Honoring the dead What happened on September 11?
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
BOOK ESSAY Honoring the dead Margaret O'Brien Steinfels 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...
...On May 12, Times columnist Dan Barry wrote about the regular Sunday Mass said at Ground Zero...
...Halberstam, a journalist and political writer, lives around the corner from Engine 40 and Ladder Company 35 on Manhattan's West Side...
...When Smith is not at Ground Zero, he is in church praying, singing, and listening to eulogies and bagpipes...
...Many firefighters never heard orders to evacuate...
...The mayor gives in...
...Perhaps that is the difference between firefighters and engineers...
...Report from Ground Zero Dennis Smith Viking, $24.95,359 pp...
...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...
...Here are some...
...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...
...Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is editor of Commonweal...
...On what does it rest...
...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 (]uly/August, September, October, 2002) The Guys: A Play Anne Nelson The Flea Theater, opened December 4, 2001 Random House, $9.95,87 pp...
...Perhaps the authentic Catholic Moment occurred on September 11 when more than 400 firemen, policemen, and other New York City workers lost their lives trying to save others...
...The wives-always fearful of a Under discussion Firehouse David Halberstam Hyperion, $22.95,201 pp...
...we too are engaged in this liturgical act of homage and remembrance...
...Two brilliant pieces of reporting by a team led by Jim Dwyer appeared in the New York Times...
...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...
...Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decreed that on September 11,2002, there will be a nearly silent commemoration of the dead...
...People trapped on the upper floors, relying on the experience of the 1993 attack, rushed to the top of the building, only to find roof doors locked-even as police helicopters hovered above...
...who was attached to another company, but rotating through the house...
...The culture of the firehouse and the police station that appears self-protective, now is seen to be sacramental and sacrificial...
...Cut off from critical information, at least 121 firefighters, most in striking distance of safety, died when the north tower fell...
...Several years ago, there was much talk of a "Catholic Moment" that never happened...
...But then, of course, the collapse of the towers surprised everyone, not only the fire chiefs, not only the men who built them, but even Osama bin Laden who destroyed them...
...Halberstam cites a West Side Lutheran pastor's take on the men: "they were not in the traditional sense, necessarily very religious...
...Firefighting is a brotherhood that exists nowhere else in our society...
...Firefighting is a family calling, and many of the searchers are fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles...
...On May 30, some eight months after September 11, a last flag-draped, empty stretcher, meant to honor the missing, was carried in silence up the ramp from the bottom of the pit...
...Smith is more fulsome, and better connected...
...Recovering human remains competed with removing debris...
...Twelve of the thirteen firefighters who answered the alarm on September 11 never returned...
...The Atlantic Monthly's three-part account, "American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center," by William Langewiesche, tells how...
...The second report, "Fatal Confusion" (July 7), is a gently told, but devastating account of how poorly prepared the fire department was to handle the challenge of the two burning towers, especially with its faulty communication system...
...If the slurry wall, which held back the Hudson River, caved in, large parts of lower Manhattan and subway tunnels would be inundated...
...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...
...The audience never has to suspend belief: we have seen it all...
...A technical writer who had access to the site, he describes the "unbuilding" under the supervision of Ken Holden and Mike Burton...
...Work was stopped if remains were sighted or smelled...
...Their rush to the World Trade Center embodies the sacrificial act to which we all aspire but hope never to suffer...
...Governor George Pataki will recite Lincoln's address at Gettysburg, former mayor Rudolph Giuliani will begin a reading of the names of the dead, and President George W. Bush will visit, but remain mum...
...who was subbing for whom...
...Many, perhaps most, were Catholic...
...Those police officers reported, some twenty minutes ahead, the imminent collapse of the north tower, but their communications system was incompatible with that of the fire chiefs, 104 floors below, in the lobby...
...There were vigils and candles and little altars at fire stations, and thousands of Masses and funeral services...
...Smith knows most of them...
...Time has passed and today much more is known about what actually transpired on September 11...
...Not to worry...
...On September 11 at 8:48, when the first plane strikes the North Tower, Smith is in his doctor's office...
...The same church now embroiled-again-in a pedophilia scandal...
...Firefighters and police are not the only heroes...
...Though nothing yet achieves that status, billions of words, artful and artless, are preparing the first draft of history...
...The engineers, architects, construction bosses, and technical experts, all efficiency and know-how, are the antiheroes of the September 11 story, their competing egos barely on hold for the duration...
...Burton and Holden accomplished their mission without further disaster or loss of life...
