American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  Earlier that morning Burton had led the first “combined” site-management meeting, at which the Fire Department, the police, and the DDC had been required to share the stage. It had taken place down the hallway, in the school auditorium. The various tribes had eyed one another with frank distrust, but had spoken in veiled terms to keep conflicts from breaking out into the open. Burton had said, “The DDC will have oversight [Meaning: control] over all recovery efforts on the pile,” in a tone that somehow implied that this was a decision imposed on him from far above. He had also said, “We’re making a push for increased safety. There may be some negative consequences. The police will not let anyone in or out of this building after ten A.M.” (Meaning: The firemen are being hysterical.) A fire chief in a white uniform shirt seemed not to have heard a word. He said, “We’re trying to hammer out a plan for the removal of victims and uniformed personnel. We’ve just located fourteen Fire Department members near the South Tower.” (Meaning: We’re not going to make this easy.)

  In the kindergarten room Holden decided that he needed to go to the pile to keep a close watch on the situation himself. Peter Rinaldi expressed concern for Holden’s safety. Holden said, “I’m just going to wear a sign saying, ‘I don’t know Mike Burton.’ ” Burton smiled humorlessly. His relationship with Holden was increasingly strained. There was another Port Authority man in the room, a strapping ex-Marine named Tom O’Connor, whose wife had worked in a neighboring building. She had survived, but they had lost many friends in the attack. He said, “We are now viewed as monsters.” His manner was matter-of-fact.

  Becky Clough, a pugnacious DDC manager and one of the few women active on the ground at the heart of the site, said, “What are we afraid of? We’re doing the right thing.”

  Burton said, “It had to happen sometime anyway. Maybe there are some positive sides.”

  O’Connor said, “So when are you losing your job?”

  I slipped outside before the building was locked down, and walked through the demonstration. The crowd by then had grown to perhaps five hundred off-duty firemen, and it was continuing to expand as others streamed in from the subways and parking lots. Some were dressed in civilian clothes, but most wore the standard protective “turnout coats,” black with yellow reflector strips and FDNY written in block letters across the back. Most were bareheaded. As protesters, they seemed awkward and self-conscious at first, and unsure of how to proceed, but they were also genuinely angry. Encouraged by a union official with a bullhorn, they raised their fists and chanted, “Bring our brothers home!” They waved a union banner and American flags. The TV crews moved in tightly, and found firemen for one-on-one interviews. A retired fire captain said, “My son Tommy is still in that building, and we haven’t gotten to him yet.” The firemen began shouting, “Bring Tommy home! Bring Tommy home!” The unions had promised City Hall that the demonstration would be orderly, and that it would remain outside the site’s perimeter—that it would amount to little more than a show for the cameras. But the firemen proved difficult to control. As the crowd swelled to nearly a thousand, it grew louder and more confident, and suddenly surged south through the first police barricades toward the Trade Center ruins.

  The TV crews followed eagerly. To the police the demonstrators shouted, “Walk with us!” and “Shut ’em down!” But the police were on duty, and after weeks of growing resentments on the pile they were not inclined to sympathize. As the demonstrators shoved through a second line of defense, the police shoved back, and some of the firemen started to swing. I saw one policeman go down with a roundhouse punch to the face; others responded, tackling and cuffing the offender. The crowd kept pushing through, with fights breaking out where the two groups met. These were big, physical guys on both sides, and they grappled in ungainly dances, straining hard, cursing each other, and toppling to the ground in aggressive embraces. Five policemen were injured. On the periphery the protesters who were arrested—twelve in all—were hustled into police vans. One was a tough-looking old man in a fireman’s uniform, who kept bellowing, “My son’s in there! My son’s in there!” Firefighters shouted, “Let him go!” But like the others who had been arrested, the old man was hauled away.

  The protesters gathered on West Street beside the ruins, where they were joined by a scattering of die-hard union sympathizers from the site—primarily a group of ironworkers who sauntered over out of curiosity, and got into the spirit of things. One in particular seemed to delight in showing the crowd how to go about making a TV appearance. He was the very image of a beefy construction worker, dressed in a hardhat and a soil-stained thermal undershirt. He climbed onto a diesel excavator and for several minutes mugged wordlessly for the cameras, waving an American flag and pumping his fist in the air. It was not clear that he knew or cared what the protest was about.

  The same was obviously not true of the firefighters’ union official, who climbed onto the excavator and used his bullhorn again, repeating his cry of “Bring our brothers home!” and threatening to find reinforcements by the thousands, including “brothers” from other cities, if Giuliani did not back down. Exhibiting more bravado than political sensitivity, he called on the police to release the men who had been arrested, and to march with the demonstrators on City Hall. But of course the police were angry at having been attacked—all the more so because they, too, had tribal allegiances, and had lost twenty-three colleagues in the Trade Center collapse. The firemen marched to City Hall, where they chanted, “Rudy must go!” This was somewhat gratuitous, since Giuliani was only two months from the end of his tenure. They also chanted for the ouster of their fire commissioner, Thomas Von Essen, who for years had been a well-liked New York fireman and union leader, but who now was going around quietly making the point that by far the greatest loss of life had been civilian, and that the Trade Center tragedy was larger than just a firefighters’ or even a New Yorkers’ affair.

