Honoring the dead

Commonweal, Sept 13, 2002 by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels

Under discussion:

Firehouse
David Halberstam
Hyperion, $22.95, 201 pp.

Report from Ground Zero
Dennis Smith
Viking, $24.95, 359 pp.

"102 Minutes"
Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton,
Kevin Flynn, James Glanz, and
Ford Fessenden, May 26, 2002

"Fatal Confusion"
Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn,
and Ford Fessenden, July 7, 2002

"At Ground Zero, Seeking
Shelter from the Storm,"
Dan Barry, May 12, 2002
New York Times

American Ground:
Unbuilding the
World Trade Center
William Langewiesche
Atlantic Monthly
(July/August, September,
October, 2002)

The Guys: A Play
Anne Nelson
The Flea Theater,
opened December 4, 2001
Random House, $9.95, 87 pp.

Only time will give us the words and images that evoke September 11, in the way that Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage evokes the Civil War or the photo of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima evokes World War II. Though nothing yet achieves that status, billions of words, artful and artless, are preparing the first draft of history. Here are some.

The 343 firefighters who died in the collapse of the Twin Towers have had outsized attention--with good reason. Their rush to the World Trade Center embodies the sacrificial act to which we all aspire but hope never to suffer. David Halberstam and Dennis Smith have written masterful, but very different, chronicles of this heroism.

Halberstam, a journalist and political writer, lives around the corner from Engine 40 and Ladder Company 35 on Manhattan's West Side. Twelve of the thirteen firefighters who answered the alarm on September 11 never returned. Halberstam's Firehouse is a moving and concise story, a stark contrast to his recent behemoth War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals--and for good reason. Far from the leaks and spin doctors of Washington, Halberstam encounters a contained ethos on West 66th Street: firefighters, their families, the firehouse's tribal customs, and their intense loyalty to one another. Detail by detail drawn from colleagues and families, he weaves together the stories of the twelve: where they were when the alarm sounded; who was subbing for whom; who should have been home; who was attached to another company, but rotating through the house. He writes of a taciturn leadership and a willing "followership"--the unqualified readiness to trust your life to the officer on duty. The wives--always fearful of a tragic end, always praying it away--live for days with the hope that their husbands survive, then for weeks, and sometimes months, with the grievous need for bodies to bury. An outsider to this world, Halberstam in two hundred pages conveys in the life and death of the twelve men the singularity and richness of the firefighter's vocation.

Dennis Smith, in contrast, is the quintessential insider: a long-retired fireman who wrote the classic Report from Engine Co. 82, about the South Bronx firehouse where he fought the conflagrations of the sixties and seventies in the city's worst slum. Smith knows everything there is to know about firefighting. He knows everybody who does it, how they do it (there are better and worse ways to handle a hose), and their standing in a tight world of men with the technical knowledge and practical skills to fight fires and win--except, as this book tragically recounts, the fire they faced in the Twin Towers.

On September 11 at 8:48, when the first plane strikes the North Tower, Smith is in his doctor's office. By 9:45, back home, he dons his old fire clothes and makes his way to Ground Zero. The first half of Report from Ground Zero captures the chaos of that beautiful September Tuesday in the words of the firemen who descended into the inferno and survived. Smith connects their "Testimony" with background, facts, gossip, and analysis. The second half, "Aftermath," gives Smith's day-by-day account from September 12 to November 17 of rescue, recovery, and funeral Masses.

Smith, like many other retired firefighters, worked bucket brigades that moved debris hand over hand in a futile search for the living (of the 2,823 people caught in the collapse, only 18 were found alive). Firefighting is a family calling, and many of the searchers are fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles; Smith knows most of them. The tales told in "Aftermath" are heartfelt, but marred, at moments, by the blarney of Smith, the Irish storyteller. Not to worry. It gives flesh and blood to Halberstam's stringent account.

Firefighting is a brotherhood that exists nowhere else in our society. On what does it rest? Halberstam cites a West Side Lutheran pastor's take on the men: "they were not in the traditional sense, necessarily very religious. But there was also a certain spiritual redemption to what they did...because of the risks they take for complete strangers." Smith is more fulsome, and better connected. When Smith is not at Ground Zero, he is in church praying, singing, and listening to eulogies and bagpipes. Of one Mass, he writes: "it is a deeply moving coming together, of the family of the fire department, of the family of neighborhood, of the family of religion, and of the family of the Irish immigrant, all of us bound in this profound and unrelenting grief."