A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  In the Fire Department we lose men every year. You can’t expect to not lose men, because they serve a special and dangerous function that’s needed in New York City. Especially in New York, where there is such a large fire load. We lost three men at the Father’s Day fire, six men at the Waldbaum’s fire in Brooklyn, thirteen men at the Twenty-third Street fire. But 343. You know, I still can’t . . .

  I don’t know how to put the right words together. When I go into Gallery 4 at the Tribute Center I have the marvelous, God-given opportunity to talk not only about the people who died that day but also about our firefighters. I get to explain to people that what they did at the towers was nothing more than what they did every day before 9/11, and what they’ve continued to do to this very day. And that it’s what they loved to do. And that they go into places where nobody wants to go. Few people can imagine what a wonderful opportunity it is to be a New York City firefighter, to work with the best of the best. Every one of us understands that it is the teamwork of the New York City Fire Department that matters: the training and the caring and the courage of everyone—these are the things that give every firefighter the opportunity to put himself forward at mortal risk to rescue another human being.

  The Fire Department is filled with unique individuals, and Jonathan was one of them. When Jonathan first went into the Fire Department, I was still a Brooklyn firefighter. Jonathan came back a couple of times saying, “Dad, guys are talking about you and what you did, the boots I have to fill.” And I’d say, “Listen, from this day forward, the boots you have to fill are your own boots, not mine. You do what you have to do at the job, and don’t let anyone tell you you have boots to fill. Don’t let them make me out of you.” I said the same thing to Brendan: “You can’t, and you shouldn’t, go through this job as Lee Ielpi’s son. You are Brendan Ielpi.”

  Firefighters are still firefighters, and 9/11 did not change that.

  Brendan Ielpi

  Brendan Ielpi is a New York City firefighter assigned to Ladder Co. 157 in Brooklyn. He was a probationary firefighter for just three months when the attack on the World Trade Center occurred. He responded to Ground Zero with other firefighters who had reported in, arriving there just after the second building collapsed. His father, Lee Ielpi, a retired firefighter from Rescue Co. 2, also responded to the site. Lee’s son and Brendan’s brother, Jonathan, and every man in his company, Squad 288, was killed in the South Tower.

  For a while I didn’t know if I would actually go into the Fire Department. I did four years of college up in Colesville[, New York]. The school was outside in the woods, so I got my bachelor’s degree in wildlife management. I loved it, and I still do—I can’t get enough of the outdoors, studying the birds and the amphibians. My first job out of college was at the fish hatchery and aquarium in Cold Spring Harbor, but I was only making nineteen thousand dollars. I really wanted to continue in that field, but it was hard to even make a living.

  I grew up in Great Neck in a pretty big family. We had two sisters—an older sister and a younger sister—and Jonathan and I were in the middle. Jonathan was four years older than me. And we were a Fire Department family. My father, Lee Ielpi, worked at Rescue 2 in Brooklyn, and is known as one of the most highly decorated firefighters in the history of the FDNY. My brother, Jonathan Ielpi, worked for Squad 288 in Queens. And he also served as chief for the Great Neck volunteer fire department.

  So it was a big part of my family, and joining the FDNY had always been an idea at the back of my head, but I guess I was a little rebellious initially, trying not to follow in everyone’s footsteps.

  Still, I always remember seeing how happy my father was with the Fire Department and how much he loved the job. Actually, he never even called it a job—[he] was always “going to play.” Every once in a while, when I was younger, I would go visit my father at Rescue 2, but not nearly as often as my brother. Jonathan lived and breathed the Fire Department. His Friday night was not going out and picking up girls; it was the fire truck. And so my father and Jonathan really bonded through the job. For me the bond with my father was through the outdoors, fishing, and camping.

  Seeing how much my father and brother loved the Fire Department made me believe that I could be happy there, too, and the FDNY was certainly a stable career path where I could make good money. So I decided to take the test and really make a push for it. I was carrying on the family tradition, carrying on my father’s legacy through my time in the Fire Department. Knowing that I’d be able to put out fires for the next twenty-five years was exhilarating. I couldn’t ask for anything more than what the Fire Department had to offer.

