by Dennis Smith
In my family we felt a sort of Irish anger, a sense of injustice, that someone was cheating and denying what we believed was right. We knew what was important to Billy: his responsibilities and his rank. The job was everything to him, as it is to all of them. To be a firefighter, to be a captain, a chief, a lieutenant—that’s who they were. You cut the guy open to see his heart, and you saw Captain William Burke, Jr. It’s hard to explain, and I didn’t really appreciate it until after 9/11 either.
The memorial at this point is just two large square voids, each side with fifteen feet of falling water and about two hundred trees to symbolize the rejuvenation of life, as the jury described it. There will be a wall around each void, about chest high and slanting toward you, and the names will be engraved on these walls. I believe they are going to put family members together but not distinguish them in any way as such. There will be no ranks or ages listed, so the young children on the hijacked planes will not be seen as children. You will see a woman’s name and you will not know she is a four-year-old girl. You will see the name of Mychal Judge and not know he is a priest, and the name of Timothy Maude and you will not know he was just fifty-three and a three-star general in the U.S. Army. The memorial creators tell you to go to an information kiosk, but how will you know to go there? They are purposefully denying actual history. There’s not going to be anything in the memorial that will speak to the attacks, to testify to what happened there.
The museum is going to be underground, and they advertise that it’s going to be a big rock. The memorial foundation returned from storage to the site the last beam, and made a big deal about it, inviting all the press to take pictures. So the beam has come back, but the damaged Koenig’s Sphere, which sat in the plaza between the towers, is not coming back. The only reason the beam is included is because it’s going in bedrock, which means it’s going underground. The rationale behind keeping the museum and the beam underground is to keep all evidence of the attacks out of sight to the memorial visitors. The jury said there could be no artifacts from the World Trade Center, or any 9/11-related artifacts, included in the memorial itself, in order to protect the integrity of the design. Any artifacts are to go belowground, out of sight. “Protecting the integrity of the design” were the words of Michael Arad, the designer of the memorial. I spoke with Michael and told him that family members would like some authentic artifact, like the Koenig’s Sphere, returned to the site. He winced and said that would be didactic. I had to look up the word “didactic,” meaning that it would tell us what to think as we were standing there.
The design of the memorial was supposed to be a democratic process, but the problem is that it became too democratic. It should have been given to the cultural artists and thinkers, who would know what the hell they’re doing—then maybe we would have gotten a decent memorial. Some protest that the last thing we need is elitism. But in fact the competition and the process were a beauty contest. The memorial design was not the choice of a democratic system, but of a handful of political leftist and elitist appointments. This was a jury of eleven or twelve people deciding from over five thousand memorial design entries worldwide. Why this jury? Why these people? Who picked them? Those are questions we should have been asking.
All eight of the original designs that were picked embraced abstraction and minimalism; none of them recognized the attacks. The then architecture critic of the New York Times praised the memorial, saying it was ambiguous and narcissistic, values that are precious to the jury. In April of 2004 Art in America magazine praised the design because it doesn’t acknowledge the attacks. The New Yorker said the design might trigger a dream state in which we could wonder.
Nobody talked about the human beings who must be remembered, whose families are suffering. Everyone was looking at the Vietnam War Memorial as a model, a minimalist but gargantuan gravestone.
I met with Michael Arad, who was living in the East Village in September 2001. On 9/11 his wife was working on Broad Street, and he rode down to meet her on his bike, just as I had ridden to meet my wife. They escaped the cloud and went uptown. He said he spent his time after the attacks riding around Manhattan, getting a feel for things, which was what moved him to enter the contest and moved him to create his design. But he never said he went down to the site, never went down to Ground Zero. In his design he never confronted the attack itself. All he did was confront people’s expressions, their fears. He went to Washington Square Park at midnight, maybe two or three days after the attacks. He said people were gathered there holding candles, and nobody spoke, and he said it was very powerful and moving. Manhattan is a tough place to feel at home, and as a foreigner from Israel, he had never felt connected to it. But now he felt a connection, and one between strangers, which is hard to find in Manhattan. And that I think is true. But is that what our task is at Ground Zero?