  Giuliani was infuriated by what he viewed as an assault on the city’s all-important process of recovery, and he lashed out with the vindictiveness for which he was known. With the demonstration still going on, he called Holden on Holden’s cell phone and demanded that he identify the ironworkers and fire them. This was only the second time in eight years that Holden had received a call from the mayor, and he was aghast at what he was hearing. Very few ironworkers had joined with the firemen, but those who had were likely to be union activists, and therefore just the sort of people who could rally sympathy across the pile. Any attempt to discipline them could easily backfire and lead to a full-scale rebellion. Moreover, for all he knew, the ironworkers were on their break (or could claim to be), and since they were not disrupting the work, they had every right to protest. This was the inner world of the Trade Center site, an emergency zone, yes, but not subject to martial law; if it was a turbulent and quarrelsome place, it was also courageous and creative, and an authentic piece of American ground. But Holden knew better than to argue with Giuliani, and he did not try. After ending the call, he dutifully had a DDC staffer at the scene take pictures of the ironworkers. It was a particularly unpleasant moment: the workers had no idea what the snapshots were about, and some posed for them festively, as if they were on a weekend outing. Holden looked disgusted by the whole affair. He was irritable in a way I had not seen before. As the demonstration drifted away from the pile, he came upon a New York tabloid-TV crew that was setting up to interview a man in an FDNY T-shirt—presumably about the depths of his sorrow. Holden told me he was tired of all the exploitation. He walked up to the reporter and demanded that he take his cameraman and leave. The reporter said, “We just want to . . . ”

  “Out!” Holden snapped, pointing north.

  The reporter gave Holden a look of pure hatred. He said, “The man’s got no heart.”

  “Out!”

  By late afternoon Holden was sitting again in the kindergarten room of PS 89, thumbing glumly through pictures of the protesting ironworkers. He had no intention of following through with Giuli
ani’s orders, but he knew that if he flaunted his disobedience, the repercussions would be swift and severe. He himself had told me earlier that the first lesson of “commissioner school” was “Don’t contradict the mayor.” The only alternative now was to procrastinate, and to hope that the idea would somehow go away. This was not the style of the Giuliani administration, in which the mayor’s whims were treated as dictates. Indeed, during several phone calls that followed, one of Giuliani’s deputy mayors, Tony Coles, continued to demand punishment for the ironworkers long after it could conceivably have served a useful purpose. But Holden held the line, in this case for inaction, and with defensive skills unheralded even within PS 89, he managed to protect Giuliani from himself, and the nation from Giuliani, and to keep the recovery effort on track.

  It was a troubled time anyway, that first half of November, the low point in New York’s response to the Trade Center attack. The Yankees had lost the World Series—and to Arizona, of all teams. The various groups at the Trade Center site were turning into warring camps. To make matters worse, Giuliani seemed to have lost control of his emotions. After the demonstration (soon known as “the firemen’s riot”) he continued for several days to rage about the protesters’ distortions, and what he saw as their betrayal of the city’s well-being. He did not seek conciliation—for instance, by forgiving those who were involved in the demonstration. Rather, the police hunted down another six firemen identified as culprits, and booked them on charges of criminal trespassing. Among these men were the presidents of both firefighters’ unions: Captain Peter L. Gorman, of the 2,500-member Uniformed Fire Officers Association, and Kevin E. Gallagher, the protester with the bullhorn, who headed the 9,000-member Uniformed Firefighters Association.

  These were honest union officials, expressing the legitimate if misguided dissent of their membership, and their arrest was unusual, to say the least. It was also, of course, counterproductive. The firemen were outraged. Captain Gorman, who had worn the uniform for twenty-eight years, said, “They’re putting me through the system like I’m a thug.” He called the fire and police commissioners “Giuliani’s goons,” and Giuliani himself a “fascist.” The unions threatened privately to hold a news conference and accuse the mayor of being “anti-American,” but apparently thought better of going public with such a foolish claim. Instead, more accurately, a union spokesman said to The New York Times, “The mayor fails to realize that New York City is not a dictatorship, where if you don’t like what a union is doing you can just go and lock up a union’s president. The message being sent from City Hall is that if you don’t agree with this administration, we will get you.” Outside the Trade Center site America bloomed with bumper stickers proclaiming UNITED WE STAND, a strangely forlorn slogan in a country that so obviously draws strength from disagreement. Drawing strength from disagreement is a trick that the attacking terrorists must certainly have discounted. But of course there are also limits to the creative power of disunity—and the Trade Center response seemed to be veering toward just the sort of social implosion that the terrorists may have had in mind.