  I started my training with the fire academy in May of 2001, and right away Jonathan began telling me what firehouse I’d be going to. I said, “Well, what about 111 truck?” And he’d say, “Number 157 truck. That’s where you’re going.” He’d come over and tell me about how the night before he’d had an all-hands [all companies working a fire on the first alarm], so it was fun. I really looked forward to Sunday dinners at home during that time, sitting at the table and talking Fire Department with my father and my brother.

  Jonathan started off in Brooklyn with Engine 214, Ladder 111, working the engine there, and then went over to Queens. And after about three and a half years on the job, one of his old bosses, Captain Murphy, opened up a new house—Squad 288—in Queens. He asked Jonathan if he wanted to come over, and Jonathan joined them in 1998. But his ultimate goal was to transfer over to Rescue. And from what I was told, he was pretty close to making it happen.

  In 2001 Jonathan and I both had pretty busy lives. I had the fire academy and was just starting my FDNY career, and Jonathan had two sons, Andrew and Austin, and his wife, Yessenia, at home. Plus he had a second job, working with a friend of the family doing all sorts of handyman and carpentry work. Like most firemen, Jonathan was pretty handy. Actually, you could build a whole house with just the guys from the firehouse.

  So while that year was hectic for both of us, we definitely hung out. Was it as much as we wanted to? No. We all lived in the same town, though, so even if we just ran into each other for ten minutes, we saw each other constantly.

  I did eight weeks at the fire academy, and my first tour in the firehouse was on July 4, 2001. I was working on Tillary Street in Brooklyn as a probie [probationary firefighter], assigned to Ladder 110, Engine 207. Every probationary firefighter from our academy class was supposed to do fourteen weeks out in the field, seven weeks in the engine and seven weeks in the truck. And then we were supposed to go back to the Rock [fire academy] in the fall of 2001 for two additional weeks of training. That was the plan, but it never really happened . . . after September 11 we never went back to the Rock.

  On September 11, I was assigned to Engine 207 on Tillary Street, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, but I wasn’t working that day, because I had a camping trip scheduled. And four of the guys in my firehouse who were working were killed.

  On Tuesday morning I woke up and began packing my car to meet the guys for our trip. Then I turned on the news and, sure enough, the first plane had hit, and I was looking at floors and floors of fire. I can just remember sitting on my bed, cursing up and down that I wasn’t at work. Because I knew Tillary Street would be there, across the bridge, right at the second alarm.

  So I remember thinking, You’ve gotta be kidding me. It’s going to be the fire of the century. They’re going to be talking about this fire forever. And I’m still cursing up and down that I’m not there. I called Debra, my girlfriend, who is now my wife. She worked in Manhattan. I said, “Look out your window. Do you see the Trade Center?” She looked, and then you could hear her and everyone in the background: Holy mackerel, what’s that? After I hung up the phone, the second plane hit. That’s when for me it kind of changed from Damn, I’m not at work to Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not at work. Because then the reality started to hit a little: No one was going to be high-fiving after this one.

  So I called my father, who had
just gotten off the phone with Jon, and he said he was heading in. I told him to wait for me. I drove to Great Neck and picked him up, and we drove to my firehouse on Tillary Street, which is just on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  On our way there the first tower collapsed. We had the scanner on and could hear everything that was happening. There wasn’t much conversation during that drive; we were just trying to get there as soon as we could. I can remember thinking that you don’t see your father in a worried and panicked state of mind too often, and I’d never seen him like that before. He was truly, truly worried. He knows our job, he knows fires, and he knew how bad this was going to be. I could tell just by his demeanor that this was not going to be a very good day.

