A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  I have met many beautiful, wonderful people—my BWs, I call them—from every state in the union. They have come here, some during that nine-month recovery period, to do something, and they could not stay at home and do nothing. Those who could not come in person went out and collected money, equipment, and supplies, things that could be used at the site. It was so beautiful.

  One couple from a little place called Phillipsburg, Kansas, which is about as big as a pinhead, came here four separate times at their own expense. On each visit they spent two weeks feeding us and cleaning up after us. The wife asked me, “After this is all done, will you come to speak to us?” I said okay, and they were ecstatic. I went to their little town not knowing what to expect. It was the first time I had really traveled to speak to a large group about 9/11. I went into the large and spiffy auditorium of their brandnew school, and it was overwhelming: The crowd was standing-room-only, hundreds and hundreds of young people and families. It was very rewarding to be there.

  I spoke positively, and talked about tomorrow. I told them how my best friend had been taken from me on 9/11, along with eighty or ninety other good friends whom I had worked fires with. But my best friend was my son Jonathan, and although I couldn’t bring him back, much as I wished I could, I had to do something for tomorrow that would make the world better. There was no alternative, as it was our sacred obligation to give all children the best that we could, and the most effective way to start was with an education about understanding the good things in our world. But to understand good, you had to talk about the bad—the horrors, the world wars, slavery, starvations, and 9/11—in a positive way.

  I speak regularly now and say a lot of things that are very difficult for people to understand and hear. I talk about the men and women who worked at the site on their hands and knees every day to find 19,979 body parts. But then I turn it into a positive, something we can learn from. We can’t hate. The people who did this, these are people who hate. They are fanatics. They come from what we now call radical Islam, as opposed to Islamic people in general. But if we’re going to be afraid to talk about radical Islam, we must pay heed to the adage about history repeating itself. In fact, it has already repeated itself. It repeated itself with the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, the guy who had a bomb up on Times Square at Forty-fifth Street, the attacks on the trains in Spain, the buses in London, and the hotel in Mumbai—every time you read or hear about somebody strapping a bomb on and walking into a crowd of people. How many more people have died since 9/11 because of this thing called “radical Islamic extremism” ? Catholic churches were just bombed in Arab countries. A person walks into the crowd and detonates a bomb he is carrying, pulverizes twenty or forty or sixty beautiful people. How can you turn these terrible things into something positive? That is the challenge.

  It’s easy for us in this country to forget these things because we live in the lap of luxury. So I speak positively about what we can do. These young people are tomorrow’s people, and if they don’t understand history, then shame on us. Almost ten years later and there is still not a state in our country that has a curriculum to teach the history of 9/11—not what happened, but why it happened. Who did it? And why did they do it? If our educators aren’t teaching, one day we’re going to be very sorry.

  Today there are countries that are very close to developing nuclear weapons, autocratic countries in which there is much unrest and turmoil, where change can occur overnight. Will these nuclear weapons fall into the hands of fanatics? Just think about the planning involved in 9/11. Would those planners stop short of dropping a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv, Paris, London?

  I’ve asked that question many times and have occasionally been asked, “Don’t you think what you’re saying is kind of radical?” And I respond, “Well, let me ask you one question, and then you tell me: On September 11, if these same nineteen terrorists had had the capability of bringing a dirty bomb into the center of Manhattan, would they have done it? Would they have detonated it?”

  And what is the answer I get from these people? Silence. Because they know damn well the answer is yes.

  When I got back from that trip to Phillipsburg I was called by people there who told me they were planning to come to New York with a group of high school students who had just graduated and asked if I would take them on a tour around the site. Although the site was already closed off to visitors, I said sure, of course. Jennifer came with me as I gave the tour, and, as she recalls, they were typical high school kids, all fidgety, looking around, [but] as soon as I started talking, everybody stopped and listened with a real intensity. At the end Jennifer realized this was something that was so important to those kids. They were going to go home with a totally different attitude—a good attitude, because we ended by discussing what we could all do for a positive future for our country.

  Back at the 9/11 Families’ Association office we talked about that experience, and Jennifer said, “Let’s build on it. Let’s do tours and change people’s lives.” So we went out and knocked on many doors. Governor [George] Pataki thought it was a fabulous idea and asked the LMDC [Lower Manhattan Development Corporation] to help us financially. We met with Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg, and he said, Great. We needed to raise at least $6 million to build out the Tribute WTC Visitor Center to what it is today, and we were able to do so with funding from the Port Authority, the Red Cross, and American Express. That effort started started in March of 2004, and by September of 2006 we opened our doors to the public. We’re a nonprofit, so fund-raising remains a major challenge, especially with the current economic situation.

  When we were first looking to build the Tribute Center, we assumed that the official 9/11 memorial that would be built on the footprints of the original towers was going to be many years away from completion and operation, so we conceived the Tribute Center as an interim memorial for visitors. But after many meetings with the people that we brought in to help us from the museum world, we realized that we were building something that was going to be out of the ordinary and not in the same vein as a typical museum or memorial. Just as I had been called the ambassador for the dead, the Tribute Center would become the ambassador for those people who could not speak.

