A Decade of Hope

Lee Ielpi is a retired New York City firefighter and one of the most decorated in New York City history. His son Brendan (see page 115) is also a member of the FDNY. His older son, Jonathan, was a firefighter in Squad 288, which was housed with New York’s special HazMat 1 company. Jonathan was lost on the morning of 9/11 along with eighteen other firefighters from the Squad 288 and HazMat 1 firehouse.

I come from a regular American background. I was born in Flushing Hospital and have lived my entire life in Great Neck, on Long Island. My dad came here from Italy as a teenager; my mom’s folks came from Italy. They met where they were brought up, in Greenwich Village, married, and had a very simple American life—raising a family, doing the best they could. I owe everything to my mom and dad, who had good family values.

My dad had to work two jobs, and it was very difficult times. My mom had to work just about every Saturday or Sunday. In good weather my dad would put my mother, my grandmother, my sister, and me in the car, and we would go fishing someplace far upstate. My dad knew as much about fishing as the man in the moon, but he wanted to take us out to the country. Dad loved to fish, while my mother would sit there.

Great Neck has an all-volunteer fire department. A very loud siren would blast to let the volunteers know that they had a call. I grew up just four blocks from the firehouse, and I’d hear the whistle and see these big red fire trucks come zipping by. I knew it was a volunteer thing and wondered how I could be one of those firemen. I wanted to race around in the big red fire truck too, have fun, and go through the red lights. And so when I turned eighteen, I joined the volunteers.

I realized right off the bat that it was exciting work, but that it was also helping people. And I love to help people. I think it’s fabulous to be able, whether you’re a doctor or even somebody who has the ability to sell goods to folks, to do good. Going to a fire and rescuing somebody, or simply saving their belongings—what more could you ask for?

My career changed a little then, because I was drafted during the Vietnam War—actually, for the second time. They tried but did not draft me at eighteen, because I had braces on my teeth. They didn’t want to take me then but told me to let them know when the braces came off. It was the first time I had been turned down for anything. The braces came off in May 1968, and in June I got the letter saying, Greetings, we want you. I had been married for almost three years by then, and I was drafted into the United States Army, did my boot camp, and went off to Vietnam.

I did what they tell you never to do in the military—volunteer for anything. They were looking for a few people to go into a reconnaissance unit, which I knew was a small unit that was a pretty tough and front-lines group, so I raised my hand. People who want to do something are always better to be around than people who do things reluctantly. I went to recon, Twenty-eighth Infantry, First Division, and spent a year in Vietnam. My unit was twenty-four guys, and we’d go out in the jungle for a week or two at a time, on whatever mission they told us. Of the twenty-four guys I worked with that year in my unit, twelve were killed, and many were wounded.

Just two days before I had been drafted, I took the test for the New York City Fire Department and passed with flying colors. The FDNY immediately put me on a military list. I was not being paid by the department, but I was building time. After my year in Vietnam I spent six months in the States finishing up my service time. I came out in June of 1970, and in September I was sworn in to the New York City Fire Department.

There is no better way to go through life, and it all just worked out so well. All the guys who in those firehouses were so totally involved in their work, it was great. We went to fire after fire like no one had ever seen before. It was a tough time in the city, but for a firefighter, what better place to be than a firehouse that has fire?

I eventually had four children, and because my wife, Ann, loved to go camping, we brought the babies up doing so. Anne Marie, my oldest, is a schoolteacher, and is married with two children. She still loves the outdoors and goes camping every single summer. Then Jonathan came along, my older son, and Brendan was next. We took Brendan camping at two months old. And then Melissa came along, who is the baby in the family. And everybody’s married now.

Jonathan and I went hunting many, many times together. I can remember the first deer that he shot. He thought it was a doe, because it was doe season. It had just become dark as we hung her up, to let the deer hang there overnight, and Jonathan was so happy as we got into our sleeping bags. The next day I was looking at it, and Jonathan was still very proud of his deer. I said, “Jon, nice doe, but there’s only one thing wrong.” Jon says, “What’s that?” I said, “Jon, your doe has a penis and testicles.” It was what they call a button buck—its horns never came through, but you can feel little buttons on its head. Everybody cracked up, and it was a good experience for him too.

With time I rose up the ranks in the volunteers and became the chief of the department. My children had never known anything but the Fire Department. When I first became assistant chief, they were just young kids, and I would drive Ann and them around in a chief ’s car—fire-engine red, gold printing on the doors, lights, siren. My radio would go off for a call, as we had an alarm, and because I couldn’t tell the kids to get out of the car and stand on the sidewalk, I would say, “Hold on,” and we would be off to the fires, all siren and flashing lights. This was their entire life, all four of them.