A couple of days after 9/11 my wife and I heard that they had set up a family center at the South Street Seaport, and that you could go down there and identify your loved one. The word was that they were going to have bodies there. I imagined floors of bodies and body bags, which they would unzip. All right, I thought. This is what I’m going to do. Identify the body. But it was nothing like that. Everybody was prepared to do anything they could to help. There was a monk there, and people speaking in accents you couldn’t ever recognize, and they all couldn’t have been more helpful. But it was not what we went there for, so we got back in the car and started driving. Across town, on Sixth Avenue at about Eighteenth Street, both sides of the street were lined up with people, hundreds of them, standing and holding candles. That’s all you saw for blocks. And they were silent. It was a spiritual, spontaneous thing, and they had all come together. It was a hell of a thing to see, and I’m happy to have seen it, to have experienced it. But you know, that’s just a memory. It is not a way to commemorate 9/11. We have a greater task at Ground Zero than to simply commemorate feelings.
I was at work one day when my brother Chris called, telling me to turn on the radio. NPR [National Public Radio] had a panel of cultural community people talking about the memorial. They were taking call-ins, so I phoned and told them I was the brother of a 9/11 FDNY captain. The panel had been praising the memorial for its abstraction, its ambiguity, and how everybody could take home his or her own meaning of the day. I criticized it for exactly that and said that there should be more to the memorial than the art. There was nothing there to speak to 9/11. And one man said, “Well, do we want the memorial to be a history lesson?” As an example, he cited the Vietnam War Memorial as being a successful memorial.
I was prepared for this, and I had a response: “The Vietnam War Memorial is not a viable model for what we want to memorialize at the World Trade Center. You cannot use as an example a memorial in Washington, D.C., that commemorates feelings about a war fought on the other side of the world. You can’t replace any authentic artifacts in Washington. None of the battles of Vietnam were fought in Washington, D.C. You didn’t replace any of the authentic artifacts. You didn’t replace a fire helmet, or a police badge, or a stockbroker’s wallet. None of the names on the Vietnam memorial died right there in Washington.”
I hope I convinced them that Ground Zero is the site of the attacks; people died right there.
We wouldn’t go to Auschwitz and remove the death camp remnants and artifacts in order to better express our feelings or make it a more unique place for mourning. Our task at Ground Zero is not to make it a more unique place for mourning or, as Arad says, a place to think about the absence in our lives caused by these deaths. In other words, Arad’s abstract design basically states: It’s not about Captain William F. Burke, Jr., and what he did that day. Or how, and why, he died. Or about anybody else who died there. Or about 9/11. It’s about us. And it’s about Michael Arad.
But we have a greater duty. If you want to make an abstract 9/11 memorial somewhere else, you can do that. There are plenty of them across the country. Right now the national September 11 Mem
orial at the World Trade Center site is nothing more than two crying pools, which does not accurately display the great heroism and the great tragedy of 9/11. We can never forget what happened that day; we need to remember. Right now it is a memorial for thinking and reflecting; it is not a memorial for remembering.
I remember the first time I saw Billy’s death certificate and saw that the cause of death was homicide. Thinking about those nineteen Islamist terrorists or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, thinking about those who killed my brother is part of what drives me to stay involved with the 9/11 issues at hand. My sisters went down to Guantánamo Bay, and in that courtroom they got to look directly at Khalid Mohammed. You have daydreams about what you’d do if you had the opportunity to get revenge, that sort of thing. You want to hold the Islamists responsible. How difficult it must have been for my sisters to look Khalid Mohammed in the eye.
