ownership. Sometimes, we name fires. In my mind, this was my fire. I knew other chiefs felt the same way.

  I reached Ten House, directly across from the South Tower. At the corner of Liberty and Greenwich Streets, the firefighters of Ten House often kept the apparatus door open for neighbors and tourists. It had been damaged; the apparatus floor, where the rigs are normally parked, had been covered with debris, and the windows shattered. But for the most part it was usable. After most of the debris was removed, it became our new Incident Command Post and a place firefighters could get water or take a breather.

  The previous day, searchers had found the bodies of Chief of Department Pete Ganci, Chief of Rescue Ray Downey, and First Deputy Commissioner William Feehan, who had walked south from the command post on West Street after the South Tower collapse. Chief Donald Burns and Chief Gerard Barbara also had been killed. Nineteen of twenty-three battalion chiefs, including Orio Palmer, had died. I was one of only four surviving battalion chiefs.

  That our upper ranks had been devastated was very unusual. Chiefs don’t go into burning buildings. Ganci was a hands-on guy, though. I suspected he’d wanted to direct the response to the collapse of the South Tower, got too close, and was caught by the second collapse. Daniel Nigro had immediately become chief of department.

  The grayish-brown dust had settled a bit over the rubble field and, for the first time, I saw the massive aluminum and steel skeletons of the skyscrapers, with huge girders hanging precariously out of upper floors of adjacent buildings. At its tallest peak, the mountain of debris was perhaps six stories high. It was impossible to believe two 110-story buildings had once stood there. The extreme crush of the buildings’ weight had pulverized everything.

  Fires continued to blaze and smolder for the next four months. What we began calling “the Pile”—what the press would dub Ground Zero—was perceptibly heaving, settling, burning, exceedingly dangerous for any search and rescue operations. An acrid smell of burning fuel, concrete, plastic, and paper hung heavily in the air.

  Volunteer rescuers—police officers, military personnel, and firefighters from around the world—wanted to help. But it was too dangerous for many folks who showed up. The National Guard was called to provide security; they cordoned off everything within blocks of the WTC complex because debris had fallen that far away.

  That second day was a mad rush to search for any victims we could find without heavy equipment. An FDNY officer and five firefighters formed each of our rescue teams. Bucket brigades removed surface debris. Those sorting through the rubble listened for sounds of life; if anything was heard, they shouted, “Quiet!” Everybody stopped talking until the sound could be identified.

  Smoke aggravated my eye injury, forcing me to stay off the rubble. But I could see people getting too close to unstable areas. I had to ask chiefs to help me literally push people out from under dangling steel beams. At times, the debris underfoot would shift and people retreated in haste, yelling, “Go, go, go!”

  Some of the hazards weren’t as obvious. Noxious air and dust prompted some people to start wearing medical masks. The fires gave off toxic fumes. We had shut off gas mains, but many of the buildings were heated by steam or diesel oil. What if an underground fire hit a diesel tank?

  For nourishment that day, I had a bottle of water and a packet of four Oreo cookies from the Red Cross, which I put in a pocket of my turnout coat. That was lunch and dinner. Local restaurants began distributing meals to rescuers for free, but I was too busy to eat. I hoped my brother was alive somewhere under the mountain of rubble. We had to find him.

  The day of grueling rescue efforts passed with few bright spots. At 9:15 that morning, a young woman who worked for the Port Authority had been pulled alive, though seriously injured, from the wreckage of the North Tower. That had given everybody hope. But when darkness fell, no additional survivors had been found.

  The electrical power was still off in lower Manhattan. We brought in more emergency lighting for the second night. The beams illuminating the haze of dust over twisted steel and smashed concrete made the Pile seem like the set of an apocalyptic horror movie. We would keep looking through the night, but hope was fading fast.

  When I started plodding back to the firehouse sometime after 8 p.m., my mind kept returning to my brother. He had gone up stairwell B. If he’d heard the order to retreat, he could have been in the vicinity of Captain Jay Jonas and his unit when the tower fell. Through some miracle, they had survived. Maybe Kevin had, too, and we just hadn’t heard him yet.

  I desperately wanted to believe that.

  The tip of Manhattan was covered in haunting darkness, with only Ground Zero illuminated by floodlights reflecting off the dust cloud from the Pile. The roads were empty as I trudged up the middle of West Street to the firehouse. I tried to grasp the enormity of the last thirty-six hours.

  I struggled with the reality that my brother Kevin could be dead. He’d followed me into the Rockaway Point Volunteer Fire Department and then the FDNY. He was my best friend and confidant, an adventurist who chose to live every day to the fullest. He knew me better than anyone.

  I thought of the Pile. Each floor of the collapsed towers had been compressed into eighteen inches, with the immense weight of steel and concrete above. Even though we would keep searching, I knew there would be no more survivors.

  My thoughts returned to my seminary days, when I grappled with deep theological issues of good and evil, then wrestled with God about my vocation in life: Should I be a priest or get married? A conversation I had had many times.

  As I walked, I again began wrestling with God. How could anyone be so evil as to fly airplanes into buildings to kill innocent people? What does all this mean? What do you want from me? As I continued to slowly walk back to the firehouse, revisiting these questions felt like meeting an old friend on the road. My heart burned as I wondered what I was called to do. Strangely, there was comfort in knowing that I had been here before.

  When I got to the firehouse, I felt the weight of the reality that Kevin was gone. I knew I had to go home to Qu
eens and tell my parents. For the second night in a row, the drive home was not going to be easy.

  10

  AN AVALANCHE OF MEMORIES

  I didn’t mingle with the guys that night. With deep sadness, I drove to Queens. I still wore my uniform white shirt with gold oak leaves on the collar and an FDNY patch on the left arm, which made it easier to get through the checkpoints at street closings in lower Manhattan. Seeing military vehicles with a 50-caliber gun on top at each roadblock brought home the reality that we had been attacked.

  Arriving on a quiet Queens block, I walked in the back door of my parents’ small house, where I had grown up with my sister, Mary Ellen, one year younger than me, and Kevin. My parents greeted me with tears and hugs and questioning faces. They didn’t want to ask me about Kevin, but I knew they had thought of nothing else all day.

  We were a tight-knit family. My parents, Helen and Bill, had grown up in the same neighborhood, three blocks apart, in Queens. They both went to St. Margaret’s Elementary School, the same school we three kids later attended as youngsters. After serving in the Navy as a signalman during World War II, my dad worked as a machinist before joining the U.S. Postal Service as a letter carrier. Mom had graduated from a secretarial high school, worked in New York City’s controller’s office, and then had a part-time job in a local clothing shop. They’d met after the war and he wooed her by writing a love poem: “One night a year ago, when there was lots of snow, I met you at a dance. It was the beginning of our romance . . .”

  Family surrounded us. Nobody had much money. We thought we’d hit the jackpot because Dad was a letter carrier. Among factory workers, government jobs meant security. Or so we thought, until the post office went on strike.

  My parents lived in a semidetached house that was no more than 600 square feet, with a postage-stamp yard. Eventually, we made the basement into two bedrooms. Two houses away lived my great-aunt Nell and uncle Tom, with my grandmother and my aunt Marie in a house right next to them. As kids, we ran between my aunt’s and grandmother’s houses through doors installed in the adjoining front porches. It seemed like one family.