I retired from the FDNY in 1996. My wish list was to be able to go fishing, hunting, hiking, and camping with my sons, because they loved to be outdoors, and while it lasted, it was the most wonderful time. We had all of that time together in the wild of nature and worked with the Great Neck Vigilant Volunteer Fire Company, and because I kept an FDNY fire helmet I even volunteered a few times with the department at really big jobs. I loved everything I did in those years, from 1996 to September 11, 2001.

The site, on September 11 was where and when it started. Finding Jonathan was paramount, obviously, but as I have said many times, I do not want people to think that I and my buddies in the Fire Department were looking only for firemen. We were looking for people, and I was looking for my son, but anyone we found along the way was going to be a blessing to someone. It’s a great way for me to think about the way things happened at the site. It took three months to find Jonathan, three months to the day. Of course I wanted to be there, but at the same time I didn’t, and I guess the good Lord worked it out correctly. That evening I had left the site and gone home, and when I got the call I came back with my son Brendan. We did what you’re supposed to do in the fire service: You carry out your own. So that little chapter ended right there. Jonathan was brought home.

We were blessed. There were only 174 bodies found whole, and after three months Jonathan’s was a whole body, or what they considered a whole body. A week or two after that we found his helmet, and then a week or two after, his turnout coat. So were we blessed? We were totally blessed.

At the funeral service for Jonathan, I made a statement at the church, St. Aloysius, in Great Neck. I wasn’t sure if I could get up to speak, but my family didn’t have the vaguest idea of what to say either. There were so many guys there that had given of themselves—the guys who had come out of retirement. They knew they couldn’t all come to the site, so what they did was to go to services and funerals—thousands of them went to hundreds of services and funerals. There is no way to comprehend that so many thousands of beautiful people went through all of that.

So I felt I had to get up and say something, because I wanted to honor them. I can remember saying, “We do a lot of clapping at all these services, and I want to acknowledge a group of people we need to clap for,” and I gestured toward these folks. “These are guys who have been leaving their families and going to services. They knew they had to do something, as we all did, and so I’d just like to acknowledge them.” And I can remember clapping for them, which was . . . I hope they remember that, because it was a beautiful thing. And when I was going to finish, I said, “I know my son Jonathan is in God’s hands, but I really wish he was in my hands.” And then I went and sat down. And I still don’t know where that came from.

The more time I spent at the site, the more I came to develop different points of view. I began to see how huge this great tragedy had been for so many people: the victims’ families and friends; the volunteers giving up their lives to help at the site, handing out food and equipment; the construction workers skipping coffee breaks and lunches or dinners to get their work done; the police and fire departments’ bosses watching out every second for the safety of the responders and workers. Seeing all this I realized that we needed to remember what had happened here in a big way. We needed to understand what hatred and intolerance can do.

So my first thought was steel.... Because it had become the most famous place in the world, I knew people were going to be asking for steel for 9/11 memorials. I don’t know where that idea came from either. But I was able to capture a lot of steel with the cooperation of the Port Authority, who owned the site, which we then used for a major project of the Fire Department: to give a piece of that steel to the families of the 343 firefighters who had been killed. The Port Authority and I then did a major project to give out these pieces of steel to almost three thousand additional people, mostly 9/11 families. So, in a way, I didn’t want all these people to forget.

Of course we’ll never forget 9/11, but I really don’t want people to forget the minutes, the day, the search, the recovery, the aftermath of 9/11 either. I want people to understand why 9/11 happened. So steel was one of those devices that would bring you right there. For when you touch that piece of steel, there’s something there—you can feel it. So I guess that’s how I started thinking about education, and that’s how it continued.

Over the course of the months I spent at the site I began working with a number of family members. Marian Fontana was one, a young lady who lost her husband, Dave, from Squad 1. She started one of the many organizations created by surviving families of 9/11, all seeking to gain more information from the city, state, and federal governments about what was going to be built at the site, what kind of memorial was planned, and how big it would be, who was investigating the terrorists, who would compensate the families for the great loss of family income, and that kind of thing. There was much politics involved in the aftermath of 9/11, maybe too much. Marian called her organization the Widows’ and Victims’ Families’ Association and asked if I would join, I guess because she knew I was spending so much time at the site. I told her I would love to join, but that I wasn’t going to leave the site, as there were still many things that had to be done there. And so I became the eyes and ears of the WVFA.