  The tribalism that grew up on the pile had origins so primitive that they can only be understood as instinctual. At the core was an us-versus-them mentality brought on by the mere act of donning a uniform. Whether as firefighters or as the two sorts of police (city and Port Authority), the uniformed personnel at the site were generally drawn from the same white “ethnic” outer-borough neighborhoods and families, but as members of their respective organizations they had learned to distrust and resent the others. The hostility was historical, and because it was strongest on the lowest levels, among the rank and file, it had proved impossible to root out. People at the site referred to it alliteratively as the Battle of the Badges. Across the years it had led to frequent arguments over turf and occasional bouts of outright obstructionism at emergency scenes. At the Trade Center it had been a factor from the first moments after the attack, when the Police and Fire Departments had set up separate command posts several blocks apart, and without communication between them. There were consequences to this: after the South Tower fell, police helicopter pilots took a close-up look at the fire in the North Tower, and twenty-one minutes before the final collapse they urged their own command to evacuate the building. The warning was radioed to the policemen inside the North Tower, most of whom escaped, but it was not relayed to the fire commands, or to the firemen in the building, only some of whom were able to hear independently radioed orders to evacuate, and more than 120 of whom subsequently died. The lack of communication was certainly no more the fault of one side than of the other, but it aggravated the divisions between them. Even during the initial desperate search for survivors the police and firemen quarreled over turf, and asserted their differences. By the end of the first day the bucket brigades had separated according to uniform. Throughout the months that followed, individual friendships and family ties cut across the lines. Nonetheless, the tribalism festered and soon infected the construction crews, too, who did not quarrel much among themselves but generally distrusted the police as ordinary citizens do, and who probably hadn’t given firemen much thought before, but came now to resent their claims to special privilege on the pile.

  The firemen’s claims were based on an unspoken tribal conceit: that the deaths of their own people were worthier than the deaths of others—and that they themselves, through association, were worthier too. This was difficult for the police and civilian workers at the site to accept. The collapse of the towers had been anything but certain. The firemen who had gone inside had been normally brave—as people are who are not cowards. They were not soldiers crossing the lip of a trench or assaulting a machine-gun nest in battle; they were men with a job that demanded mental willingness and hard physical labor, and on that day they were climbing endless stairwells one flight at a time in the company of friends, and with little obvious purpose in mind beyond finding the civilians who must have been injured by the twin attacks. The firemen in the South Tower were killed without warning. They were unintentional martyrs, noncombatants, typical casualties of war. Those in the North Tower felt the rumble of the South Tower’s collapse, but as best as is known, most did not understand what had happened or conclude that their own building soon would come down. Later on, as the precariousness of the North Tower became clearer, there were firemen who committed acts of extraordinary heroism—for instance, by lingering to help civilians, or remaining in the lower lobbies, desperately working the radios and calling for an emergency retreat. But the Fire Department had no monopoly on altruism that day, and terrible though its casualties were, with 343 dead, it did not suffer the greatest losses. As the workers on the pile knew all too well, that sad distinction went to Cantor Fitzgerald, where 658 people had died—some of them no doubt as altruists too. But what did such categories mean anyway? Nearly 3,000 people had been slaughtered here, nearly all of them on the job, and each of them at the last instant equally alone. Those who had not been vaporized lay scattered in the rubble’s democratic embrace. The dead were dead now and didn’t care. And it was absurd for the living to group and rank them.

  Were it not for all the hype, this would hardly need saying. It’s true that the United States was shaken, and that people in their insecurity felt the need for heroes. The dead firemen certainly fit the bill. They were seen as brawny, square-jawed men, with young wives and children—perfectly tragic figures, unreliant on microchips or machines, who seemed to have sprung from the American earth like valiant heroes from a simpler time. They had answered the call of history, rushed to the defense of the home-land, and unhesitatingly given their lives. They had died at the hands of barbarians, leaving behind widows who were helpless, or who were said to be. All this presented opportunities for image-making that neither the media nor the political system could resist. Progressives may have been shocked by the ease with which America slipped into patterns of the past—with women at the hearth, men as their protectors, and swarthy strangers at th
e gate. Rationalists may have worried about the wallowing in victimization, and the financial precedents being set by promises of payouts to the victims’ families. As usual in America, there was reason for everyone to deplore the cynicism and crassness of the press. However, there would be time for refinements later. As an initial reaction to the first shock of war, the hero worship was probably a healthy thing, as long as it was confined to the dead.

  But when it spilled over indiscriminately to the living, problems arose, particularly at the center of attention, on the Trade Center pile. The firemen now on the scene were by definition those who either had escaped from the Twin Towers before the collapses or, more likely, had not been inside them to start with—in most cases because they were somewhere else in the city at the time. They were not lesser men for this. But if the loss of the others was to mean anything beyond the waste of war, it had to be admitted that people on the pile since then, though ferociously dedicated to a grim and dangerous task, were simply not involved in heroics. Of course the situation was presented differently on the outside, where the public was led to believe that conditions on the pile were so difficult that merely by working there people were sacrificing themselves, and that the firemen in particular—anonymous figures who wore the same wide-brimmed helmets as their fallen brethren—deserved the nation’s adoration. For many of the firemen, who tended to have led quiet lives until then, the sudden popularity became a disorienting thing. Even those with the strength to resist the publicity—who stayed off TV, and did not strut in public—seemed nonetheless to be influenced by this new external idea of themselves as tragic characters on a national stage. The image of “heroes” seeped through their ranks like a low-grade narcotic. It did not intoxicate them, but it skewed their view.