  We have trained over 390 guides—all volunteers. They come from the 9/11 community, which we define as anyone who lost a loved one, rescue workers, survivors who made it out of the towers, volunteers like Jennifer, and then the people who live and work in the area who watched that day and witnessed things that no one should ever have witnessed. Can you imagine being there to see those people who jumped from the two buildings ? Who better to give a tour than this 9/11 community? They are the voices of the people who were murdered that day.

  The Tribute Center is a person-to-person, I-was-there history. It is a sharing. Everything you hear, see, or read is testimony by people who were affected by 9/11. It is like a museum in that it has many artifacts and a historical collection of objects, but it also has living stories and living storytellers. The Tribute Center is open seven days a week, and our guided tours are held seven days a week. We limit the tours to twenty people, and do four and five a day.

  When you enter the Tribute Center you see in Gallery 1 what the World Trade Center and the area were like before September 11, after which you follow a timeline that starts on February 26, 1993, the date that’s forgotten by just about everyone: The first time the towers were attacked by radical Islamic extremists.

  In the next gallery we start the timeline of September 11 and take you through the events of that day. You hear voices and see people who died that day. There are transmissions of the firefighters on their walkie-talkies as they are ascending the stairs in the South Tower—all those great men, all those powerful voices, doing what we as firefighters did every day before 9/11 and have done every day since. You’ll see photographs of police officers like Moira Smith [see Jim Smith, page 128] and civilians coated with ash. You’ll hear families talking about their loved ones. You’ll see po
sters of missing people. You’ll see a powerful five-minute video of what it was like to spend nine months at the site. You’ll see my son’s helmet and his turnout coat, which we were blessed to recover.

  Jonathan’s helmet and coat are now on display in Gallery 3.

  Gallery 4 is the family room. Jennifer reached out to every family and asked them to send us one photo of the loved person who was lost, so as you enter the space your breath will be taken away. It’s a very solemn, quiet place, with walls that are covered with beautiful smiling faces of all ages, colors, religions, and economic levels. And you will sense immediately that the only thing wrong with this room of good and decent people is that they are no longer with us.

  When we leave Gallery 4 we want to change the experience and stress how tomorrow has got to be a better day. We want to brighten you up a little bit, so you’ll see photos of workers hugging at the site, photos of spouses, lovers, family, friends. You then reach a little spot where there are tiles on the wall with drawings and sayings, the work of people from all over the world who went into a ceramics shop and made them to hang on a fence up on Greenwich [Street] and Seventh Avenue. Ten years later there are still four thousand of these memorial tiles on that wire fence; we have about four hundred of them at the Tribute Center.

  On the opposite wall is a little origami crane, no larger than a dime, created by a young girl by the name of Sadako, who lived through the bombing of Hiroshima. She was two years old at the time, and eventually came down with leukemia from radiation poisoning, and died in 1955 at the age of twelve. Of course, like all of us, she wanted to live, and her dad suggested that if she fold a piece of paper into the shape of a crane, her wish might come true. It’s a cultural belief in Japan. So Sadako started folding cranes, and because there was a lack of paper in postwar Japan, she carefully picked the labels from her medicine bottles. She made well over a thousand before she died. The family donated all of the cranes to the Hiroshima memorial except for five, which they kept as a remembrance of their daughter.

  About two years ago Sadako’s brother decided it was time to give the five cranes away, one to each of five continents to carry on his sister’s wish that she could live, live in peace, and stop nuclear proliferation. For the continent of North America, her brother decided to give it to us, and we now have a beautiful little crane made out of brilliant ruby-red cellophane. It is so little but so hugely consequential in its power. The unique and telling aspect of this story is that the label Sadako used for our origami crane came from a medicine bottle that was sent to Japan by the United States to try to fight her cancer.

  Because the cranes started getting smaller as death got closer, the crane given to us is one of the last cranes she made before she died. Here we are some sixty-five years later, and we still can’t seem to find peace in this world. But this little twelve-year-old girl was smarter than most of us, having turned her wish into something tangible.

  As you make your way downstairs you can look up and see over ten thousand origami cranes that were sent to the Tribute Center by schoolchildren in Japan, which lost twenty-four of its citizens, who worked in the banking industry, in the towers.

  Downstairs in Gallery 5 are the thoughts we hope will provide the food for thought that will bring people to change. We ask visitors to sit at a long table filled with blank cards and answer the following questions:How have you been affected by September 11th?

  What action can you take in the spirit of September 11th, in tribute to those lost, or to help educate another?

  What are your feelings?

  More than two million people have come to the Tribute Center from more than 135 countries, and they’ve recorded their feelings and their advice in their own hand, in their own language. We now have over two hundred thousand cards. The world speaks here, from all countries, including Iran and many [other] Muslim countries, and they all speak with the same words. We must find a way to live with each other. We must find a way to stop hatred and intolerance. We must stop terrorism. These cards are stunning: They are poetic, and their words range from rudimentary to artful. It is a powerful place, with a powerful message: WE MUST LEARN TO LIVE WITH OUR DIFFERENCES.

