by Dennis Smith
And so the whole Fire Department knows about my life and, since then, I’ve had patients connect with me in ways that had never happened before. I’ve now lived yet another set of experiences, and I can connect with them better. But that’s truly underestimating the issue, for what happened is that those firefighters who suffered similar issues and losses after 9/11 now feel more comfortable in sharing their problems with me. It is a great responsibility, but it is such an amazing gift to be allowed into people’s lives. I am so much the better, both as a human being and as a physician, for having had these experiences. I wish my wife was still alive—I wish every day that she was still alive. But everything that happens to you, I truly feel, happens for a reason. It’s up to us to accommodate or integrate our experiences. We don’t know the reasons they happen. That plan is far above us. But it is up to us to try to find a way to take bad things and make them good.
This is what I’ve been doing, for the weeks, months, and years since 9/11, and will continue to do.
Jay Jonas
When the North Tower fell at 10:28 A.M. on September 11, it brought the total number of men and women killed at the World Trade Center to 2,749. In the midst of this carnage a miraculous and inexplicable event took place: Somehow, when the collapse of this mass of 4.4 million square feet of floor space ended, it left a small open space buttressed by fallen concrete and steel. In this space were twelve firefighters, a Port Authority police officer, and a woman named Josephine Harris. Some minutes before the collapse, Captain Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 had come across Josephine as they hurried to exit the tower, knowing that it was about to fall. She was in great distress, taking only one step at a time as she descended, and she pleaded with them, “Help me.” At that moment Captain Jonas and his men determined to take this woman with them, recognizing that she could cost them their lives.
When the collapse started, I was on the fourth floor, looking for a chair for the woman we were rescuing, Josephine Harris. She had a serious case of flat feet and could not walk normally. She is a big woman, and taking the stairs was even more difficult for her. It was an agonizing and slow progress, one step at a time. The South Tower had already collapsed; I could not imagine how many people were already dead. It was just a matter of seconds or minutes before this one would begin to fall. We needed a chair to carry her so that we could run out of the building with her.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the guys I had working for me that day really didn’t understand what kind of danger we were in. We had met Captain Billy Burke [see page 182] from Engine 21 when we were still going up the stairs, and when we felt some shaking in the building, he said, “You go check the north windows and I’ll go check the south windows.” We did that, and then we had a conversation. I thought he was going tell me that a piece fell off the roof, maybe causing a partial collapse in our building. But he said, with kind of a straight face, “The South Tower just collapsed.”
I said to my men, “It’s time for us to get out of here.” They looked at me a little funny, for we’d just climbed twenty-seven floors with a hundred pounds of gear on our backs, and now I’m telling them to do an about-face and go down the stairs. But they knew, they understood. They said, “Okay, Cap,” and wanted to start jettisoning some of their equipment, but I told them, “No, keep your equipment with you. Keep your tools with you. You never know; we may need them on the way down.”
I’m sure that whatever leadership traits I developed came from observing some of the lieutenants and captains and chiefs that I worked for or with. One thing they all had in common is that the most effective leaders were the ones who remained calm under the highest stress. The more stressful a given situation got, I would consciously slow my speech down and speak softly. That’s what I was doing on that day. Billy Butler was in front of me with Josephine’s arm over his shoulders, and I would kind of talk to him in a conversational tone, and slowly ask, “Billy, can you move a little faster?”
All of my men—Tommy [Falco], Billy [Butler], Sal Bagastino—came up to me afterward and said, “How were you able to keep it together the way you did? Knowing what you knew, and you didn’t cause us any anxiety?” I told them that while I may have been calm on the outside, I was screaming on the inside. When people ask what the scariest part of the experience was, they expect me to say when the building was collapsing. That wasn’t it. The scary time was the period between the South Tower’s collapsing and the start of the North Tower’s collapsing, because it involved the anticipation that something bad was about to happen.
It was like watching a horror movie, when spooky music is playing in the background. Oh, the spooky music was playing in our minds. It was there; it was palpable. We got to the tenth floor, the ninth, the eighth, and I was thinking to myself, Well, wow, we might make it. We may get out of here. But, obviously, that didn’t happen.