There is a failure to understand and to learn the lessons of 9/11. Look at Major Hasan from the Fort Hood massacre. They knew that he was a fundamentalist; they had plenty of evidence, and they did nothing. Nothing. Prior to 9/11 a field officer reported to his superiors that there were five Middle Eastern men who were learning how to fly an airplane without learning how to take off or how to land, and they said, They have a right to learn how to fly. And this is all due to political correctness, the same kind of correct politics and cultural ideals that come out of the New York thinking about 9/11. It’s a certain mind-set, an agenda, a cultural and political power that is so hard to go against.
I do think a lot about Islam. The majority of Muslims worldwide criticized the building of a mosque so close to Ground Zero, so you can see that there are moderate views among them. However, fundamentalist Islam [often called Islamism], jihad, and submission to Sharia law are such a big problem that I think they don’t want to face it. It’s not something Muslims want to confront. It’s a scary thing, but it seems nobody has a solution to it.
I don’t know much about Islam, but I met a man recently whose sister was working for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of Tower 1 of the World Trade Center. He said she called home and told her mother that the smoke was getting really bad, and then said, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”
Her brother then said to me, “I’d like to think that the smoke got her, but I don’t know that she didn’t jump.”
There was a third guy with us who had worked in Saudi Arabia, and he had nothing good to say about Islam, speaking of it in vile terms, with venom. He told us the attack on 9/11 was an act of war, and we had to fight it now.
The two of us looked at each other, both thinking this guy was kind of over-the-top. But here we were, two family members, neither one of us were bleeding-heart liberals, who did not feel this strongly about Islam. We didn’t want to forgive and forget, but neither one of us wanted to be over-the-top either.
I haven’t heard any family members hate Islam, but what’s interesting is that the building of the mosque at Ground Zero is making people hate Islam and Muslims more than the attacks did. The 9/11 families weren’t holding Islam accountable for the attacks, but now, when people don’t act properly in response to something like this, a mosque that is seen as an insult, it is held against them.
Sometimes I ask, What have I accomplished? I’ve spent so much energy and time on this, on the memorial and commemorating 9/11 properly. But at this point the memorial is not going to acknowledge the attacks, so I feel as if I haven’t accomplished anything. On the other hand, Billy’s rig, Engine 21, is going to be part of the museum. I was on the museum committee with Commissioner Cassano, and with his strong support we were able to make that happen. Kids are going to come here for generations and see that fire truck and know Billy’s story—how he embodies the heroism and the sacrifice of that day.
My family just deals collectively with our memories of Captain Billy Burke and what he did that day. And we do things independently, too. My brother Christopher recently wrote something for a Syracuse paper about the mosque issue, and how our politicians don’t know that Ground Zero extends as far as the dust fell. Wherever that dust landed, that’s the sacred ground. When Christopher was telling me about what he had written, he got very emotional talking about Billy, so this was one of those times when the emotion comes out. But I guess that’s how we’ve dealt with it.
We’re all working hard at preserving what Billy would have wanted. He was a history buff and had a superior knowledge of the Battle of Gettysburg, where we lost almost eight thousand men in 1863. I’ve got pictures of him down there on that field of battle. He had bookcases filled with things. His favorite figure from the Civil War was General John Buford, who was the first to engage Lee’s forces. He taunted the Confederates with his small number of men, and he forced them into the best strategic place for Meade to fight Lee. Billy was really impressed by that. His admiration was genuine and not just a romantic idea. He understood what they did, and the importance of conveying that forward in history, and preserving it, for our own progress. A free society progresses by remembering the sacrifices for our freedom that were made in the past by ordinary people. And so that’s the way our family thinks: Preserving the truth, and not some image of an autocratic mayor and of an inexperienced architect. Preserving the truth . . . I know that’s what Billy would be doing. And that’s what the Burkes are committed to doing for our brother.
Talat Hamdani
A New York City teacher, Talat Hamdani is a widow and the mother of three sons. One of them, Mohammed Salman Hamdani, was killed on September 11, 2001. He was a New York Police Department cadet and a certified emergency medical technician who responded to the attack on the World Trade Center when he saw the smoke while on the way to his job as a lab technician.
