by Dennis Smith
Magazines like Newsweek and Time publish cover issues that call America Islamophobic and then wonder why Americans are not buying their magazines. They lecture us with moral vanity about multiculturalism and scold us about how we’re a bunch of narrow rednecks.
Where is our future bringing us? It’s not just the implications surrounding shifting populations of huge numbers of Muslims in the world. It is the threat of the most sought after weapon of choice. What happens when Iran gets a nuclear bomb? I remember when I worked at Court TV, one of my colleagues covered the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, but I was not very interested in that case. So while I understand not being interested in all of the scare about terrorism, after 9/11 I think we cannot afford to ignore the reality in front of us.
In the cold war we had something called “mutually assured destruction.” We do not have that deterrent today. Islamists don’t identify with nationstates ; countries are either a part of the nation of Islam or not. The mullahs rule. People wrongly believe that Ahmadinejad controls Iran, when it is definitely the ayatollahs. I believe that Iran would detonate a bomb in Israel in a heartbeat, knowing that they could lose a million of their own people. That is a culture totally alien to our Western society, which cherishes life and individual conscience.
The whole point of radical Islam is to supplant Western law with Sharia, to turn the United States into a part of the worldwide caliphate. They are working to institute accommodations to Islam, and that is occurring in many countries without anyone’s truly realizing it. If we object to this, we’re cast as bigots and racists.
I was fascinated by the preacher down south who wanted to burn the Koran. He was demonized for exercising free speech, but after all, a book—even a Bible or a Koran—is cardboard and paper, not the actual living, breathing Prophet. It is an insult to Muslims, yes, but the insult isn’t as deeply wounding as putting a fifteen-story mosque up in the air where all those bodies fell as dust. More than eleven hundred people were never found in that place, not even the smallest body part, and so they were in that dust. Burning a book does not compare. Somehow burning the Koran was viewed as a despicable thing, and people were going to die because of it. The press just accepted that insane equivalency as some new moral norm. No one questioned whether people would actually kill over that.
While Mayor Bloomberg was defending Imam Rauf’s freedom of religion, where was the liberal media pointing out that the mayor created a phony spin? No one, absolutely no one, suggested that this imam did not have a legal right to build a mosque. The mayor, I think, does not understand the grave insult to so many good and decent families.
This is the kind of battleground that we’re going to be seeing in the next ten years, based on the speech issue. Our Founders complained about newspapers too—the press was the bane of their existence. But they defended it and fought for it, because they understood that if you don’t have freedom of speech, the republic crumbles. It is the first and last bulwark against tyranny. If we can’t preserve our country, if we can’t name and say what’s wrong . . . Think of it: The New York Times will publish classified national security measures aimed at protecting us but won’t print the Danish cartoons that mock a religious figure. This is a form of cultural suicide. Freedom of speech is the battleground now. As it is said, not to speak is to speak, and not to act is to act. Let Muslims speak, but with transparency of motive, history, and religious belief. And let Americans speak as well in this way. Americans know who they are, and they know what this country stands for. They know what they want to leave for their children, and they will fight for it. This is the thought that gives me hope, that I rely on, to honor all the good my brother Chic gave to the world.
George Siller
George Siller is the second oldest brother in the family that created the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Run, a nationally known and annually televised race that now attracts more than seventeen thousand runners each year. The event was created to memorialize the heroic run of firefighter Stephen Siller, who ran through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel with full gear to join in the rescue efforts at the World Trade Center on 9/11, where he lost his life. The foundation the family created, online at www.tunneltotowersrun.org, is a not-for-profit charity that supports injured firefighters, burn centers, disabled veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the children of those veterans in need.
We’re a very close family. My father was adamant about us being close all our lives. There were seven of us: Stephen was the youngest; Frank, who was about six years older, was the second youngest; then my three sisters—Regina (we call her Gina), Mary, and Janis—and then my brother Russell. Stephen was sort of a gift to us all. After so many children my father used to say that if another one came along, it would have to be an immaculate conception. We, the older ones, were packed together, a bunch of kids, and we couldn’t appreciate one another. We were like puppies fighting for the milk or the bone or whatever. And now we had a child that we all appreciated. It was like having a toy in the family. He was such a joy. He had a great personality. I think part of that was he had a great audience, for we all thought he was so funny and smart.
My mother and father were both very religious. My father belonged to the Third Order, which is like [being] a lay Franciscan priest or brother. He loved everybody, and he was a very generous man. Both my mother and father would go to mass every day during Lent and Advent, and we actually read the Bible at suppertime, until everybody in the family was laughing so much that my father would get madder and madder, and finally he gave up on it. He wasn’t a religious fanatic, but he lived a religious kindness. To make a living he sold religious articles: first communion and confirmation sets; little prayer books; rosary beads. His business would go south because he was often ill, and the people who worked for him would help us out. But in our family we have never cared about money. We never had it growing up, and we don’t feel like it’s the important thing in life.
