A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  When you grow up without a lot of frills, and everybody’s the same, that’s normal. Today they call it dysfunctional. It’s not dysfunctional but just the way it was. Everybody was struggling. It was a different code. I grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a predominantly mixed area. I didn’t have any problems. You judged a guy by how many sewers he could hit in stickball. There were no parks. Our football was a newspaper rolled up and tied with a string. At Christmastime someone would get a football and think, Wow, that’s the cat’s meow, until the asphalt beat it up. It was a good life.

  One day, when I was fifteen and hanging out, a couple of guys said, Why don’t you come with us to the National Guard? National Guard, who are they? Soldiers. You get to carry rifles and shoot guns. I said, You’re kidding me—that sounds like fun. So I went down to the armory, and I said, I want to join. It’s amazing what you can get away with. Because I had some of my father’s art talents, I created a birth certificate, not a problem. The hardest part was making the seal, but I found a way. It didn’t look good, but it was raised. I brought it down there, some sergeant looked at me, and asked, “You’re eighteen years old?” I said, “Yes, sir.”

  I was assigned to 10th Company, 106th Infantry Regiment, Heavy Weapons, at Camp Drum. In the daytime I got to run around in the woods blowing things up, but at night I had, like, twenty godfathers making sure I didn’t smoke, drink, or get into trouble. I never told my mother. When I brought my seabag home with all the army clothes, she asked what they were, and I told her that I had won a chance to go to a camp through the Herald Tribune Fresh Air [Fund]. I said, “Because they knew we didn’t have any money, they gave us all these old army clothes.” She bought it the first time, but when I came back with a corporal stripe she got wise to me. But she never said anything, and I had a good time in my two years in the National Guard. So I was now eighteen years old, and all I wanted was to be a marine. My mother said, “You’ve got to graduate high school.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I never graduated.

  I think it was about my tenth week in boot camp that my DI [drill instructor] called me into his hooch, which is never a good thing, and I got a little bit of a bouncing around. He was screaming at me, and the junior DI was screaming at me, calling me a liar, a traitor, for what I had done to their Marine Corps by being in the army. I asked how they found out—nobody had told me about fingerprints.

  After two years in the Marine Corps I was looking for something to do, and took a test for the Police Department and a test for the Fire Department. I went to visit my father at the firehouse—the last time I had seen him was the night I left for Parris Island [the Marine Corps training camp]—and told him I had taken the test for the Fire Department. He said, “Good, good, and I hope you make it.” We sat and talked, and he introduced me to a couple of the young men that were there. I got on the Fire Department list, and because they called before the Police Department did, I said, “I’ll be a fireman.”

  I went to probie school, and my father came to the graduation ceremony. My mother had left when I went into the Marine Corps—I don’t know where she went—and my grandmother had died, so my father’s being at graduation was a pretty special day, and his coming in uniform made it even more special. And my wife-to-be was with us. He was proud that I was a fireman. We talked a little about the job, and he asked, “Where would you like to work?” I said, Where he worked, and he said, “Well, right now I’m driving the chief in the 36 Battalion, which is in Greenpoint.”

  I said, “Pop, to be honest with you, I’m probably gonna screw up, and if I screw up, it’s on me, and if I do something good, it’s on me. I don’t want somebody saying, You did it because you’re Vigiano’s son. I want people to come to you and say, You’re Vigiano’s father.” He said, “You’re a hairy little son of a gun.” I told him I didn’t know what “hairy” meant, but that’s the way it was going to be. I told him, “I love you, but I don’t want to work with you.”

  My father had good friends in the job, so I was assigned to Ladder 103, East New York. I had a very good Fire Department career—there were maybe three days or five days in thirty-six years when I wasn’t happy. Probably the worst day of my life before 9/11 was when a fireman died in my hands. You know, I never forgot that. I was a lieutenant in Rescue 2. I was actually holding a mask on this firefighter in the emergency room in Kings County [Hospital] while another firefighter, who happened to be a Special Forces medic, was doing the chest compressions. A few firemen had been brought in, plus the normal collection of bodies in an emergency room, and by the time the team got to him, he was dead. It was Bob Goldman. That wasn’t a good day.

