came back!” he exclaimed. “I remember.”
For Mohammad, a university degree was still the Holy Grail but his quest had ended a number of years ago when he could no longer afford rent for his 46th Avenue apartment near the restaurant and was forced to move to New Jersey. Trying to balance the commute, school and classes, with cost of tuition . . . “I’ll go back,” he said brightly.
A white-haired man came into the restaurant with a pack of smokes and handed them to Mohammad. “See? I didn’t forget you,” the man said before walking out with a smile. Mohammad later explained that he didn’t know the man’s name but knew his story. The eighty-six-year-old was a World War ii veteran whose wife had died about five years earlier and who was down on his luck. He wandered in often, usually without money, and Mohammad took it upon himself to bring him a steaming bowl of lamb stew. Sometimes the man would come back with a pack of cigarettes to thank him, and Mohammad didn’t have the heart to tell him he wasn’t really a smoker.
Mohammad had other fans and a bunch of them were at a table at the front of the restaurant, wearing crisp suits and sitting with their backs to the wall in a defensive, erect posture that screamed police officers. “You write good things about him,” one told me, winking at Mohammad as he paid the bill.
“You working with NYPD on 9/11?” I asked the baby-faced officer.
“Negative,” he replied.
“They’re good guys,” Mohammad said once they were out of earshot. “Work for intelligence.”
Then he added seemingly more to himself than to me, “You know, New York is a good place for good people and it’s a bad place for bad people.
“I don’t have anybody here but I don’t feel lonely. This is my home. This is my place. This is my country.”
A FEW BLOCKS from the Afghan Kebab House was the Pride of Midtown, the nickname for New York’s busiest fire hall. Built more than one hundred years ago, it sits on the corner of 8th Avenue and 48th Street, close to Broadway and the theatres. The firefighters working in the red-brick building answer more than fourteen thousand emergency calls a year.
Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9 lost fifteen men on duty on 9/11: the three Mikes—Haub (the Hobbinator), Lynch and Brennan; the house “probie” and youngest at 24, Chris Santora; the “artist” Paul Gill; the athlete Sam Oitice. Chief Ed Geraghty, Joe Angelini, Len Ragaglia, Carl Asaro, Captain Dave Wooley, Jose Guadalupe, Lieutenant Danny O’Callaghan, John Tipping, Alan Feinberg. They answered the call at 9:04 AM fourteen minutes after the first plane hit.
Just before the first anniversary of 9/11, I went back to the fire hall and spent a week doing a “ride along” with the men. This involved a lot of grocery store visits. The Pride of Midtown may be the busiest station in the city, but there always seemed time to get ingredients and create elaborate meals. It was almost inevitable, however, that the bell would ring just as the plates were served and the men would run cursing toward the trucks as mouthwatering scents wafting like fingers from the kitchen tried to pull them back to their seats.
The anniversary was hard on the New York City firefighters. They lost 343 members. Stories of some of their dead had reached near-mythical status. The commander, the rookie, the father and son under the rubble; sixty-eight-year-old Fire Chaplain Reverend Mychal F. Judge, who was killed by falling debris in the lobby of the north tower after giving the last rites to firefighter Daniel Suhr. The Reuters photo of Father Judge as he was carried out by firefighters on a tipped chair, his head slumped sideways, became one of the most enduring images of 9/11.
But at the Pride of Midtown in particular, the anniversary was excruciating. Firefighter Richard Kane came off a twenty-four-hour shift one day in early September 2002 and walked out bleary-eyed smack into a busload of earnest children, all gripping hand-drawn pictures and lined up shyly behind their teacher. They wanted to deliver the drawings and could they maybe hug the firefighters, the teacher asked? A few nights earlier, a group of inebriated women had come to buy commemorative 9/11 T-shirts that most of the stations sold for charity, and then just stared at the firefighters with drunken tears and slurred their admiration. On this morning, Kane looked down at the children and wanted to tell them to go away. He needed a shower and a bed.
In the first months after 9/11, the focus on the firefighters made it okay for the normally macho men to break down. It was expected that you would cry and more of an issue if you didn’t. The Pride of Midtown became a shrine of candle wax and flowers that stretched from the driveway into the road, blocking two lanes of traffic. Whenever you passed that corner, all noise ceased. Even the cabbies wouldn’t honk.
But then fall turned to winter, the missing became the dead, and the steady stream of well-meaning visitors and mourners turned into a daily sucker punch in the gut. You’re the ones who survived, those well-meaning hugs and tears said. Your buddies are all dead. And if the firefighters didn’t already think about that almost every minute at that fire hall, then all they had to do was look up at the Ladder 4 sign that had been brought back after it was discovered in the rubble of Ground Zero in the spring of 2002, twenty metres below ground. Or they would see O’Callaghan’s spare coat, which remained where it was on the morning of 9/11. “All gave some, some gave all,” screamed a sign read by only those who gave some. The firefighters were working, cursing, sweating, guilt-ridden, pissed-off actors in a living memorial.
“It’s really the toughest place in the city to work. No one wants to say that because we’re just so grateful for the public support we’ve received, but it has to end soon. Everybody just wants it to stop,” Richard Kane said after smiling and accepting the drawings from the children. Seeing a penny on the ground, he kicked it absentmindedly. I wrote in my notebook that Kane did not put that penny in his pocket. Probably just an act of frustration but it felt significant. See a penny pick it up all day long you’ll have good luck. None of the firefighters wanted to talk about luck as the reason they survived.
So call it timing. Five trucks responded to the 9:04 call. Only one made it back—Kane’s. His lieutenant turned around after realizing he had left his helmet behind. “Leave it, we’ve got to go, leave it,” Kane remembered yelling. But they went back to get it and then their truck was stopped en route. They were two blocks away when the second tower fell.
FEW WOULD PREDICT how a terrorist attack on U.S. soil could usher in a such a dark, divisive period in history, one that not only failed to quash the threat of global terrorism, but instead created a whole new generation raised on war and rhetoric and bent on revenge.
In the early days, those few voices who called for a measured response and urged the United States to look inward and take a deep, collective breath were branded traitors and told they did not appreciate just how profoundly the world had changed. The world was indeed a different place. “Patriotic” and “anti-American” became buzzwords. A rabid new breed of so-called security experts hit the airwaves, talking in concise 15-second clips about the near and the far enemy that now, looking back, does not seem that different from the rhetoric Osama bin Laden spewed. I was part of the media machine that churned out these stories, which were heavy on drama and outrage, and light on analysis.
Hindsight makes it easy to judge how things went so disastrously wrong, how the goodwill for the United States turned to international condemnation. What is harder to recall and for many of us to admit now was how we felt then. People were scared. We wanted strong leaders. Many wanted revenge. The sepia-toned Western posters demanding Osama bin Laden be captured Dead or Alive were flying off the racks. I bought a roll of toilet paper with the al Qaeda’s leader’s face on every square above the words Wipe Out Terrorism.
Subways and tunnels turned ominous, as did tall buildings. No one wanted to fly