  Jon had been at his firehouse, Squad 288, when he called our father. Whenever its doors were opened up, his house had a beautiful view of the city skyline. And that’s what Jon was looking at when they were talking on the phone. He was saying, “Dad, you gotta see this, this is crazy.” The phone started cutting off. And Jon said, “Dad, I’m going, they put [assigned] us on the box.” And that was it.

  So on the way in, we knew Jon was going. And then the buildings starting collapsing, and we could hear the sheer panic over the scanner. When we got to Tillary Street, the 11th Division was there, and my dad just jumped in a car with them. I couldn’t go with him, because I had been on the job for only four months and had to stay with my company. I didn’t see my father again for another five or six hours.

  I wasn’t at the firehouse for more than fifteen minutes before a group of us got in a car and started heading over to Manhattan. There were about eight of us, mostly senior guys, and we teamed up with an officer who took us to one of the command posts, or what they were calling command posts, right by the church on Broadway. We told them that we had a bunch of guys here and were ready to go.

  By this point the second building had collapsed, and they just had us sitting around. We were all thinking, What are we doing here? There are a thousand things that have to be done, why are we just sitting here? We can’t sit here any longer. Eventually the boss said, “All right, let’s just go,” and so we walked the two blocks to the site and started doing whatever we could do.

  Jonathan was on my mind, but, for some reason, it took me a little while to really start to worry. I don’t know what it was; I guess I just didn’t realize how bad the collapse had been or comprehend how big and monstrous those buildings were. Guys were saying that the entire second-alarm units must be dead, but Jonathan hadn’t headed in until right after the second plane had hit, so I was really thinking that he was going to be all right. A lot of guys were in the same hopeful frame of mind, because do you ever experience anything like that?

  Once we got to the site and started looking around, though, the devastation became real. I saw bodies all over the place . . . people in the rubble . . . just dead bodies everywhere. I remember running into a few guys from Rescue 4, whom I’d known before I got on the Fire Department. And I said, “Hey guys, how you doing?” They just looked at me with a look that said, Don’t even ask us how we’re doing.

  I don’t know if it was my young mind, my innocence. I was only twenty-five years old then, and I thought I knew everything. I was so naive about the world. We were so pampered growing up—no war, no fighting. Everything was great. I’d never seen anything like what I was seeing on 9/11, and most people haven’t. But I got to work. Whatever they told me to do that day, I did. That first day I just had to root around the pile with my hands, feeling for anything.

  Hours later, at around 4:00 in the afternoon, I finally ran into my father somewhere in the pile. I looked at him and asked, “You find Jon yet?” He just looked at me, and he didn’t say anything, and I knew exactly what he meant without his saying it. He managed to tell me that the chiefs thought they were all gone, trapped someplace. He said that he ran into a few guys from Squad 288, and they couldn’t even look him in the eye. They started walking the other way, because they didn’t want to be the ones to tell him.

  I worked all through the night, until about 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. I was adamant that I was not going to leave. If Jon was here, I was staying. I finally sat down and said, “I’m just going to sleep here.”

  But a couple of the guys talked me into going back to the firehouse to get some rest, and said we’d come back in the morning and do it all over again tomorrow. One said, “And we’ll do it all the next day, and the next day, until we find everybody. So let’s go.” After they talked a little sense into me, a few of us made our way back to Tillary Street.

  On that first day my dad got in touch with our family and told them that he and I were all right, and that we were just doing as much as we could. The only person I spoke to was Debra’s mother, now my mother-in-law, to make sure my Debra got home okay from Manhattan. So I called her house, and her mother answered the phone, and that was the first time that I lost it. Reality really set in. I remember just crying, and she asked if everything was all right. And I just lost it.

  The first couple of days at Ground Zero, looking at that pile, at that monstrosity, you would think that there had to be people alive in there. In a plot of fifteen acres, some people must have landed in the right spot. You’d find huge voids, and you’d think that hundreds of people would have to be in them, guys trapped here and there, with all their protective gear on. How could there not be someone alive in here?

