Firehouse (5 page)

Wherever the fire was, though, he was very good at it. Very professional, and very calm. Calm was important; it was one of the most important words in the vocabulary of firemen, and a word they did not use lightly. That and the phrase “do the right thing,” as in, “He was the kind of fireman who always did the right thing.” Staying calm for a fireman was crucial—for unlike most other peacetime jobs, firemen were in the regular business of the suppression of fear. Every call might be a ticket to a burning inferno where there was no light, where falling walls and ceilings cut off exit routes, where a floor could give out, and where a fireman could become disoriented and begin to feel his source of oxygen failing as he grew weaker and as the heat grew more fierce second by second. Therefore keeping calm was a critical part of the job. Every serious fire could trigger powerful impulses of fear, and if an officer shows that fear on the job, if he is not calm and not disciplined himself, then the fear will spread quickly through the men. Calm is the most basic of the positive words that firemen use to describe one another.

Doing the right thing was equally important. When the men speak of a colleague who does the right thing, they mean he will stay at his post under terrible conditions and not panic. Doing the right thing was going in and risking your life for a trapped civilian or fellow fireman. Firemen define each other by their codes of honor, which, because of the nature of the job, are mandatory and must be instinctive. The men have to be able to count not just on their officers, but on their buddies. Doing the right thing also involves small, seemingly unimportant things in the firehouse. It begins when you are a probie, and it means following certain customs, such as being the first one to the sink to wash the pots and pans after meals. The firehouse, like the military, is based on doing little things right, because if someone does not do the little things correctly, then he probably won't do the big things correctly. Moreover, in a firehouse, if you do not do your share of the routine work, someone else has to do it for you, in which case you pull down the house, and you are a
hairbag
. You do not wait for someone to tell you to do it, you just do it. There is an additional reason: Between moments of fearsome danger, there is often a lot of slack time at a firehouse, and if you do not have codes like this, then it would be very easy for people to become lazy and get in a rut, and for the entire house to lose its sense of cohesion and its purpose.

In the months before the tragedy, Frank Callahan, who was fifty-one years old at the time of his death, had thought about retiring. On occasion he told a few of the senior men that he had checked out his pension numbers and that retirement was a tantalizing possibility. Two of his four children were out of the house, his wife taught school, and they lived reasonably simply in a small town north of New York City. But he felt that the pension needed to be a little bigger. Even more important, when he and Angie talked about it, was the question of what he would do when he retired. Unlike many of the men, who were also plumbers or carpenters or electricians, he did not have a fall-back career, and he thought it was a little late to go back to school for some other degree. So they decided for the moment that he would keep on being a fireman. That was what he did best.

The Callahans rarely took family vacations, but that summer they had decided to and rented a cottage on Lake George, in the Adirondacks. They all went, all, that is, except for Frank, who did not want to go. So Angie and the four children—Harry, Nora, Peter, and Rose—had a great time on the lake, feeling a little guilty that he had stayed home, and that he was, they were sure, almost certainly spending his days watching the History Channel.

Immediately after the first plane, American Flight 11, hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, Frank Callahan called his twenty-three-year-old son, Harry, who was at his home in Queens. He was concerned that his daughter Nora, a twenty-year-old student at New York University, who worked three days a week in the south tower, for Vestek, might be in the company's seventy-eighth floor offices. But Harry, who was off that day from his job as a mechanic, assured his father that Nora did not work Tuesdays, and that she was not in the building. That had relieved Frank greatly. Then he had called home, which was a little unusual since normally there would be no one at home at that hour—the younger kids would be in school and Angie, who taught eighth-grade math, would be in class. By chance, Rose, thirteen, their youngest child, was home sick. He spoke briefly to her and asked for his wife's phone number at work. Then he called Angie, who was stunned to hear his voice because he almost never called her at work. That threw her, and she knew instantly that whatever had happened was very serious.

By then the second plane, United Flight 175, had hit the south tower. Callahan told her of the attack, that it was the work of terrorists. “It's really, really bad down there. We've just gotten the ticket,” he said, “and we're on our way. I've just talked to Harry, and Nora is safe.” Then he said that he had to hang up because it was time to go. He did not say he loved her, because that was not the way he talked. When the other men at the station later heard about the phone call, they understood that it had reflected not only the totality of his concern, but also his love for his wife: that he had called Angie at work had been his way of showing his love.

Angie had always loved Frank, even if she did not always understand the impulses that made him so quiet and distant. They had met when she was Angela Lang (Irish on her mother's side, German-Swiss on her father's), one of eleven kids in a family that had gone each summer to Breezy Point in Queens, where they had a simple bungalow. The summer colony, located on a sandy spit of land at the western end of the Rockaway peninsula, was popularly known as the Irish Riviera. When Angela was eighteen, she had gone to a party at a volunteer firehouse and she had met this really cute boy with a wonderful mustache. She had picked him up, she said later, and he was very willing to be picked up. He was just out of high school; his father had owned a few bars, but had died when Frank Callahan was about ten. Frank had just taken the firemen's exam when she met him.

Even then he was very quiet. Getting him to talk was, she once noted, not unlike trying to open a safe. When he had first started calling, he would sit silently in the living room, waiting for her. Angie's mother asked her, “Does this guy ever talk?” But if he did not talk a lot, there was something singularly strong, steadfast, and honorable about him. He was a man of substance and determination, uncommon qualities, she felt. She had hoped that as he got older, he would become more open with her and the children, more talkative, but if anything, it went the other way, and she accepted that he was the product of a different, more stoic generation. There had been no role model for him to demonstrate how to talk to his family and how to show emotions or to reveal weaknesses, and his was a background where the two—emotions and weaknesses—were often perceived as being the same thing. He could be as demanding with his family as he was with his firemen. His report card reviews were always serious, not something the four children greatly looked forward to. Each grade from each kid, he seemed to think, should be a little better, because life was a serious place, where the pressures on you were constant, and you
had
to do your best.

