Firehouse (17 page)

What had happened on September 11 was a terrible thing, but Angie knew the man she had married well enough to know that it might have been far worse had the attack happened the following day, Wednesday, September 12. On Wednesday Frank would have been off duty and his daughter Nora would have been working in the south tower. If he had lost her and his men as well, on a day when he was not working, it would have been intolerable for him, leaving him with a life that was no longer acceptable. Angie could barely imagine what it would have been like to live with Frank under those circumstances.

As she prepared for her husband's December 10 service, Angie had to deal with the absence of his body. It was not that hard for her, although she knew this issue was difficult for some of the other families. It depended, she thought, on one's view of spirituality. Everyone has his or her own beliefs. She believed that once the soul left the body, it was over. The body's mission was done. She had accepted her husband's life as it was, and now she accepted his death.

His memorial service was supposed to be the last of all for the men from 40/35. That was only fitting, as Captain Jim Gormley said in his eulogy for Callahan: Captains were the first in and, by both oath and tradition, the last out. Callahan was a fellow captain and, Gormley said, more than a friend or a brother. He was a comrade, and unlike friends and brothers, comrades held one another to higher standards. They could not forgive one another's mistakes because the price of those mistakes was so terrible. “When a comrade dies, we miss them,” he said. “We regret words unspoken, we remember the love, we grieve the future without them. We are also proud. Proud to have known a good man, a better man than ourselves. We respect the need for him to leave, to rest.”

The service was held at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, a place the firehouse had always protected, but which the Callahans as a couple had rarely visited. Angela Callahan loved Mozart, and that past August, just a few weeks before the terrible day, she had gotten tickets to a Mostly Mozart program at Lincoln Center. She had asked her husband to go with her, and he agreed, albeit somewhat reluctantly—it was not really his kind of thing. They parked a block from the firehouse, and afterward, on their way home, they saw the men in front of it, and they waved. She suggested they go in and have a cup of coffee, but he did not want to—perhaps they would have teased him about going to hear Mozart. But that was Frank, Angela thought.

After September 11, Angela visited Ground Zero with some of the men, and she was staggered by the destruction. It was beyond her comprehension. Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse Five
was one of her favorite books, and so she had read descriptions of the worst tragedies of World War II, but this just overwhelmed her. It was like visiting a different city in a different country.

Angela Callahan worried often about the men who had survived. She was fearful that some of them were being stretched too thin, devastated by the fact that they had survived when so many of their friends had not, pulled by a sense of responsibility to the families of those who had died, and yet still committed to their own families. In the early weeks and months after the attack, there was so much going on demanding immediate attention that everyone seemed to be doing all right. But Angela worried about the coming dark, gray, winter months, when there would be more time to think about things.

Angie Callahan was all too aware that the macho culture of the firehouse was such that men were not supposed to go for therapy, that by the codes of the firehouse, they were to tough out their troubles and that therapy would be seen as a sign of weakness. Some of the men did go for therapy, though, even if somewhat uneasily. (Reverend Scholz helped find counseling for many of them.) Once while eating lunch around the firehouse kitchen table, Ray Pfeifer told Mike Kotula that no, he was not going to see a therapist, but Kotula said that he
was
seeing a therapist, and that he quite liked her; the way he thought of it was that he was visiting Mr. Rogers, but a Mr. Rogers
with breasts
.

Kevin Shea was not exactly sure where he fit in now, and he wondered whether there was some undertow of resentment from the others because he alone of the 40/35 men who went out that day had managed to survive. There was no doubt that he had been badly injured that day and that he was lucky to be alive. His entire body had been black and blue. He had suffered a serious concussion and a broken neck—with fractures of the C-5, C-6, and C-7 vertebrae. The doctors, he was told, took the tibia of a cadaver, ground it down to the right size, and replaced his fifth cervical vertabra with it. Ninety percent of the tissue of one testicle had to be removed, along with ten percent of the other one. For several weeks he was relatively immobile, and he had to wear a neck brace into mid-December.

