David Halberstam's 'Firehouse'

May 27, 2002 -- Just six miles from the twin towers, Engine 40 Ladder 35 sent 13 firefighters to the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Only one of them returned.

David Halberstam, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and historian, lives three blocks from the station, one of the hardest-hit firehouses in Manhattan. In his new book, Firehouse, he honors the men, their traditions and their families.

Below is an excerpt:

September 11 was a special kind of hell for 40/35. No one who works at the firehouse has really yet comprehended the apocalyptic nature of what occurred. That morning thirteen men set out on the house's two rigs, and twelve of them died. It was a tragedy beyond comprehension, not just the worst day in the history of New York City, but one of the worst days in American history — a day that people would compare to Pearl Harbor, sixty years earlier. The New York Fire Department was the institution that bore the brunt of it — 343 men killed — and the 40/35 firehouse was among the hardest hit. The aftershocks of the tragedy have persisted not just in the grief for the men who were lost, but also in the guilt among the survivors, who have continued to wonder not just why they lived, but whether it was wrong to have done so. There have been acceptable days, and there have been bad days, when the pain was almost unbearable.

The men of 40/35 are bonded now more than ever, not just by their job, as in the past, but by their grief as well. Sometimes the house has a feeling of a World War II unit, in which a good part of the men were wiped out in one sudden, shocking battle, and none of the survivors entirely understands what happened — why so many men were taken so cruelly and so quickly, and why they, the survivors, were spared. So much of who went that morning and who did not was chance. Some were relieved early and were on their way home before they heard about the attack; some were supposed to have worked that day but had taken what are called mutuals, which meant that, for personal reasons, they had switched shifts with other men …

… The station house, like so many others in New York City, became, in the days after, something of a shrine. The names and photos of the men who died were posted near the door. People, strangers mostly, still come by to leave flowers, notes, and cards there. To no small degree it has the same feel as the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, in the sense of it being a homemade memorial. In the first few days after the tragedy, a young woman in her twenties would stop every morning, look at the pictures, and then burst into tears. Finally one of the firemen asked her what was the matter, had she lost a close friend in the firehouse?

No, she answered, but she felt as if she knew one of the firemen, and then she pointed to the photo of Giberson, a big, strapping, good-looking man, who had been a chauffer on Ladder 35. In the photo he was wearing a hat because he always wore a hat. Giberson, who was forty-three at the time of his death, had been quite sensitive about losing his hair, and one of his idiosyncrasies was what the men called "the hat switch." It was not something they teased him about — he was too strong and forceful to be teased about something like that — but everyone knew that Giberson always wore a baseball cap around the firehouse, and his fireman's hat on the truck, and when it was time to go out on a run, Giberson would switch the baseball cap with the fireman's hat as fast as possible, when he thought no one was looking.

Jimmy Giberson always started slowly in the morning and the other men knew it and did not crowd him then. One of his small pleasures was to come in a little early, when the city around him was just beginning to stir and the people in the neighborhood were going off to work. He would take his coffee in front of the firehouse and watch everyone hurrying by. He would smile and say hello, as if the better to understand the people in the neighborhood whose lives he was charged with protecting. That was when the young woman had seen him, and though they had never said more than hello to each other, and she did not even know his name, she had come to think of him as her personal fireman.

Copyright 2002 David Halberstam