  So much good has happened since 9/11 that our tomorrows might well become better for all people throughout the world. For example, there have been thousands of scholarships established in memory of 9/11, and my son has two named in his honor. Many foundations have also been created [see the Jackmans, page 304, and the MacRaes, page 315] to relieve the suffering from tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, and kids in need, with money and supplies sent in memory of 9/11.

  There’s a photo that was taken of Jonathan and me after the Father’s Day fire in June 10 2001 at which three firefighters died [see Zack Fletcher, page 149], two from Rescue 4 and one from Ladder 163. Jonathan was by this point the second volunteer chief in Great Neck, and we were in his chief ’s car with his scanner on when we began to hear screaming in the background. We knew right away there was a problem: There had been an explosion, a wall came down, and three firefighters were missing. We drove over to the fire, and while Jonathan had his gear in his car, I was wearing shorts. On the way down the block we met a fireman from Jonathan’s company, Squad 288. The guy was in a panic; you could see it in his face. One of the guys trapped in the collapse was from 288—Brian Fahey, who had just transferred to Rescue 4. John Downing from Ladder 163 was lost, and Harry Ford. Jonathan got his gear and mask on, and I told him, “Go ahead, do what you have to do. I’ll stay around here and help wherever I can.”

  Forty-six Engine Companies had responded to the job, along with thirty-three Ladder Companies, sixteen battalion chiefs, and two deputy chiefs. All five Rescue Companies were there.

  I then saw Dr. Kerry Kelly [see David Prezant, page 28] come running down the street. She saw me and asked, “What are they up to?” I told her three guys were missing, and she immediately tried to climb onto this pile of rubble where the wall had fallen out onto the street, burying someone beneath it. I yelled, “Doc, you can’t go up there like that,” because she had heels on and a skirt. But she is the daughter of a New York firefighter, and I could see the spirit. I said, “Doc, you’re going to be more valuable down here,” and just then Jonathan appeared and said, “Dad, I think we have Harry.”

  I then heard a voice, and it was Dennis Collins from Ladder 111. “Lee,” he said, “what do you need?” I told him they might have Harry Ford, and to get a stretcher. I turned back and saw they were carrying somebody, and we got to a spot where we could transfer whoever it was to the stretcher. They brought him over, and it was Harry Ford. Jonathan knew Harry well, because they lived near each other, and because the rescue units and the squads are very tight. And I had known Harry for an eternity, as he was a longtime firefighter in Rescue 4, and we worked together countless times.

  To look at Harry, he seemed fine, but he wasn’t breathing, as he had been compressed far too long under the wall that had come down. We began rolling the stretcher down the street, and somebody was riding along on its rail, doing [CPR heart] compressions on Harry. The ambulance was at the end of the block, and when we got there we began clearing Harry’s airway. As we loaded the stretcher onto the ambulance, a hand came out and pulled me in, and it was Jonathan’s. Kerry Kelly was already there, and maybe an EMT. As soon as the door was closed behind us we started CPR. I can remember vividly Jonathan talking to Harry, and I was yelling at him, trying to get his brain focused. “Harry! Harry! I want you to hear me, we are working on you, and you better not die on me.” Jonathan got a great airway going, Kerry was taking vitals, and I was doing compressions. When you do compressions you can feel the exchange of air coming in and going out of the lungs, and if you’re trained you can actually feel the person’s heart being compressed, like a heartbeat. I thought we were going all right and told Harry, “We’re doing good, we’ve got great airway!”

  When we got to the hospital we took him out, and it was there that the photographs of Jon
athan and me were taken. We continued working on him in the emergency room for a while until the doctor said he could take over from here. But Harry had been crushed for so long that the air we had been giving him and the compressions weren’t enough.

  So Harry died, and John Downing died, and Brian Fahey died. Fahey was missing for a long time, but you could hear him calling on his walkie-talkie. But he was underneath the stairs, and no one could reach him or get down to him. He was Jonathan’s friend from 288, whom I had met a week or two before at a convention. This was a very sad fire, and it is still baffling how all of this happened, the explosion, the wall.

  Little did we realize that September 11 was only a couple of months away, and on that day everybody who came to the towers from Rescue 4 would die. And Jonathan, and everybody from the two companies in his firehouse, Squad 288 and HazMat 1, died, nineteen of them. Five Rescue Companies in the city responded that day to the World Trade Center, and because the alarm came in at the time of a shift change, men from both the night tour and the day tour responded with many of the companies. They rode heavy. Every Rescue Company firefighter there that day died. Five of the seven Squad Companies were there, four riding heavy. Every man in every Squad Company died except for one. Seventy-five firehouses lost men, and many of them lost every man working. There are 128 firefighters still missing. How can you comprehend that? There is no way to understand it. The New York City Police Department lost twenty-two great guys and a wonderful, heroic woman, Moira Smith. On any other day the deaths of twenty-three cops would be front-page news around the world. Port Authority lost thirty-seven of their police officers. I just cannot get over September 11: 343 firefighters killed. It’s difficult to even say that. It makes no sense.