The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  And one after another they slapped on their gear and ran up the stairs. They did this to save lives. Of all the numbers we’ve learned since Sept. 11, we don’t know and will probably never know how many people that day were saved from the flames and collapse. But the number that has been bandied about is 20,000—20,000 who lived because they thought quickly or were lucky or prayed hard or met up with (were carried by, comforted by, dragged by) a fireman.

  I say fireman and not “firefighter.” We’re all supposed to say firefighter, but they were all men, great men, and fireman is a good word. Firemen put out fires and save people, they take people who can’t walk and sling them over their shoulders like a sack of potatoes and take them to safety. That’s what they do for a living. You think to yourself: Do we pay them enough? You realize: We couldn’t possibly pay them enough. And in any case a career like that is not about money.

  * * *

  I’m still not getting to the thing I want to say.

  It’s that what the New York Fire Department did—what those men did on that brilliant blue day in September—was like D-Day. It was daring and brilliant and brave, and the fact of it—the fact that they did it, charging into harm’s way—changed the world we live in. They brought love into a story about hate—for only love will make you enter fire. Talk about your Greatest Generation—the greatest generation is the greatest pieces of any generation, and right now that is: them.

  So it was like D-Day, but it was also like the charge of the Light Brigade. Into the tower of death strode the three hundred. And though we continue to need reporters to tell us all the facts, to find out the stories of what the firemen did in those Towers, and though reporters have done a wonderful, profoundly appreciative job of that, what we need most now is different.

  We need a poet. We need a writer of ballads and song to capture what happened there as the big men in big black rubber coats and big boots and hard peaked hats lugged 50 and 100 pounds of gear up into the horror and heat, charging upward, going up so sure, calm and fast—so humorously, some of them, cracking mild jokes—that some of the people on the stairwell next to them, going down, trying to escape, couldn’t help but stop and turn and say “Thank you,” and “Be careful, son,” and some of them took pictures. I have one. On the day after the horror, when the first photos of what happened inside the Towers were posted on the Internet, I went to them. And one was so eloquent—a black-and-white picture that was almost a blur: a big, black-clad back heading upward in the dark, and on his back, in shaky double-vision letters because the person taking the picture was shaking, it said “Byrne.”

  Just Byrne. But it suggested to me a world. An Irish kid from Brooklyn, where a lot of the Byrnes settled when they arrived in America. Now he lives maybe on Long Island, in Massapequa or Huntington. Maybe third-generation American, maybe in his 30s, grew up in the ’70s when America was getting crazy, but became what his father might have been, maybe was: a fireman. I printed copies of the picture, and my brother found the fireman’s face and first name in the paper. His name was Patrick Byrne. He was among the missing. Patrick Byrne was my grandfather’s name, and is my cousin’s name. I showed it to my son and said, “Never forget this—ever.”

  * * *

  The Light Brigade had Tennyson. It was the middle of the Crimean War, and the best of the British light cavalry charged on open terrain in the Battle of Balaclava. Of the 600 men who went in, almost half were killed or wounded, and when England’s poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, learned of it, he turned it into one of the most famous poems of a day when poems were famous:

  Theirs not to make reply,

  Theirs not to reason why,

  Theirs but to do and die:

  Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  Cannon to right of them,

  Cannon to left of them,

  Cannon in front of them

  Volley’d and thunder’d:

  Stormed at with shot and shell,

  Boldly they rode and well,

  Into the jaws of Death,

  Into the mouth of Hell

  Rode the six hundred.

  I don’t think young people are taught that poem anymore; it’s martial and patriarchal, and even if it weren’t it’s cornball. But then, if a Hollywood screenwriter five weeks ago wrote a story in which buildings came down and 300 firemen sacrificed their lives to save others, the men at the studios would say: Nah, too cornball. That couldn’t be true. But it’s true.

  Brave men do brave things. After Sept. 11, a friend of mine said something that startled me with its simple truth. He said, “Everyone died as the person they were.” I shook my head. He said, “Everyone died who they were. A guy who ran down quicker than everyone and didn’t help anyone—that was him. The guy who ran to get the old lady and was hit by debris—that’s who he was. They all died who they were.”

  * * *

  Who were the firemen? The Christian scholar and author Os Guinness said the other night in Manhattan that horror and tragedy crack open the human heart and force the beauty out. It is in terrible times that people with great goodness inside become most themselves. “The real mystery,” he added, “is not the mystery of evil but the mystery of goodness.” Maybe it’s because of that mystery that firemen themselves usually can’t tell you why they do what they do. “It’s the job,” they say, and it is, and it is more than that.

  So: The firemen were rough repositories of grace. They were the goodness that comes out when society is cracked open. They were responsible. They took responsibility under conditions of chaos. They did their job under heavy fire, stood their ground, claimed new ground, moved forward like soldiers against the enemy. They charged.