When he returned to the house, he felt somewhat uncomfortable. He wondered whether when the other men looked at him, they saw something wrong, as if he were wearing some kind of scarlet letter. Somehow he felt less connected than he had expected. Perhaps, he thought, it was all in his mind, that he was taking his own guilt and transferring it onto their view of him. But something was wrong. One day he was talking to another fireman and the man broke off the conversation quickly and told him, “I'm sick of your shit. Just go away.” When he had tried to talk to one of his friends, asking if he had done anything wrong, his friend had answered, “Kevin, this is just not the right time to talk about it.”

At the memorial service for Frank Callahan, Captain Gormley spoke of the men who had died that day and then made a brief reference to Kevin Shea: “Kevin, we are joyful to have you back.” That had been reassuring, his first official welcome back into the fold. He was not sure, however, what his future as a fireman was. He wanted eventually to go back to full-time duty, but the decisions on that were to be made by the department, not by himself.

Some of the firemen thought that no small part of Shea's problem was his perpetual innocence, a quality that made him seem out of sync with the current mood of the house. They were bothered that he wore his doubts about what had happened to him far too openly. In December Shea started talking to a bright young writer named David Grann, on assignment from
The New York Times Magazine
, about what had happened on September 11 and how he was wrestling with his doubts about how he had behaved. Grann's article quite accurately reflected Shea's anguish—although not the broader view of Shea's superiors, who thought the young fireman's painful self-doubt was the most natural response from a survivor of a catastrophe, especially the sole survivor of a firehouse shift. But what was quite stunning about the article, when it was published on Sunday, January 13, 2002, were the headlines written by the editor of the magazine, Adam Moss, headlines that were apparently jazzed up despite objections from Grann. The magazine's cover trumpeted: “Amnesia at Ground Zero: Was the Firefighter a Hero or a Coward?” Inside the magazine, running above the article, were the words, “Which Way Did He Run?” followed by: “After Firefighter Kevin Shea lost his memory on Sept. 11, he set out to discover if he was a hero or, as he alone feared, a coward when the towers collapsed.”

When the article was published, it created a furor at the firehouse. The idea that some editor, who had been nowhere near the danger on that apocalyptic day, might cast doubt over the actions of a man so wounded and now so vulnerable seemed to the men almost inconceivable. If anything, the incident seemed to underline a cultural conflict in the city itself—between those who always sought to emphasize what was new and exciting and those who abided by more traditional codes, in which there was great sensitivity about adding more pain to existing pain. (After Shea's fiancée, Stacy Hope Herman, called Moss to protest the headlines, he eventually called her back and apologized about the use of the word
coward
, saying he had not understood that the word, one that was not used in the world of firemen, would be seen as so explosive.)

There is a quick flash of videotape that shows Lieutenant John Ginley, Michael Lynch, Steve Mercado, and Mike D'Auria as they descend the stairs into the lobby of Building Four and head for the lobby of the south tower. The tape runs in slow motion for about ten seconds, and though no one is sure of the exact time it was shot, it obviously takes place well into the disaster—the air is full of debris. Some authorities believe it was filmed a little before 10:00
A.M.
, just prior to the two terrible collapses. It is easy to identify the men. They are loaded up with gear, and their expressions are unusually stoic. Their brothers from 40/35 find it almost unbearable to watch the brief clip, because they can imagine what the men already know about their chances of surviving, and yet they are going forward, with no panic or fear on their faces. They are, in the fire-fighting lexicon, calm, and they are doing the right thing. It is a haunting moment, and the videotape reveals with rare intimacy what brave men look like at the worst moment that the Fates can present.

When Stephanie Luccioni, Michael Lynch's fiancée, viewed the tape, she found it jarring at first—this last glimpse of him alive, so strong and unbending at such a terrible moment. But then she decided that the tape was his way of saying good-bye to her, of saying,
This is my duty, and I am going to do it
. This made her even prouder of him, and she felt blessed by the fact that she had loved and been loved by a man of such honor.

