Brave Hearts

We didn’t watch the eleven o’clock local news much when I was a kid, because, well, it was at eleven o’clock, and growing boys (even those of the adolescent variety) needed their sleep. So when my father arrived home from work one evening in the late 1960s and announced that we would all watch Channel Seven’s Eyewitness News later that night, we knew it had to be a special occasion.

My father told us that a film crew from Channel Seven had shown up at his place of work that afternoon, so there was a chance he’d be on the late news. Back in the 1960s, getting on television was a little tougher than it is today, so we were all quite excited. My father was a member of the Fire Department of New York, known then, as it is today, for its professionalism, dedication to duty, and conspicuous bravery. But, truth be told, my father’s work didn’t often capture the media’s attention. He worked on Staten Island, New York City’s least-populated borough, a place of small towns and surprisingly vast wooded areas. A typical alarm involved a grease fire in the kitchen or a small brush fire. So we found it curious, to say the least, that a crew from a local news program had traveled all the way from mid-Manhattan to cover a fire on little old Staten Island.

My father told us only that he and his buddies had responded to a particularly tough fire that afternoon in one of Staten Island’s few industrial areas. His appearance betrayed nothing about his day. He didn’t smell of smoke, as he sometimes did when he arrived home. We didn’t notice any telltale bruises or wounds on his face or neck, the usual evidence of a tough day at the office.

As eleven o’clock approached, I joined my parents and two brothers in front of the massive piece of furniture that housed our black-and-white Zenith TV. We suffered through the usual litany of local news events — car wrecks, crimes, sports results, the weather — before the anchorman brought up a minor fire on Staten Island. “Quiet, quiet, this is it,” my father said, as if we hadn’t figured that out already.
I don’t know what we were expecting, but whatever it was, we grew disappointed as the seconds ticked by. We saw glimpses of the fire, glimpses of smoke, glimpses of unfamiliar faces in FDNY gear trooping by with hoses and ladders. A reporter — I believe it was Gil Noble, who still plies his trade for WABC all these years later — told us that nobody had been hurt, and that it really wasn’t much of a fire at all. I remember thinking, as any snotty adolescent would, Great — we stayed up for this?

But then the reporter’s tone changed. Even a small fire can sometimes remind us of the price firefighters pay every day, he said. As he spoke those words, the camera zoomed in on a firefighter sitting on the step of his rig, his head down, part of his face blackened by smoke. His shoulders were shaking, he was coughing up a storm.

It was my father.

He was much younger then than I am now (I’m fifty-three) but in my mind’s eye, he looks old and tired. He probably felt worse than he looked. But he came home with a smile, got up the following morning, and went back to the firehouse for another nine-hour tour. Why? Because that’s what firefighters do, no matter where they work, whether they are paid professionals or civic-minded volunteers.

They’re called “the bravest” because they do what the rest of us can hardly imagine. They run into burning buildings; we run out of them, if we can. If we can’t, they’ll generally find us, even if it puts their own lives at risk.

As I write this, two days before Thanksgiving, the FDNY is mourning the loss of a forty-six-year-old lieutenant named Robert J. Ryan, killed in my old hometown of Staten Island while extinguishing an attic fire in a modest single-family home. A piece of the attic’s ceiling collapsed on Lt. Ryan, dislodging his oxygen mask and his helmet. He lost consciousness and died before his comrades could reach him. Perhaps he died of smoke inhalation. Smoke, I remember my father saying, could be a wounded firefighter’s best friend, for smoke made sure you were dead before the flames got to you. Smoke pitied the fallen firefighter.

Two years ago, Lt. Ryan was badly burned while battling a fire in Brooklyn. The New York Times reported that his injuries were so severe that he had to wear extra protection on his skin whenever he was outdoors. He underwent a year of excruciating rehabilitation and then went back to work, a course he was determined to follow even as he lay in a local burn unit just after his injury. The burns could have ended Ryan’s career, a doctor said. But he would have none of it, even though the injury probably would have qualified him for a tax-free disability pension of 75 percent of his regular salary.

Lieutenant Ryan left behind a wife and four children, the oldest of whom is preparing to enter college next fall.

I have been around firefighters long enough to know that I shouldn’t be surprised by Ryan’s courage, by his absolute dedication to his job, his comrades, his community, and his fellow human beings. But I am not particularly brave, so I remain in awe of these men and women who put their lives on the line for the sake of strangers. Most of the firefighters I know work in New York, but the nation’s largest fire service has no monopoly on courage, as any FDNY member would quickly acknowledge. The fire that killed Lt. Ryan was the kind of seemingly routine blaze that breaks out every hour in some part of this country. But as any firefighter will tell you, and as any firefighter’s spouse or child will confirm, there is no such thing as a routine fire. Not when you’re the one crawling through a smoke-filled room. Not when you’re the one on the nozzle when a wall of flame is moving toward you. Not when you’re ventilating the roof of a burning five-story building. The fire that killed Lt. Ryan could have been anywhere; indeed, it is blazing somewhere even as you read this. And somewhere, men and women like Lt. Ryan are feeling their way through acrid smoke, looking for strangers under beds, huddled by a window, or sprawled on a couch. Sometimes, their search ends not in joy but in death. A ceiling collapses. A roof gives way. The fire takes an unexpected turn. A floor disappears into a burning basement.

“We cannot finally understand firemen,” the late journalist Murray Kempton wrote in 1978. “They have risen to some place among the inexplicable beauties of life.” Most would be embarrassed to hear themselves so described. My father, my father in-law, my godfather, and their friends would tell you that they just did their jobs and hoped to live long enough to cash a few years’ worth of pension checks. That’s how it worked out for them and for most of their friends. But not for everybody.