Later when Angela spoke of September 11 and of Frank's phone call, she said that he
knew
what he was going into, that they all
knew
. Even without the collapses, she said, he was experienced enough to know that with such big planes hitting towers like that, with all that fuel exploding, that it was going to be the worst thing they ever had faced. They knew, she added, that not all of the men were going to be coming back.

The chauffeurs on duty that morning, Jimmy Giberson on the truck and Bruce Gary on the engine, were men at the very core of the firehouse. Being a chauffeur meant you had one of the most demanding and important jobs of all: finding the best route to a fire, positioning the rigs so that the men could best work the fire, and for the chauffeur of the engine, managing to find water. Giberson and Gary were both considered absolutely first-rate, and more than any of the officers—officers came and went, and were never a major part of the daily life of the house—the two of them, each in his own way, were largely responsible for maintaining the firehouse's traditions and codes. As the saying goes, the men run the firehouse but they are kind enough to let their officers work there.

Both men were always working, both very much aware of setting examples for the younger men. On almost any morning you could look over and see one or the other of them taking two or three hours systematically checking out his rig, making sure that everything worked, leaving nothing to chance; if they left things to chance, the day might arrive when something went wrong, so it was critical to eliminate any mechanical vulnerabilities before the rigs went out. Moreover, the way to insure that things were done right in the house was to set examples by doing things right themselves.

No one wanted to cross them, in part because they were both physically strong, forceful men, but also because of their personal integrity. Both Giberson and Gary had the sheer physical power to dominate others if they so chose. And Gary could do it with his tongue as well. If someone was screwing up, if someone had to be told to help clean up the kitchen or to wash the rig, then Gary would get on him verbally. Giberson, on the other hand, was a quiet man.

Jimmy Giberson was about six feet three inches and 220 pounds, and he was quite possibly the strongest man in the firehouse. He had huge hands and feet. When the men got their boots, a pair would come in one box, but Giberson's feet were so big that each boot came in a separate box. Six days before the terrorist attack, he marked his twentieth anniversary with the fire department. He was thinking of retiring sometime in the next year. As a result, he had started going for overtime, to get his final full year's salary, on which his pension would be based, as high as possible. On the morning of September 11, Giberson, as usual, had come in a little early. He was judged to be an uncommonly talented man in terms of his professional skills, even by the exacting standards firemen use to measure one another. His captain, Jim Gormley, thought him to be the most gifted, natural firefighter he had ever seen. “Jimmy was always in the right spot [or the wrong spot—because it would be the most dangerous one], always instinctively moving to where he should be before you even asked him to,” Gormley recalled of him later. But Giberson never tried for an officer's slot, and refused to study for the lieutenant's exam. Gormley had often pushed him to take it, but Giberson had always resisted. He was comfortable as one of the men, absolutely sure he was doing what he wanted, eager for no additional burdens or responsibilities. Giberson needed, Gormley thought, nothing that he did not already have.

Giberson worked all the time—even when he was not at the firehouse. If one of the other firemen needed help with house repairs or renovations, Giberson would invariably show up to help out; he was, among other things, the resident wallpaper specialist. When he hung paper at the home of a colleague, he barely spoke to anyone while on the job and refused any food or drink. Carrying his special wallpaper razor in his teeth, he would do the job perfectly, then, refusing any money, he would disappear as politely and as silently as he had arrived.

The sense of inner obligation to the other firemen was particularly strong with him. Once when it was cold out and Mike Kotula was about to go on vacation, Kotula discovered there was too little gas in his car, and the engine, somewhat predictably, would not start. Kotula decided to pour a little gas into the carburetor to prime it, but by mistake he used oil, thereby completely messing up the engine. Giberson not only lent Kotula his car, but while his friend was on vacation, he took Kotula's engine out, broke it down completely, cleaned it, and reassembled it, so it worked perfectly by the time Kotula returned.

Giberson expected that same sense of duty in others. If you were screwing up, he would simply give you a look, and there was no doubt what it meant—that you were cheating on the others, and therefore pulling the house down. Things were to be done right. No one was to endanger himself, or anyone else on a run, and no one was to get even a little sloppy. Matt Malecki was his friend, but one hot summer night Malecki went out on a run without his mask. Giberson jumped all over him—it was a small thing, but Malecki had been careless; no one ever knew whether a run was going to be serious or not, and you
had
to wear your mask. It was not about friendship. Malecki knew not to argue or try to make any excuses. He simply apologized: “Jimmy, you're right and I was wrong,” he said.

Giberson was big on tradition. Somehow he always ended up as the principal Christmas party cook, and he took that responsibility very seriously. Starting the night before the party, he would commandeer the kitchen and chase everyone out, unless they were helping him. Then he would do most of the cooking for the 100 people or more who were coming to the party. That was the way it always was, and that was the way it was going to stay.

There was always a palpable sense of Giberson's physical strength. Though the strength went largely unused, the sense was always there. A few years earlier there had been one memorable fight outside a bar frequented by firemen. A man from another house had started getting on Giberson, who just walked away from him and left the bar. But the other fireman followed and kept up the argument. Two blocks away from the bar, the other fireman made the mistake of throwing a punch. Giberson returned it, breaking the man's nose and mashing in his face. Mostly, though, Giberson used the threat of his physical power, rather than the power itself. Once, on a firehouse grocery shopping run, Giberson spotted a man slapping a woman around. Without summoning his pals, he jumped off the rig, caught the man in his enormous arms, and instructed him that this escapade was over, and that it was never—and he meant
never
—to happen again.