Stephanie was determined to go on with her life, but occasionally when she wanted to feel that Michael was still around, she played that last tape of him and the other men descending into the hell of the burning World Trade Center.

Some five months after the tragedy, Ray Pfeifer heard from John Lynch, Michael Lynch's father, about footage shot by a contract cameraman working for one of the networks that almost surely showed the men of Ladder 35 as they entered one of the towers. Pfeifer spent some time tracking down the tape—which happened to be from the same photographer who caught the engine as they headed toward the south tower—and when he got it, he brought it to the firehouse. It was both fascinating and haunting to watch the video—the clarity with which it showed the collapse of the south tower was almost unbearable to see. One minute the giant structure is still standing, proud but badly damaged, smoke pouring out of its upper stories, and then, with an unbelievable force driving it, the collapse began, windows popping out, floor by floor, ever so sequentially, like a series of dominoes toppling. And then there was nothing but smoke and dust.

What made the video even more dramatic, indeed almost unendurable for the men in the firehouse, was the brief section that showed the men of Ladder 35 as they made their fateful entry into the south tower. One morning in early February of 2002, the men of 40/35 played the video over and over at the firehouse, trying to identify everyone on the tape. Because of the video's erratic quality, caused by having been shot under such hectic, frightening circumstances, it was impossible to get a sense of exactly when it was shot, but the men at the firehouse believed it showed their brothers entering the south tower about ten minutes before the collapse.

There they were, men who had once been the closest of friends, men who had once dominated this very room with the force of their personalities, in the final moments of their lives. It was hard to identify the individuals because, in addition to the erraticism, the video had been shot at some distance. Nonetheless, there they were, moving quickly in single file toward an entrance. “Okay—now watch, that's the captain,” said Ray Pfeifer. Then right behind him, staying very close, was the most junior among the firemen, Dan Marshall—and that was according to tradition: the most junior man, staying right next to the officer. “There! That's Mikey Otten and that's Michael Roberts, and that's Kevin Bracken,” said Pfeifer. And everyone agreed with him.

The only figure about whom there was some doubt was that of a man who entered the building a few seconds ahead of Callahan. The debate was whether it was Jimmy Giberson. The men questioned why Giberson would have gone in ahead of the captain. “He holds his tools exactly the way Jimmy did, the exact same angle,” said Pfeifer, and Anthony Rucco and Joe Mackey, who were watching, agreed. So did Terry Holden, who thought he could pick out Giberson's immense mustache. But they were puzzled why Giberson would be out in front.

Then Mike Kotula arrived, and they ran the tape several times for him. Kotula had been exceptionally close to Giberson and had taken his death very hard. Now, as he watched, he was absolutely sure it was Jimmy. “That's him! No doubt about it!” said Kotula. “Then, why is he out in front?” one of the others asked. “Jimmy was always in front. Always. With those long legs, you couldn't keep up with him. And no one was going to stop him on something like this,” Kotula said.

One of the men asked Kotula if he was
absolutely
sure it was Giberson. Yes, said Kotula. “Look at the way he holds his tools. That's Jimmy. Look at how long his legs are. See, his coat seems to be short on his body because he's so tall. That's Jimmy. No one else.”

The men sat there, playing the tape again and again, getting one last look at their friends, walking into the building from which they would not come out alive.

John Morello spoke at his son's memorial service, and he spoke beautifully. He was a man who used words exceptionally well. He asked the people in the church for their forbearance, because he was not well prepared for the occasion—it was usually sons who were called on to eulogize their fathers. But then he described Vincent as a son and a husband and father, and the richness of life ahead of him, and how well he had wanted to do everything. For the first few days after the attack, when John was in the shower, he would reach out to touch the tiles, tiles that Vincent had installed—touching them, he thought, was like reaching out and touching his son. And then, he told the mourners, he would weep.