In the fall of 1966, when I was eleven years old, my father left the house one morning wearing his dress uniform, with a blue tie and white gloves. Class A’s, as the outfit is called. He wasn’t going to work that morning. Instead, he was on his way into Manhattan to be part of an honor guard outside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral for the saddest day in FDNY history before September 11, 2001.

Later that morning, the coffins of seven firefighters were carried into the cathedral for a funeral Mass. Two more coffins were brought into St. Thomas Episcopal Church, a few blocks to the north of St. Patrick’s. On that day, October 21, 1966, eleven firefighters were laid to rest, victims of a seemingly routine fire on Twenty-third Street several days earlier. Nine of the dead were buried from St. Patrick’s or St. Thomas; the two others were buried in more private ceremonies on Long Island.

I remember listening to radio coverage of the funerals and the ceremonies. I don’t recall a word of the homilies or the speeches. All I remember is the wail of bagpipes and the angry thumping of drums. The following day, I saw pictures on the newspaper of nine flag-draped caskets hoisted atop nine pumpers. A mass of men in dress uniforms stood at attention along Fifth Avenue, white-gloved hands raised in salute. My father was in that crowd, somewhere.

Did I ever think the pipes would wail for him, or for my godfather, or for one of their buddies who so often stopped by our house for barbeques and parties? Not often. But on that day in October 1966, it certainly seemed possible. One of the men who fell into the inferno on Twenty-third Street had been on duty because he swapped shifts with one of my father’s friends, who needed the day off so he could attend his daughter’s First Communion.

My father lived long enough to cash some pension checks, but didn’t see the age of sixty. He drank too much, I’m told.

Only firefighters can understand what it takes to stand on a roof above a fire, or to climb up a stairwell when everybody else is scrambling down. But while their courage may be inexplicable, it is not unappreciated. The incomprehensible courage of the FDNY on September 11, 2001, framed the way we understand that infamous attack. We surely will never forget those images of firefighters in turnout coats, bunker pants, boots, and helmets trudging into the Twin Towers. How did they summon up the courage to enter those buildings, climb those stairwells, attend to those who were injured or in distress? Training helps, of course, but, as soldiers will tell you, training takes you only so far. When faced with catastrophe, with the unthinkable, firefighters have to put aside the human instinct to flee in the face of imminent danger. You can’t train people to risk their lives. Training can only help one’s chances. In the end, firefighters rush into burning buildings, or attack burning tracts of wilderness, while the rest of us flee.

On the morning of September 11, Lt. Charles Margiotta was driving home after his overnight shift when he heard news about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers. He got off the highway, drove to a nearby firehouse, and hopped aboard Rescue Company 5’s rig as it left quarters on its way to downtown Manhattan. Margiotta, a forty-four-year-old married father of two, called his mother from the back of the rig as they approached the World Trade Center. He told her that it looked bad, and he told her that he loved her. And in he went, into one of those burning towers with eleven members of Rescue 5. They all died, along with 332 colleagues. No other fire department has ever suffered such a catastrophe.

In the aftermath of the attacks, several friends of mine argued that the firefighters should not have gone into the fatally wounded towers because of the obvious risks involved. I was stunned to hear anybody seriously suggest that firefighters ought to be spectators if fires are judged too dangerous. If only property is at risk, sure. But if there are people inside a burning building, no firefighter would merely watch — even, by the way, if he or she were ordered to stay put. Firefighters traditionally have a dyspeptic view of authority — even, or especially, if that authority happens to be wearing a white officer’s helmet.

To argue that firefighters should not have entered the burning towers is to prove Murray Kempton’s point: we cannot, in the end, understand firefighters. Their courage is beyond our comprehension. Likewise the courage of spouses, partners, and children, those who understand that every shift brings risk and that every kiss goodbye might be the last. Is that overly melodramatic? Perhaps. I sometimes felt unease when my father left for an overnight tour, but I took comfort in the knowledge that he didn’t work in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or the Bronx. The odds of living through the night were a lot better on Staten Island.

Today, modern building construction practices and safety regulations have reduced the number of catastrophic fires in our cities and suburbs. Fatalities are rare these days, but even so, there is no such thing as a routine fire, as the spouses and children of fallen firefighters know all too well. More than a hundred firefighters were killed nationwide last year, fifty-seven of whom were unpaid volunteers.

Sometimes a firefighter’s courage is tested outside of burning buildings. Some of the bravest firefighters I know are women and African Americans who faced disgraceful and sometimes dangerous harassment on the job. Firefighting has long been a particularly masculine job, one dominated by white males, especially Irish Americans who saw civil service as a secure stepping-stone to the middle class. When blacks and then women demanded a chance, they were not always greeted with open arms. Retired battalion chief Reggie Julius, a black World War II veteran, had to fight it out, literally, with some firehouse bigots in the early 1950s, when the FDNY was almost 100 percent white. Captain Brenda Berkman endured horrendous hazing when she became one of the first female firefighters in New York in the late 1970s.

In the days after September 11, Berkman and Julius worked the smoking, dangerous pile where the World Trade Center had once stood. They risked their lives in a vain search for anyone who might have survived the collapse. They joined other active and retired firefighters, past animosities put aside, in one of the saddest and yet most life-affirming searches any firefighter ever endured.

Nobody told them to do it. They did it because they were firefighters. And that’s what firefighters do.