  Our boys, John and Joe, were good sons. Whatever we asked them to do, they did. Jan got them started in Cub Scouts real early, at seven or eight years old. When they were eight, I began to coach them in baseball and football. When they were ten years old, Mama said, “Now you’ve got to take them into Boy Scouts.” So I became an assistant and took whatever job they gave me. When the scoutmaster quit, they asked me to take over, and I ran it like I did in the Marine Corps. The scouts are a takeoff of the military—learning skills, leadership, what you’re made of, and learning the role of rank.

  For the next eight years I saw each of my sons grow from boy to man. When John was ready to make Eagle Scout—I think he was close to sixteen—Joe was shy of about four merit badges, and he asked his brother, “Why don’t you wait, and we’ll make it together?” And not only did John wait, but he helped Joe get the merit badges. They both made Eagle Scout the same night, and I don’t know if that happens very often.

  Joe would come with me to the firehouse, and the firemen adopted him. He was as big as some of them that I had working for me, and he used to wear the guys’ boots. Lee Ielpi [see page 98] would teach him how to light up an area when we were doing extrication training. He looked like a little mini fireman, and would say that he was going to be the next generation.

  For his thirteenth birthday I brought him to Rescue 2. We bought a big chocolate layer cake with “Happy Birthday” written on it. But Lee Ielpi was there and said, “We’re gonna give you a better cake.” So he took a milk container and cut windows out, cut the bottom out, and put it on top of the candles. He lit them, and fire started coming out of the little so-called windows. “You got to put it out, Joe,” Lee told him. They gave him water. So he put the fire out, and the cake was saturated. We had a soggy birthday cake, but it was a good day.

  But at seventeen he began dating a young girl whose father was a police officer, and the guy talked him into taking the PD test. We drove him to the test, and I told him, “Joe, go in and do your best, and when you finish, meet us at the Van Wyck Diner.” Just one pencil, that’s all he had, and he said, “No problem, see ya.” I’m watching him go in, this seventeen-year-old kid, with a group of men. He was a good size, but he was still a kid. So my wife, Jan, and I walked to the diner and were on our second cup of coffee when Joe walked in. I thought, This is not good, figuring, all told, an hour and ten minutes for a three-hour test. I said, “How’d you do?” He said, “I aced it.” He took out a piece of paper, and we looked at the numbers. I said, “It’s a good thing you didn’t break the pencil.” He said, “I did, but the guy next to me had a lot of them, and he gave me one.” So I asked, “Well, when are they gonna give you the answers?” “I think tonight. They’re gonna be on the radio.” I said, “You know, Joe, if you fail the test, it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s an experience. You’re gonna take another one down the road—maybe the fireman’s test. They’re all pretty much the same.” He said, “I’m not worried, Dad.”

  We went home, and he got dressed up to go out with his girlfriend. Calls me up about 11:30. “Dad, I got 110 on the test.” I said, “How did you get 110?” He said, “I did the extra credit.” After the numbered questions they had a couple of reading comprehensions, then one with a diagram in which you had to pick out certain things, and he got them all. So I said, “So you’re seventeen a
nd you’re on the list.” He said, “I’ll be in the first class.” They later called him up and said they couldn’t take him until he was twenty, so at twenty years and two days old, Joe was a New York City police officer.

  John was in college at the time and said to Joe, “You’re an idiot. You should be a fireman.” But even when he was a cop, Joe was heavy into the Deer Park Volunteer Fire Department. He had joined when he was sixteen, and he was on every team that the Deer Park Fire Volunteers had. He loved the fire service.