My first instinct, as soon as I heard the boom boom boom of the upper floors beginning to hit one another, was to get back to the stairway, to be with my men. And once I got in the stairway, things got very bad. We were being violently thrown around, debris was pelting us on every part of our bodies, and the collapse created very strong wind currents in the stairway. It was like being in an earthquake and a hurricane at the same time.
While I was being thrown around I said to myself, Well, this is it, I can’t believe this is how I’m going to die, but this is it.
It seemed like an endless amount of time, those floors coming down, closer and closer. Somebody asked me the day after the collapse, “How long did it take for the building to come down?” I said, “I don’t know, maybe a couple of minutes.” And then I timed it using the news footage they ran so often in the early days: It took only thirteen seconds for the 1,368 feet of that building—110 floors and 360 feet of antenna—to fall.
Once everything stopped—the collapse stopped, the shaking stopped, the wind current stopped, the debris stopped attacking us—it was suddenly dark and still. I was coughing and spitting, trying to get all kinds of debris out of my mouth, my ears, my nose. I then wondered: Who’s still here? Who’s still alive? And once I was able to catch my breath, that’s when I called out and gave a quick roll of the names of my men, and Josephine, hoping with each name that they were still alive.
Thank God, they all answered. The next thing I thought: There has got to be a clue here, for there’s got to be a way out. I responded to a Mayday call from Mike Warchola, the lieutenant in Ladder 5 who was trapped and crushed. He ended up dying that day. But as I came back down after trying to get to him I found a service elevator shaft and [remembered] we all had the lifesaving ropes we carry. I thought, Hey, we could rappel down this elevator shaft and maybe find the PATH train station and walk to Hoboken, New Jersey.
I thought it was a brilliant plan. But Tommy Falco, one of my guys, simply said, “Hey, pal, what if we can’t get out of the shaft? It’s not like we can run back up the stairs and get back here.”
Yeah, I thought, we’ll save that for a more desperate time. So we kept looking for a clue. Initially we tried to continue down the stairs. We felt that maybe we could work our way out, dig or climb, but we didn’t go down more than half a flight when word came up from Lieutenant Jimmy McGlynn of Engine 39, who was below us with two of his firefighters trying to save Chief Prunty, who was pinned by concrete and dying a couple of floors—what there were of floors—beneath us. So there was no way out below us, we were told. We kept talking to people on the radio, hoping they would find us. I knew something eventually would happen, but what I did not know was how immense the collapse area was, and that we were the needle in the haystack.
When I finally did make it out to the ambulance I saw Chief Pete Hayden standing on top of a fire truck, directing all the operations. That was inspiring to me. After that, almost elated, I was sitting in an ambulance, getting treated, when a guy came up to me and said, “Hey, that was great, that was unbelievable, that was the most dramatic thing I ever heard on the radio. I�
��ve never heard anything like it. Congratulations. You got out.” I thanked him, and he said, “By the way, did you see Engine 4 today?”
I thought for a second about what an odd question it was, and said, “No. No, I didn’t see Engine 4 today.”
And he said, “Oh, my son was working there today.”
It hit me like a ton of bricks: Oh, my God, how many guys do I know who have sons here today? They were here now, looking for their kids. I hadn’t been out ten minutes and I got confronted with this. Then all the names started coming in. Guys were looking for their fathers, and fathers were looking for their sons, and it was just the emotional thread that came with this. And—it’s still so raw.
You can read the list of men who died that day: Pete Ganci [the Fire Department’s chief of department] was a great guy, a guy who accomplished so much in his life, and was a great leader. Why did he die and not me? I really don’t know. People ask if I have survivor’s guilt, and I say, Well, yeah, sometimes I do. Especially when I meet widows of firemen who died that day, and I can see it in their eyes, how their whole lives have been affected, as if it had been a trigger event, like a series of dominoes falling down. And how much their lives have changed, how different everything turned out for them. How hard it was, and is, for them. My own wife, Judy, assumed that I was dead, and had been trying to figure out how she was going to tell my kids, until she got word that I was alive. So I could appreciate what a bellwether event it was for these people.
To this day I continue to have little revelations of 9/11. I’ll watch video of the building coming down, or I’ll see photographs of it, and I’ll look at it, and I think I will be able to explain it all. But I can’t really tell you.
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 conc
erned 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.