A Friend to Firefighters

Sept. 11, 2006 — -- Nancy Carbone was one of thousands of New Yorkers who flooded into their neighborhood New York City firehouses on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, offering to help in any way they could.

Over time, most of those people left.

Carbone stuck around.

Today, the Brooklyn wife and mother of two runs Friends of Firefighters, a nonprofit counseling center that counsels and cares for New York City firefighters.

On Sept. 11, Carbone said, she watched one neighbor after another walk into her local firehouse in Brooklyn with checks in their hands.

"I told [the firefighters,] 'I don't have any money, so I can't give you any money. Why don't you give me something else to do?'" she said.

Firefighter John Sorrentino remembers the day he met Carbone.

"It was absolutely crazy," he said. "There were a million things going on."

"She came up to me -- total stranger -- and said, 'Is there anything I can do to help?' I said, 'Yeah, you wanna help? We need a bugler to play 'Taps' for a funeral.'"

"She found one for us," Sorrentino said.

"Taps," also known as "Butterfield's Lullaby," was written in 1862 by a Civil War Union general named Daniel Butterfield.

It's traditionally played on a bugle, at a distance of 30 yards to 50 yards away from the service.

"I found the bugler behind a tree," Carbone said, still amazed. "I waited till everything was over and kind of ambushed him. I didn't have a pen. He had a marker, so I took it and wrote his number on my arm."

From there the assignments continued.

"We need doves."

"We need bunting for a memorial service."

"We need therapists."

She said she went to funerals "almost every day for as long as I can remember."

Over time, the wounded, overwhelmed men and women of the New York City Fire Department came to trust and rely on Carbone's desire to help.

"Basically, it was a tremendous leap of faith on their part. I'm just a civilian that came to their firehouse," Carbone said, referring to the Middagh Street firehouse in Brooklyn. "I took that very seriously. I took that to mean they expected something of me, and I wasn't going to let them down."