A young lady by the name Jennifer Adams, a very competent woman who came out of an investment banking company, came in to organize things. A firefighter from the NYC firefighters’ union knew that Marian needed some help and introduced her to Jennifer. Her company had left for Houston just shortly before 9/11 and wanted her to come along, because she is commendably brilliant, but she was in love with New York City, and so she stayed. She had been working in the North Tower on the eighty-sixth floor when it was hit. Jennifer had spent about three and a half months as a volunteer at the World Trade Center site, working on the corner of Liberty and West in a little white tent with many other volunteers, handing out coffee, hot chocolate, inserts for shoes, a warm word, a comforting shoulder, maybe some guidance. It was a very difficult place for anybody to be, but it gave her a pretty good understanding of what had happened at the site. Jennifer agreed to join us, but only for a few months, because she needed to work. We were able to pay her a minuscule amount of money at the end of each month, and that enabled her to stay on for almost eight years. We got our funds from banging on doors and calling on friends like the International Association of Fire Fighters. Family members helped us, because they knew this was an effort that was going to be vital for them and for everyone.

I think that Jennifer’s joining us was simply meant to be—so many things have happened since then that cannot be coincidences. When she came onboard we saw right away what a godsend she was. She began by organizing our little WVFA completely. Early on she noted that there were many family organizations that were redundant and were conveying mixed messages, so she put eight of them together and created the Coalition of 9/11 Families. She was just relentless in her endeavors. She started a quarterly newsletter, which we still publish to this day. She built a database of some forty-five hundred family members. And then, after four years of work, she suggested that we step back and perhaps rebuild our own organization. “The Widows’ and Victims’ Families’ Association” was proving to be a mouthful, so we decided to call it the simpler “September 11th Families’ Association.”

One day she looked out the window, pointed to Liberty Street, and said, “Why don’t we lease that little building down there, and we’ll make it a visitors’ memorial center?” So I looked at Jennifer like, I don’t know, as if she were an oracle, and so we discussed it. I said, “Jen, that’s wonderful.” We were given a very inexpensive space to share with a Lutheran organization—everyone was so generous.

During this whole period people were coming down here in droves, moving around aimlessly and wondering, Is this the World Trade Center site? There was nothing here saying that it was, except maybe for dubious street vendors selling 9/11 T-shirts and coffee mugs, so it was foolish to think that everyone who came to the site would automatically recognize Ground Zero. Hundreds of thousands of people have never been to New York, and what they saw was a hole in the ground. Nobody was out there to guide them, to help them, tell them the stories of that day.

Jennifer, meanwhile, had been paying attention to what I had been doing at the site. I had just stopped my part of the recovery work after many uninterrupted months, and I was no longer working as a retired FDNY member. At around that time I had begun to get calls from people who wanted to go through the site. It began when the Port Authority asked me to bring a group of reporters through the site. And I felt something there, when I did that. I was able to talk to people about 9/11. I cried every time I did so, but I was able to talk about it, and I saw the value of talking, and of being a firsthand storyteller. I started to walk them around, explaining that terrible day to them, trying to give them a sense of what really had happened. It was a natural thing for me. And, I had become a tour guide without knowing it.

Then the Fire Department asked me to take another group of reporters around. I can still remember vividly, walking through the site, with recovery work still going on, how a reporter stopped me, with a little bit of a smile on his face. He was watching one of the firefighters on the pile. “Did you see what that guy just did?” he asked. I said, “No, what?” The reporter said, “He just picked that shoe up and smelled it.”

And I looked at this reporter and said, “Most guys are going to pick a shoe up and smell it, because it could have human remains in it. And that may be the only thing a family gets back.” I had caught him off guard, and he now had a tear in his eye. But these are things that we did at the site. We were looking for parts of people, and we were looking for them in places that were hidden, because there were no bodies here. And they were hidden, in any place you could think of: a shoe, a sock, inside a shirt, in a two-inch void between two massive beams. Only 174 complete bodies of the 2,752 beautiful people who were murdered at Ground Zero on September 11 were recovered. There are still 1,222 missing.

A professor from Duquesne University, Mike Dillon, who has since become a very good friend, came to do a story. Someone in the city press office had asked if I would meet with this reporter, a professor, who was doing a story for a local newspaper in Pittsburgh. I don’t remember the full content, but it was about me, the site, Jonathan, and the recovery workers. In it he gave me a title, “ambassador to the dead.” When I first read it, I said to myself, Is this good? And then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was a good title, as our 9/11 dead need to be talked about and represented.

At the World Trade Center site thousands of people came to volunteer their services. In America the volunteer spirit is still very much alive, whether it is working as a candy striper at a hospital, helping kids read at a library, or being a volunteer firefighter in your hometown—75 percent of the country is protected by volunteer firemen. And this volunteer spirit was prevalent at Ground Zero then, and is present at the Tribute [WTC Visitor Center] today.

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?”

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 posters 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.

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.

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.”

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 Jonathan 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.

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.”