PEGGY NOONAN
Courage Under Fire
The 21st century's first war heroes.
Friday, October 5, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
Forgive me. I'm going to return to a story that has been well
documented the past few weeks, and I ask your indulgence. So much has
been happening, there are so many things to say, and yet my mind will
not leave one thing: the firemen, and what they did.
Although their heroism has been widely celebrated, I don't think we
have quite gotten its meaning, or fully apprehended its dimensions.
But what they did that day, on Sept. 11--what the firemen who took
those stairs and entered those buildings did--was to enter American
history, and Western history. They gave us the kind of story you tell
your grandchildren about. I don't think I'll ever get over it, and I
don't think my city will either.
What they did is not a part of the story but the heart of the story.
Here in my neighborhood in the East 90s many of us now know the names
of our firemen and the location of our firehouse. We know how many men
we lost (eight). We bring food and gifts and checks and books to the
firehouse, we sign big valentines of love, and yet of course none of
it is enough or will ever be enough.
Every day our two great tabloids list the memorials and wakes and
funeral services. They do reports: Yesterday at a fireman's funeral
they played "Stairway to Heaven." These were the funerals for
yesterday:
* Captain Terence Hatton, of Rescue 1--the elite unit that was among
the first at the Towers--at 10 a.m. at Saint Patrick's Cathedral
on Fifth Avenue.
* Lt Timothy Higgins of Special Operations at St. Elizabeth Ann
Seton Church, on Portion Road in Lake Ronkonkoma, out in Long
Island.
* Firefighter Ruben Correa of Engine 74 at Holy Trinity Catholic
Church on West 82nd Street, in Manhattan.
* Firefighter Douglas Miller of Rescue 5, at St Joseph's Church on
Avenue F in Matamoras, Pa.
* Firefighter Mark Whitford of Engine 23, at St Mary's Church on
Goshen Avenue in Washingtonville, N.Y.
* Firefighter Neil Leavy of Engine 217 at Our Lady Queen of Peace,
on New Dorp Lane in Staten Island.
* Firefigher John Heffernan of Ladder 11 at Saint Camillus Church in
Rockaway, Queens.
And every day our tabloids run wallet-size pictures of the firemen,
with little capsule bios. Firefighter Stephen Siller of Squad 1, for
instance, is survived by wife, Sarah, daughters Katherine, Olivia and
Genevieve and sons Jake and Stephen, and by brothers Russell, George
and Frank, and sisters Mary, Janice and Virginia.
What the papers are doing--showing you that the fireman had a name and
the name had a face and the face had a life--is good. But it of course
it is not enough, it can never be enough.
We all of course know the central fact: There were two big buildings
and there were 5,000-plus people and it was 8:48 in the morning on a
brilliant blue day. And then 45 minutes later the people and the
buildings were gone. They just went away. As I write this almost three
weeks later, I actually think: That couldn't be true. But it's true.
That is pretty much where New Yorkers are in the grieving process:
"That couldn't be true. It's true." Five thousand dead! "That couldn't
be true. It's true." And more than 300 firemen dead.
Three hundred firemen. This is the part that reorders your mind when
you think of it. For most of the 5,000 dead were there--they just
happened to be there, in the buildings, at their desks or selling
coffee or returning e-mail. But the 300 didn't happen to be there,
they went there. In the now-famous phrase, they ran into the burning
building and not out of the burning building. They ran up the stairs,
not down, they went into it and not out of it. They didn't flee, they
charged. It was just before 9 a.m. and the shift was changing, but the
outgoing shift raced to the towers and the incoming shift raced with
them. That's one reason so many were there so quickly, and the losses
were so heavy. Because no one went home. They all came.
And one after another they slapped on their gear and ran up the
stairs. They did this to save lives. Of all the numbers we've learned
since Sept. 11, we don't know and will probably never know how many
people that day were saved from the flames and collapse. But the
number that has been bandied about is 20,000--20,000 who lived because
they thought quickly or were lucky or prayed hard or met up with (were
carried by, comforted by, dragged by) a fireman.
I say fireman and not "firefighter." We're all supposed to say
firefighter, but they were all men, great men, and fireman is a good
word. Firemen put out fires and save people, they take people who
can't walk and sling them over their shoulders like a sack of potatoes
and take them to safety. That's what they do for a living. You think
to yourself: Do we pay them enough? You realize: We couldn't possibly
pay them enough. And in any case a career like that is not about
money.
I'm still not getting to the thing I want to say.
It's that what the New York Fire Department did--what those men did on
that brilliant blue day in September--was like D-Day. It was daring
and brilliant and brave, and the fact of it--the fact that they did
it, charging into harm's way--changed the world we live in. They
brought love into a story about hate--for only love will make you
enter fire. Talk about your Greatest Generation--the greatest
generation is the greatest pieces of any generation, and right now
that is: them.
So it was like D-Day, but it was also like the charge of the Light
Brigade. Into the tower of death strode the three hundred. And though
we continue to need reporters to tell us all the facts, to find out
the stories of what the firemen did in those towers, and though
reporters have done a wonderful, profoundly appreciative job of that,
what we need most now is different.