  There is another great poet and another great charge, Pickett’s charge, at Gettysburg. The poet, playwright and historian Stephen Vincent Benét wrote of Pickett and his men in his great poetic epic of the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body”:

  There was a death-torn mile of broken ground to cross,

  And a low stone wall at the end, and behind it the Second Corps,

  And behind that force another, fresh men who had not fought.

  They started to cross that ground. The guns began to tear them.

  From the hills they say that it seemed more like a sea than a wave,

  A sea continually torn by stones flung out of the sky,

  And yet, as it came, still closing, closing and rolling on,

  As the moving sea closes over the flaws and rips of the tide.

  But the men would not stop:

  You could mark the path that they took by the dead that they left behind,

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  And yet they came on unceasing, the fifteen thousand no more,

  And the blue Virginia flag did not fall, did not fall, did not fall.

  The center line held to the end, he wrote, and didn’t break until it wasn’t there anymore.

  The firemen were like that. And like the soldiers of old, from Pickett’s men through D-Day, they gave us a moment in history that has left us speechless with gratitude and amazement, and maybe relief, too. We still make men like that. We’re still making their kind. Then that must be who we are.

  We are entering an epic struggle, and the firemen gave us a great gift when they gave us this knowledge that day. They changed a great deal by being who they were.

  They deserve a poet, and a poem. At the very least a monument. I enjoy the talk about building it bigger, higher, better, and maybe we’ll do that. But I’m one of those who thinks: Make it a memory. The pieces of the Towers that are left, that still stand, look like pieces of a cathedral. Keep some of it. Make it part of a memorial. And at the center of it—not a part of it but at the heart of it—bronze statues of firemen looking up with awe and resolution at what they faced. And have them grabbing their helmets and gear as if they were running toward it, as if they are running in.

  Welcome Back, Duke

&nb
sp; From the ashes of September 11 arise the manly virtues.

  The Wall Street Journal: October 12, 2001

  A few weeks ago I wrote a column called “God Is Back,” about how, within a day of the events of Sept. 11, my city was awash in religious imagery—prayer cards, statues of saints. It all culminated, in a way, in the discovery of the steel-girder cross that emerged last week from the wreckage—unbent, unbroken, unmelted, perfectly proportioned and duly blessed by a Catholic friar on the request of the rescue workers, who seemed to see meaning in the cross’s existence. So do I.

  My son, a teenager, finds this hilarious, as does one of my best friends. They have teased me, to my delight, but I have told them, “Boys, this whole story is about good and evil, about the clash of good and evil.” If you are of a certain cast of mind, it is of course meaningful that the face of the Evil One seemed to emerge with a roar from the furnace that was Tower One. You have seen the Associated Press photo, and the photos that followed: The evil face roared out of the building with an ugly howl—and then in a snap of the fingers it lost form and force and disappeared. If you are of a certain cast of mind, it is of course meaningful that the cross, which to those of its faith is imperishable, did not disappear. It was not crushed by the millions of tons of concrete that crashed down upon it, did not melt in the furnace. It rose from the rubble, still there, intact.

  For the ignorant, the superstitious and me (and maybe you), the face of the Evil One was revealed, and died; for the ignorant, the superstitious and me (and maybe you), the cross survived. This is how God speaks to us. He is saying “I am.” He is saying “I am here.” He is saying “And the force of all the evil of all the world will not bury me.”

  I believe this quite literally. But then I am experiencing Sept. 11 not as a political event but as a spiritual event.

  And, of course, a cultural one, which gets me to my topic.

  It is not only that God is back, but that men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the past quarter century, and emerged when a certain kind of man came forth to get our great country out of the fix it was in.

  I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull things and haul things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in 100 pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to go to be safe. Men who are welders, who do construction, men who are cops and firemen. They are all of them, one way or another, the men who put the fire out, the men who are digging the rubble out and the men who will build whatever takes its place.

  And their style is back in style. We are experiencing a new respect for their old-fashioned masculinity, a new respect for physical courage, for strength and for the willingness to use both for the good of others.

  You didn’t have to be a fireman to be one of the manly men of Sept. 11. Those businessmen on Flight 93, which was supposed to hit Washington, the businessmen who didn’t live by their hands or their backs but who found out what was happening to their country, said goodbye to the people they loved, snapped the cellphones shut and said, “Let’s roll.” Those were tough men, the ones who forced that plane down in Pennsylvania. They were tough, brave guys.

  * * *

  Let me tell you when I first realized what I’m saying. On Friday, Sept. 14, I went with friends down to the staging area on the West Side Highway where all the trucks filled with guys coming off a 12-hour shift at Ground Zero would pass by. They were tough, rough men, the grunts of the city—construction workers and electrical workers and cops and emergency medical workers and firemen.

  I joined a group that was just standing there as the truck convoys went by. And all we did was cheer. We all wanted to do some kind of volunteer work but there was nothing left to do, so we stood and cheered those who were doing. The trucks would go by and we’d cheer and wave and shout “God bless you!” and “We love you!” We waved flags and signs, clapped and threw kisses, and we meant it: We loved these men. And as the workers would go by—they would wave to us from their trucks and buses, and smile and nod—I realized that a lot of them were men who hadn’t been applauded since the day they danced to their song with their bride at the wedding.