  You would be standing on the pile, and you’d hear someone say, “Shhhh, quiet.” Next thing you know a thousand people were yelling, “Shhhh, quiet,” until all of a sudden everyone was silent. It was amazing to see thousands of people being quiet and standing still together, just because someone may have heard something.

  But after three or four days without finding anybody, I think we realized this was just not . . . this was just not happening.

  At that point you start thinking logically. What are the chances that anyone survived this? You start thinking, All right, they were in the South Tower, and they climbed down, and if they did a flight of stairs every . . . They were here fifteen minutes, and you have a videotape, and then they were here twenty minutes before the building collapsed, if they did one flight a minute, they were up twenty flights, then how do you survive this?

  No one asked me specifically what he could do for me. I think they all did what they could: Guys just being there for you and letting you vent. We were all dealing with so many people, so many families, and so many lives that it was really hard to focus on one specific person. From my own firehouse alone four were killed. So everybody knew somebody or somebody else’s family who was in that pile.

  The Fire Department went to a twenty-four-hour shift, with groups A, B, C, and D. So if you were the A group, you would work twenty-four hours, and then you’d have three days off, and so on. I did that for a week or two, and then I spoke to my father and the captain who was making up the charts. And the captain basically said, You come back here when you’re ready.

  I wound up spending a lot of those off days with my father at the church down by Ground Zero. But whenever I crossed the bridge, I saw the smoke. And on the windy days, the smoke would blow right across the bridge, and you could smell it. I thought to myself, I can’t just be sitting here. I need to go back there and help, so I was only off for about a month before I went back to the pile.

  After 9/11 I didn’t see the rest of my family for the first three days. A friend of the family’s was coming into the city, so he drove Jonathan’s chief ’s car [the Great Neck Fire Department car] in for us. My father and I drove it back to Great Neck that night, and my dad parked it around the corner from my parents’ house. I said, “What are we doing parking two blocks away?” And he said, “If I pull this car into the driveway, and the whole family sees Jon’s car pull up in the driveway, they are going to freak out. I don’t want the kids seeing it. I don’t want your mother seeing it. Otherwise, they may think Jon’s coming home, Daddy’s coming home.” I don’t t
hink Jon’s kids saw that chief ’s car for months, simply because they would have believed Daddy’s pulling up, Daddy’s home. It was a long time before his kids were old enough to comprehend that Daddy wasn’t coming home.

  So we parked the car around the corner and walked the two blocks to see the family for the first time. It was pretty chaotic—a lot of crying, a lot of tears, a lot of speechless hugging. They all wanted to know what was going on at Ground Zero. It was extremely hard to describe. There were things I didn’t want to tell them, and I wanted to keep hope in everyone’s mind, trying to keep them positive, so that my mom and my two sisters and my nephews and my brother’s wife could forge ahead. Meanwhile, in the back of my head, I knew what was really going on. The writing was on the wall, but I tried to be positive for everyone else.

  My father went on the Larry King show, and I joined him. Three firefighters from another truck in Manhattan were also being interviewed, and one guy was talking about a firefighter from his house, saying, “We know he’s in there. He’s a big guy, a strong guy. And we know he’s going to survive this.”

  When the interview was over, we all went back into the green room. My father sat the guy down and said, “Brother, you gotta face reality. He’s not coming back.” But this guy was in denial: “No, you don’t understand.” My father just said to him again, “You gotta face reality.” And that was it for me. It was almost as if my father was telling me without telling me: You need to face reality here, Brendan. Let’s just hope we find Jon.

  And we did find him. For me, it was—I hate to use the word “bittersweet,” but it was a good ending to a horrible, horrible story.

  It was close to midnight, and I was very restless. I was getting agitated and thought, I’m going to go to Great Neck, to the volunteer firehouse. Just have a cup of coffee and get my mind away from things. So I got in the car and starting driving. At a point in the road where I could either take a left and go to the firehouse or make a right and go to my parents’ house, for some reason I just said, Let me go past my parents’ house.