We need a poet. We need a writer of ballads and song to capture what
happened there as the big men in big black rubber coats and big boots
and hard peaked hats lugged 50 and 100 pounds of gear up into the
horror and heat, charging upward, going up so sure, calm and fast--so
humorously, some of them, cracking mild jokes--that some of the people
on the stairwell next to them, going down, trying to escape, couldn't
help but stop and turn and say, "Thank you," and "Be careful, son,"
and some of them took pictures. I have one. On the day after the
horror, when the first photos of what happened inside the towers were
posted on the Internet, I went to them. And one was so eloquent--a
black-and-white picture that was almost a blur: a big, black-clad back
heading upward in the dark, and on his back, in shaky double-vision
letters because the person taking the picture was shaking, it said
"Byrne."
Just Byrne. But it suggested to me a world. An Irish kid from
Brooklyn, where a lot of the Byrnes settled when they arrived in
America. Now he lives maybe on Long Island, in Massapequa or
Huntington. Maybe third-generation American, maybe in his 30s, grew up
in the '70s when America was getting crazy, but became what his father
might have been, maybe was: a fireman. I printed copies of the
picture, and my brother found the fireman's face and first name in the
paper. His name was Patrick Byrne. He was among the missing. Patrick
Byrne was my grandfather's name, and is my cousin's name. I showed it
to my son and said, "Never forget this--ever."
The Light Brigade had Tennyson. It was the middle of the Crimean War
and the best of the British light cavalry charged on open terrain in
the Battle of Balaclava. Of the 600 men who went in, almost half were
killed or wounded, and when England's poet laureate, Alfred Lord
Tennyson, learned of it, he turned it into one of the most famous
poems of a day when poems were famous:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd:
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
I don't think young people are taught that poem anymore; it's martial
and patriarchal, and even if it weren't it's cornball. But then, if a
Hollywood screenwriter five weeks ago wrote a story in which buildings
came down and 300 firemen sacrificed their lives to save others, the
men at the studios would say: Nah, too cornball. That couldn't be
true. But it's true.
Brave men do brave things. After Sept. 11 a friend of mine said
something that startled me with its simple truth. He said, "Everyone
died as the person they were." I shook my head. He said, "Everyone
died who they were. A guy who ran down quicker than everyone and
didn't help anyone--that was him. The guy who ran to get the old lady
and was hit by debris--that's who he was. They all died who they
were."
Who were the firemen? The Christian scholar and author Os Guinness
said the other night in Manhattan that horror and tragedy crack open
the human heart and force the beauty out. It is in terrible times that
people with great goodness inside become most themselves. "The real
mystery," he added, "is not the mystery of evil but the mystery of
goodness." Maybe it's because of that mystery that firemen themselves
usually can't tell you why they do what they do. "It's the job," they
say, and it is, and it is more than that.
So: The firemen were rough repositories of grace. They were the
goodness that comes out when society is cracked open. They were
responsible. They took responsibility under conditions of chaos. They
did their job under heavy fire, stood their ground, claimed new
ground, moved forward like soldiers against the enemy. They charged.
There is another great poet and another great charge, Pickett's
charge, at Gettysburg. The poet, playwright and historian Stephen
Vincent Benet wrote of Pickett and his men in his great poetic epic of
the Civil War, "John Brown's Body":
There was a death-torn mile of broken ground to cross,
And a low stone wall at the end, and behind it the Second Corps,
And behind that force another, fresh men who had not fought.
They started to cross that ground. The guns began to tear them.
From the hills they say that it seemed more like a sea than a wave,
A sea continually torn by stones flung out of the sky,
And yet, as it came, still closing, closing, and rolling on,
As the moving sea closes over the flaws and rips of the tide.
But the men would not stop:
You could mark the path that they took by the dead that they left
behind, . . .
And yet they came on unceasing, the fifteen thousand no more,
And the blue Virginia flag did not fall, did not fall, did not
fall.
The center line held to the end, he wrote, and didn't break until it
wasn't there anymore.
The firemen were like that. And like the soldiers of old, from
Pickett's men through D-Day, they gave us a moment in history that has
left us speechless with gratitude and amazement, and maybe relief,
too. We still make men like that. We're still making their kind. Then
that must be who we are.
We are entering an epic struggle, and the firemen gave us a great gift
when they gave us this knowledge that day. They changed a great deal
by being who they were.
They deserve a poet, and a poem. At the very least a monument. I enjoy
the talk about building it bigger, higher, better and maybe we'll do
that. But I'm one of those who thinks: Make it a memory. The pieces of
the towers that are left, that still stand, look like pieces of a
cathedral. Keep some of it. Make it part of a memorial. And at the
center of it--not a part of it but at the heart of it--bronze statues
of firemen looking up with awe and resolution at what they faced. And
have them grabbing their helmets and gear as if they were running
toward it, as if they are running in.
opinionjournal.com
tom watson tosiwmee |