  And suddenly I looked around me at all of us who were cheering. And saw who we were. Investment bankers! Orthodontists! Magazine editors! In my group, a lawyer, a columnist and a writer. We had been the kings and queens of the city, respected professionals in a city that respects its professional class. And this night we were nobody. We were so useless, all we could do was applaud the somebodies, the workers who, unlike us, had not been applauded much in their lives.

  And now they were saving our city.

  I turned to my friend and said, “I have seen the grunts of New York become kings and queens of the city.” I was so moved and, oddly I guess, grateful. Because they’d always been the people who ran the place, who kept it going, they’d just never been given their due. But now—“And the last shall be first”—we were making up for it.

  * * *

  It may seem that I am really talking about class—the professional classes have a new appreciation for the working class men of Lodi, N.J., or Astoria, Queens. But what I’m attempting to talk about is actual manliness, which often seems tied up with class issues, as they say, but isn’t always by any means the same thing.

  Here’s what I’m trying to say: Once about 10 years ago there was a story—you might have read it in your local tabloid, or a supermarket tabloid like the National Enquirer—about an American man and woman who were on their honeymoon in Australia or New Zealand. They were swimming in the ocean, the water chest high. From nowhere came a shark. The shark went straight for the woman, opened its jaws. Do you know what the man did? He punched the shark in the head. He punched it and punched it again. He did not do brilliant commentary on the shark, he did not share his sensitive feelings about the shark, he did not make wry observations about the shark, he punched the shark in the head. So the shark let go of his wife and went straight for him. And it killed him. The wife survived to tell the story of what her husband had done. He had tried to deck the shark. I told my friends: That’s what a wonderful man is, a man who will try to deck the shark.

  I don’t know what the guy did for a living, but he had a very old-fashioned sense of what it is to be a man, and I think that sense is coming back into style because of who saved us on Sept. 11, and that is very good for our country.

  Why? Well, manliness wins wars. Strength and guts plus brains and spirit wins wars. But also, you know what follows manliness? The gentleman. The return of manliness will bring a return of gentlemanliness, for a simple reason: Masculine men are almost by definition gentlemen. Example: If you’re a woman and you go to a faculty meeting at an Ivy League university, you’ll have to fight with a male intellectual for a chair, but I assure you that if you go to a Knights of Columbus Hall, the men inside (cops, firemen, insurance agents) will rise to offer you a seat. Because they are manly men, and gentlemen.

  It is hard to be a man. I am certain of it; to be a man in this world is not easy. I know you are thinking But it’s not easy to be a woman, and you are so right. But women get to complain and make others feel bad about their plight. Men have to suck it up. Good men suck it up and remain good-natured, constructive and helpful; less-good men become the kind of men who are spoofed on “The Man Show”—babe-watching, dope-smoking nihilists. (Nihilism is not manly, it is the last refuge of sissies.)

  * * *

  I should discuss how manliness and its brother, gentlemanliness, went out of style. I know, because I was there. In fact, I may have done it. I remember exactly when: It was in the mid-’70s, and I was in my mid-20s, and a big, nice, middle-aged man got up from his seat to help me haul a big piece of luggage into the overhead luggage space on a plane. I was a feminist, and knew our rules and rants. “I can do it myself,” I snapped.

  It was important that he know women are s
trong. It was even more important, it turns out, that I know I was a jackass, but I didn’t. I embarrassed a nice man who was attempting to help a lady. I wasn’t lady enough to let him. I bet he never offered to help a lady again. I bet he became an intellectual, or a writer, and not a good man like a fireman or a businessman who says “Let’s roll.”

  But perhaps it wasn’t just me. I was there in America, as a child, when John Wayne was a hero, and a symbol of American manliness. He was strong, and silent. And I was there in America when they killed John Wayne by a thousand cuts. A lot of people killed him—not only feminists but peaceniks, leftists, intellectuals, others. You could even say it was Woody Allen who did it, through laughter and an endearing admission of his own nervousness and fear. He made nervousness and fearfulness the admired style. He made not being able to deck the shark, but doing the funniest commentary on not decking the shark, seem… cool.

  But when we killed John Wayne, you know who we were left with. We were left with John Wayne’s friendly-antagonist sidekick in the old John Ford movies, Barry Fitzgerald. The small, nervous, gossiping neighborhood commentator Barry Fitzgerald, who wanted to talk about everything and do nothing.

  This was not progress. It was not improvement.

  I missed John Wayne.

  But now I think… he’s back. I think he returned on Sept. 11. I think he ran up the stairs, threw the kid over his back like a sack of potatoes, came back down and shoveled rubble. I think he’s in Afghanistan now, saying, with his slow swagger and simmering silence, “Yer in a whole lotta trouble now, Osama-boy.”