We all grew up with a sense of service. My brother Russ went in the VISTA service, where he met his wife, Jackie. All my sisters became nurses. My sister Mary was a nun initially, but she left [the order], married, and now has three kids. My mother and Mary actually went to nursing school together. My mother was fifty years old at the time, and they became nurses together at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Staten Island. I became a registered nurse as well, later on, with the GI Bill. My parents were also very generous, and they taught the same generosity to all of their kids. When we made a bet for a dollar or something—maybe on the World Series, since we were massive baseball fans—if we won, my parents would tell us, You can’t take that money. But if we lost, they would say, You have to honor that bet and pay it. Why we ever bet, I don’t know.
Our parents passed away a year apart, my father from a blood clot after surgery—he had bad circulation in his legs, and diabetes—and then my mother, from cancer. My mother was sick the whole last year, and Stephen used to come home from school and find her balled up almost in the fetal position, because with stomach cancer it was the only position she felt comfortable [in]. She didn’t want the lights on in the room, and so he lived a sad and depressing life during that period. Even before my mother passed away, all the brothers and sisters had been dedicated to keeping Stephen occupied and happy. But it was a terrible way for a child to live—he’d just lost his dad, and now he had to deal with a mother who was dying.
Most of us were in our early twenties to early thirties when our parents passed away, but Stephen was still a child: eight and a half when my father died and ten when my mother died. And so, besides losing our parents, we had to deal with bringing Stephen up. We felt that Russell and his wife, Jackie, were the best to raise Stephen. They had no children, and also Russell was the oldest. We all had families already. Russell could give Stephen all-around attention and dedicate himself to bringing him up.
Russ and Jackie live in Long Island, so after our mother died, Stephen was moved from Staten Island to Rockville Centre.
When our parents died, we didn’t feel sorry for ourselves. We felt sorry for Stephen. I cried a little at the funerals, obviously, but I never really wallowed in my own self-pity. It was poor Stephen. That’s what we all did, and that’s how we handled 9/11. We felt sorry for Stephen’s children and his wife, Sally; not for ourselves. Over time, though, we have come to feel sorrow for ourselves, but I guess we hide it by feeling sorry for the other people. Put others first.
When Stephen was older he eventually got an apartment on Staten Island, not far from me, living on his own, in a basement apartment. He ended up marrying a girl named Sally Wilson, who lived one block from where he grew up on Staten Island. He must have met Sally a few times when he was a kid, but nothing had registered. He wanted to have kids because he wanted with Sally to be the parents he did not have growing up. He was determined to have a wonderful family life to make up for some of that sadness he had experienced. Stephen and Sally started their family with Jamie, and then came Olivia, Genevieve, Jake, and finally Stephen, who was around nine months old on 9/11.
Stephen joined the Fire Department because he had such a connection with people—he loved them, and he loved being around them, and he loved the family feeling. The Fire Department gave him that feeling of family, being with the guys, the teamwork thing. He was so sociable that he’d have a thousand friends, no matter where he was. In fact, at his funeral, almost every person who came told us he was Stephen’s best friend. He made everybody feel that way, being so gregarious and warmhearted. He never slept; he would go to everything—any family or friend event you could think of, he’d be there. We called him Mr. Multiplicity. He did five things on the Sunday before 9/11, one of which was calling me up asking if I wanted to play some golf. All of a sudden, on the fourteenth hole, Stephen says, I gotta go. And that’s the way he was. He was probably supposed to be someplace else the whole time. Then he came back to my house to watch Band of Brothers, the HBO miniseries, and after the episode ended, Stephen said he was going to come over every week to watch the rest of the series with me. So we made plans to do that, but, of course, we never got to.
His desire for the Fire Department was unstoppable. That’s the word to describe the way Stephen went about everything in his life—unstoppable. I’m not sure where that determination came from. He did always love John Wayne. All the athletes he admired were tough guys—like Lawrence Taylor, Bernard King—and his favorite baseball player was George Brett. In fact, he drove across country to see George Brett’s last game in Kansas City. He made everything, did everything.
In sports, he never met a shot he didn’t like. He had a great arm and could really throw, in both football and baseball. He was a little erratic, in that he’d make an unbelievable diving catch at third base, but then throw it over the first baseman’s head at a hundred miles an hour. He was so competitive, so determined. And he brought that into his work. Maybe a month or two before 9/11 he fell through a floor into a basement filled with water. There was nobody in the building, and I said, Stephen, you gotta think. But he was gung ho: gung ho about his job and about his family. He gave so much time to each niece and nephew. I don’t know how he did it. My son George said to me at Stephen’s funeral, “I thought I was the only one who had a special relationship with Uncle Steve.” But all the cousins were saying how Uncle Steve showed up for this and made it to that. I didn’t even know about it at the time, but Stephen was helping my son Greg, who was playing college football. Greg went off to college as a tight end, but when he tore his ACL [anterior cruciate ligament, part of the knee], they wanted him to be an offensive lineman, which meant he had to bulk up. Stephen would go and work out with him at a park down the block here. I never even knew they were working out together, as Stephen was doing stuff with him while I was at work. When Greg had his first football game in college, at the University of New Hampshire, Steve planned to come up with me to see the game. But then a fireman died, and he had to pay his respects. Stephen told Greg, I’ll make the next game. That was the Saturday before 9/11.