  John wanted to finish college at Stony Brook. When he started there, I said, “Since you’re not going into the military you’ve got to learn to be on your own, and living at home would be an extension of high school.” So we agreed, and he lived on campus. Then, in 1984, I got diagnosed with throat cancer. I didn’t tell the boys, as I didn’t think it was something they had to be burdened with. Joe was a senior in high school, and John was taking his final exams in college, so I said, “Let him get through school, and then we can let him know, and Joe too.” But after all the tests were over, Jan told them. They came to the hospital and realized what all the secret meetings had been about. John was upset, really upset, but Joe handled it better.

  A firefighter from my company would volunteer every morning and another every night to drive out to Long Island with the chief’s car, pick up my wife, take her to the Sloan-Kettering hospital, and then bring her home. They did this for three weeks, and not one person got overtime, not one person complained. I got to see every member of the company every day. When the radiation started, the department had Ambulance 4, which was in Manhattan, pick me up here in Long Island, drive me to Sloan-Kettering, and then bring me home. Two of those guys also owned two successful restaurants called Donovan’s. They said, We’re not using the Fire Department cars, so would pick me up in their Cadillacs, back and forth, for thirty-six treatments. When it was all over I wrote and I thanked the Fire Department for what they had done, but told them about the Cadillacs. The department said we have to get something to take care of the families, and an old, broken-down FDNY chief ’s car won’t do. And that was the start of what is now the FDNY Fire Family Transport Foundation with comfortable vans.

  Cops and firemen are like Spartans and Centurions. At every family dinner Joe would shoot off something, John would counter, and I’d be in the middle, the arbiter. They might get a little heated, and Jan would step in and say, “It’s over.” But on other nights it got exciting, arguing, Who does more work, firefighters or police officers? Jan stopped that too. But then I took it to another level when I started teaching the use of the Hurst tool [widely known as the Jaws of Life, an air-compression tool that can lift up a bus or cut through the doors of a car] around the country and took John, who as a firefighter was learning the tool, with me. And Joe said to me one day, “What about me? I’m not an orphan. I should go with you.” I said, “Joe, you’re a cop.” He said, “I’m an emergency cop. I know more about those tools than John.” I said, “I’ll take you, but John’s in charge.” John loved it; he got to order his brother around. But they were both excellent instructors, which I had seen in the Boy Scouts. When John became an Eagle Scout he was my senior patrol leader, and I used to watch him counsel other boys. He just had a knack about him. Joe watched him, learned, and developed his own technique. They became quite successful when they moved into this instructing world with me. Joe and John were the glue that brought everything and everyone together.

  So I watched them grow from little boys to young men in Boy Scouts, and then I got the opportunity to work with them as men in the world. I don’t think you can measure that, and there isn’t a father alive who can say he had a better life. Ours together was cut short. Yes, we banged heads, fathers and sons, and more than once I told them, “I’m not your friend. I’m your father, and there’s a line you can’t cross.” But man, I had nothing but good times with them for the thirty-four and thirty-six years that those boys were on earth.

  On the morning of 9/11 Joe was working the day tour so he could be home to lead his son’s Cub Scout troop. John was just going off duty when a guy called in and said his child was sick, so John said, I’m here, I’ll stay. I was shaving when the phone rang, and it was Joe, in Truck 2 of ESU [Emergency Service Unit]. He said, “Dad, turn on the television. A plane just hit the World Trade Center.” Sure enough, Channel 5 was doing a bulletin, a report that a plane had hit. They were thinking it was a Piper Cub, and Joe said, “No, Dad, it’s not a Piper Cub. I’m on the West Side Highway, and we’re heading south right now. From the column of smoke, this wasn’t a Piper Cub.” I said, “All right, Joe, be careful.” “Okay, Dad,” he said. “I love ya.”

  That’s how we ended our conversations every time I spoke with my sons. I spoke with John the night before, I spoke to Joe en route, and the last words I said to each were, “I love you.” Every time you get on that fire truck, you can die. Every time. I gave this advice to both my sons: “Don’t ever leave your house pissed off at your wife or your kids, because you don’t know if you’re going to see them the next day.” I said, “So no matter what the gripe is with your wife, your girlfriend, or your children, put it aside. Hug them. Kiss them. Take it up the next day. Because the last thing that you want to remember is that you hugged them and kissed them.”