...Office workers, stockbrokers, salespeople, security guards, waiters, and bus boys respond with acts of generosity and selflessness...
...Off-duty men converged on the site and entered the buildings without the requisite supervision and assignment...
...But there was also a certain spiritual redemption to what they did...
...The Guys evokes the ritual origins of drama...
...Smith connects their "Testimony" with background, facts, gossip, and analysis...
...Halber-stam'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...
...He writes of a taciturn leadership and a willing "followership"-the unqualified readiness to trust your life to the officer on duty...
...Was this drenched Franciscan," asks Barry, "from the same church that is now being criticized- again-as a distant hierarchy of white-haired men hiding in well-appointed chanceries...
...because of the risks they take for complete strangers...
...Ground Zero was cleared in record time as if to erase in a frenzy of deconstruction the fury of the terrorist attack...
...The first reconstructs the 102 minutes between crash and collapse (May 26, 2002...
...No politician will utter his or her own words and insult the families of the dead or the citizens of New York...
...Langewiesche is on the side of the engineers...
...They came down to the World Trade Center in fire trucks, and we should not let them leave in dump trucks," is how one fire chief puts it to Smith...
...A rain-soaked Franciscan said Mass...
...But not in New York...
...E-mails, phone calls and messages from the top floors of each tower, along with the recollections of survivors, "offer not only a broad and chilling view of the devastated zones, but the only window onto acts of bravery, decency, and grace at a brutal time...
...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...
...Other disasters were possible: fires, further collapses, and explosions...
...It has given burying the dead a whole new meaning, an emphatic recognition of human dignity, even in death...
...Theirs is a different ethos than that of firefighters and police officers, and there is considerable animus, in Langewiesche's telling, between the two groups...
...The 343 firefighters who died in the collapse of the Twin Towers have had outsized attention-with good reason...
...An early, first tour of the site by the original architects and engineers produces speculation about the causes of the collapse, but not the consequence-thousands dead...
...And then, there was the search for the dead...
...who should have been home...
...With all of the words spoken and written about September 11, a sense remains that there are yet things to be said...
...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...
...Detail by detail drawn from colleagues and families, he weaves together the stories of the twelve: where they were when the alarm sounded...
...Over a million-and-a-half tons of debris were removed in 242 days and nights...
...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...
...On November 1, the mayor announced that the search for human remains would end...
...David Halberstam and Dennis Smith have written masterful, but very different, chronicles of this heroism...
...On November 2, there was a near-riot by firefighters (Smith gives a blowby-blow account) who demanded that recovery of the dead remain a primary goal as the debris is removed...
...It gives flesh and blood to Halberstam's stringent account...
...The second half, "Aftermath," gives Smith's day-by-day account from September 12 to November 17 of rescue, recovery, and funeral Masses...
...Survivor and citizen are united in a moving and painful remembrance of the dead, one by one...
...Confrontations between engineers, bent on keeping on schedule, and firefighters, bent on recovering their comrades, was common...
...Perhaps the dark suspicion of political maneuvering and rhetorical inadequacy crossed the mayor's mind...
...Another Catholic Moment...
...By 9:45, back home, he dons his old fire clothes and makes his way to Ground Zero...
...Smith knows everything there is to know about firefighting...
...Barry stood in the rain between a weeping construction worker and a retired firefighter, who had lost two sons...
...What could he possibly say...
...Dennis Smith, in contrast, is the quintessential insider: a long-retired fireman who wrote the classic Report from Engine Co...
...Deep religious sensibilities were on public display after September 11...
...The two men, who ran an obscure city office, Department of Design and Construction, rushed to the site and quickly found themselves in charge of cleaning up Ground Zero (the city's Office of Emergency Management was destroyed in the collapse...
...The play by Anne Nelson, then starring Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray, brings together a fire captain struggling to write eulogies for his men and a writer willing to help him...
...The tales told in "Aftermath" are heartfelt, but marred, at moments, by the blarney of Smith, the Irish storyteller...
...About two months after September 11, The Guys opened, way-off-Broadway, at the Flea Theater, a few blocks from Ground Zero...
...Were we looking in the right place...
...BOOK ESSAY Honoring the dead Margaret O'Brien Steinfels 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...
...When a body is found, work is stopped and the remains are carried out in solemn procession...
...82, about the South Bronx firehouse where he fought the conflagrations of the sixties and seventies in the city's worst slum...
Vol. 129 • September 2002 • No. 15