My brothers and I had a regularly scheduled golf game, and on 9/11 we had plans for a golf outing in New Jersey—Frank, Russ, Stephen, and myself. We used to play almost every month, but then we could only manage to get together a few times a year. We were pretty excited about that day, because we knew what the weather was going to be like—perfect. Ironically, every time we went golfing we’d try to get Stephen to leave early, or get some guy to pick him up early, so he could get there on time. But that day we didn’t rush him because he was working the night before. And like Stephen, we usually tried to get the golf in and then go to work, but that day we all decided, let’s just take it easy and really enjoy ourselves. It could be one of the last good days of the golf season, that kind of thing. So Frank, Russ, and I planned to meet at Frank’s and to wait for Stephen. But Russ stopped first at Sally and Stephen’s house on the way, and Stephen called Sally and said, “Tell the boys I’ll meet them at the golf course, There’s something going on at the World Trade Center. I’ll meet up with them later.” He didn’t know then. And that was our last phone call from Stephen.
Stephen had a shortwave radio in his car, so he would hear whenever there was a fire somewhere. Even on his off days he would go to a fire, and sometimes would drive to check it out when he had his kids in the car. He had already left the firehouse that morning and was heading toward the Verrazano Bridge on his way to meet us when he heard on the radio what was going on and turned around. He went back to his firehouse, Squad 1 in Brooklyn, and his crew had already gone. They lost eleven guys.
They wouldn’t let anybody through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, so Stephen left his truck at the Brooklyn entrance and ran through the tunnel. Frank and I later got a call from somebody from the Police Department saying they found his truck there, and we then tried to retrace how it all had happened. We later learned that halfway through the tunnel Stephen jumped up on Engine 239, which was stuck in all that traffic, and after taking a six-foot hook from them started running again. When he took the hook he told the guys, I’ll meet you there. We went over to that firehouse, Engine 239, where we found out that someone had seen him on West and Liberty streets. That’s the last place that we know for a fact that somebody had eyeballed him.
I had seen the fire at the World Trade Center before I left for Frank’s house, and like everybody else, I thought it was either an electrical fire or a small plane that actually hit it—like what had happened at the Empire State Building. So it didn’t really register with me at first that it was a catastrophe. But at Frank’s house I said, “Turn on the TV—there’s something going on.” And then we got the call from Sally telling us that Stephen would meet us later. So Russ joined us, and we sat there and watched it. When we saw the first tower go down, it was like, Oh, God. We spent a good part of the time saying to ourselves, There’s no way he could have made it in time. To rationalize it. He couldn’t have made it there from Brooklyn. And then we kind of slowly realized that Stephen would have found a way to get there. We spent the next day or two waiting for a phone call. Well, they didn’t find any part of him. But we had a burial anyway, because his wife and family wanted that ritual, those prayers. Stephen’s grave is on Staten Island, right down the block from here in St. Peter’s Cemetery.
Why did this happen? Why? In 1993 there was a bombing, and every time I would see the pictures on TV I’d get mad. Of course, for 9/11—I’ve watched it a million times—I have more of a feeling of disgust than of anger. Or a feeling of desperation. Why? Why did this have to happen? Why did Stephen’s children have to grow up without a dad after he ran in to help people? I . . . and, I think, our family . . . pushed our energy toward trying to make the world a little better, but there is always that why question. I feel like the reason that these terrorists hate us so much is envy, and you can’t stop people from being envious. And jealousy. And like many people, I feel that a respect for life is not there. It’s unfortunate. I think that until the
y have something to lose in life people have less respect for life. If you have a beautiful house or a wonderful family or whatever, then you think twice, but if you’re living in a cave in the middle of Afghanistan, you’re not really giving up much, and that’s the reason you’re easily brought into this martyrdom. I believe they have nothing to lose. And they have a lot of anger, and are easily swayed.
I was in a daze all of that day. Frank said, “I think we lost our brother.” I kind of felt it that day, but for five or six days afterward I figured somebody could live in a hole or something, like when a mine collapses. So many people on Staten Island had a relative or friend who was involved in 9/11. We spent a lot of days sitting around Sally’s house, hours and hours, and bringing the food in. We all kept trying to keep the kids occupied, [not] sitting there, waiting. Very anxious.
Sally is just a remarkable mother. She held up better than I thought most wives could possibly do. Not that she wasn’t totally upset, worried, but she had five kids to keep her mind focused and occupied. In a way, for that situation, children are a blessing, to keep you busy. It also helps that we have a very big family. If we went out to dinner and everybody brought all their kids and grandkids, I think the reservation would be in the midfifties. I have a Christmas brunch every year, and depending on who shows up, we have from forty to fifty-seven now. I’ve never really counted them, but they can all be counted on.
At Stephen’s funeral there were tons of people outside the church, and as many inside. It was very moving, almost presidential in a way, with all the firemen lined up. Mayor Giuliani came to the wake. I don’t know how the heck he made all those things, but he was really, really wonderful. Lifted everybody he could. And Governor Pataki’s wife was there, and other officials too. It was a good funeral, if there is such a thing.