  We can think about 9/11 from different points of view. Chief Dan Nigro [see page 1] looked at it from the command standpoint: Here were two huge buildings with many floors of fire, hundreds of people getting killed, so, tactically, what were they going to do? The chiefs knew you couldn’t fight a high-rise fire like you fight fire in a tenement. In a project fire the heat was incredible; in the World Trade Center, you had a minimum of ten or fifteen floors being fed by jet fuel. Holy . . . God. I can’t imagine the temperature.

  Just two months before 9/11 John had called me up and said, “Dad, can you call the chief of department [Peter J. Ganci] and ask him to put Tom Haskell [see page 163] in my company?” I said, “John, I’m retired. How am I going to ask the chief of department to transfer somebody to your company ? Those days are over.” He said, “Dad, he’s great, and he worked with you. We’ve gotta have him.” I said, “I remember he was a fireman, a big guy, but I never knew he was the captain.” So Tom Haskell was the captain the day of the attacks. He accepted the temporary assignment, but since he was on the list to be a battalion chief, he refused a permanent transfer.

  Now, when they pulled up in front of the South Tower, they looked up and knew they were gonna get their ass kicked in this building; there was just no way you were going to hide. And nobody hesitated—they all followed him up the stairs. Watch the films. You see the fear in some of these kids’ eyes; you see that they didn’t really want to go, but they didn’t stop. How do you measure that if you don’t talk about heart, training, desire, courage? It’s not just one quality. Those kids all showed what they had. Tactically, if I had been a lieutenant or a captain at that time, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Once I was in the building, though, up close, the realization would have kicked in that we didn’t belong there. I’ve been to more than a few fires in my career where I found, This is not a good spot; now it’s time to make a retreat.

  The people coming out of those buildings that day were men whose families relied on them, women who just went to work, your wife, your daughter, your niece going shopping—the people we were sworn to protect. When you saw them you knew there were more people in there, but you didn’t know what situation they were in. You forgot about the fire; you forget about what was going to happen. I gotta get those people out. And that’s what they did. Firemen are no different from cops. When they saw thousands of them fleeing, they knew there were more—there was always one more.

  I never saw the fire. Chief Dan Nigro never saw the fire. Chief Pete Ganci never saw the fire. Chief Peter Hayden never saw the fire. What did they see? Tactically, they saw victims, people. The firefighters weren’t there to put out a fire. They could have stretched all the hose in t
he world, but they weren’t going to put out that fire. But they were going to get people out, and they did—thousands. The sad commentary is that we actually trained with high-rise procedures.

  That day I watched the coverage on television, saw the impact of the second plane crashing into the South Tower, the column of smoke. I had to leave the house for a minute to run to the store, and on the way home flipped the radio on. The building had collapsed. I said to myself, High-rises don’t collapse. Floors can collapse in a high-rise; buildings don’t collapse. Never. No high-rise has ever collapsed. At home I put on the television and watched the second tower come down. I was dumbfounded.

  The phone never stopped ringing. Because I knew that Joe was there, I tried to call the firehouse but couldn’t get through. I called a friend of mine who’s a dispatcher and said, “You gotta help me out.” And he said, “Let me see what I can do,” and then he called me back and said, “Don’t worry about it, 132 relocated.” I said, “Okay, that’s a good sign.” They didn’t relocate. They went right to the staging area.

  They sent a car to pick us up, to go to One Police Plaza. After thirty-six years as a firefighter I would have assumed that the Fire Department would take care of us. The Police Department I knew only as a peripheral thing, but now I saw how strong it really was, looking at it tactically. Streets were closed; policemen were everywhere, and not just traffic cops but armed policemen. And every place you went, there was a checkpoint. I said, “We’re in a war here.” We got to One Police Plaza, and they take us into the auditorium where a few tables had been set up, where people were sitting there and waiting. My daughter-in-law Kathy, a police officer, arrived, and had already been up to Truck 2.