It was in May of 1978 when my younger brother came home and said that the American embassy was giving out business visas. He could not leave Pakistan because he wanted to stay with my mom, who was a widow. My husband, Salmeen, though, had always been an ambitious man, and he wanted to go to a foreign country so that he could prosper. We both had good jobs in Pakistan—I was a second-grade teacher with the government, and he was the manager of a battery company—but we still lived hand to mouth, even though we did not pay any rent because we lived in his family’s place. So he applied for and got a visa. There were no savings for a new start in America, so a couple of weeks later we sold our motorbike and our refrigerator, the only two valuables we had after three years of married life. He cried when his motorbike was sold—that was his baby.
It was, I think, in June of 1978 that he arrived in America; I joined him on February 3, 1979. Our son Salman was then thirteen months old and wasn’t walking yet. Later, his two younger brothers, Adnaan and Zeshan, would say, “You’re an immigrant.” And they did it to me also, because they were born in America and we weren’t. That’s the American attitude, and I’m glad they have it. It was funny, but it’s not a crime to be an immigrant.
We lived first in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which was a nice neighborhood then and is nicer now, though more crowded. Salmeen, of course, needed a full-time job to support our family and found one at the Blood Brothers company in Mamaroneck. It was a wrecking company, automobile parts, and that’s where he worked for five years.
We went fishing a couple of times with Mr. Blood, and Mrs. Blood was a nice lady. We never discussed who was what religion or anything political—that was never a consideration before 9/11. In 1983 Salmeen started working for this Yemeni guy, Ali, in a store on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, and purchased half a share in it. It was a small store, a deli and newsstand, selling newspapers and magazines, Lotto [tickets], cigarettes, soda, beer. We already had two children, Salman and our second son, Adnaan, and it was around that time that my youngest son, Zeshan, was born. When my husband first had the idea to buy the share, we didn’t have the money. So I said, What to do? I took all my gold to Ali’s wife, and said, “Here, keep this. Whatever you say our share in the store is worth, when I give you that money
, you can give me my gold back.” She is such a wonderful person. She said, “No, Talat. You take your gold back. I trust you will give me the money.”
In 1986 Salmeen bought the entire store. Only eight years after coming to America he owned his own business. He set a great example for our sons.
All my boys grew up in Greenpoint, and all three of them went to St. Cecilia’s, a Catholic school. I sent them there because I went to public school all my life, and I believed in the discipline of the parochial schools. Adnaan is four years younger than Salman, and Zeshan is eighteen months younger than Adnaan. Salman was the tallest of my three boys—a very tall, handsome man, with everything to live for. But the trinity of my sons is broken now.
Salman used to get beaten up in the neighborhood when he was around seven years old. So my husband said, “This is not right. I can’t be there protecting him every day on the streets.” So he put him in karate school, and they taught him self-defense. Salman told me, “Mama, I’m supposed to tell anyone who challenges or threatens me that I know karate, so don’t mess with me. And if they don’t listen, then I can hit them back.” Which he did. That helped him to become strong and independent.
One day when Salman was in the fourth grade he came home and told me he didn’t want to go to St. Cecilia’s anymore, because all the kids were saying to him, “You’re not Catholic, you don’t belong here.” It was because he would not go to the church. I had spoken with the nun who was the principal, and she had had no objection, and suggested that Salman could go up to the principal’s office for that period. I went to St. Cecilia’s again and apprised the principal of the situation. She said, “Don’t worry, I will take care of it.” A week later Salman came home one day and said, “I need the Koran to take to school, because the teacher told us to bring our book of faith to show everybody.” They had all different faiths there, and there was no problem. Years later, I think this is what this nation needs now: a discourse on diversity of faith and tolerance. It’s ironic that Salman experienced his first lesson in tolerance at such an early age