Firehouse (9 page)

D'Auria never lost the idea that he had to assume responsibility for the people around him. When he was barely twenty, he was working as an apprentice in a restaurant kitchen, and a friend also working there was having trouble with drugs and had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. When D'Auria found out, he took off his expensive watch, gave it to his friend, and simply told him he had nine months to straighten out his life, adding, “And every time you look at that watch, I want you to think of how much time you have left to get yourself clean.”

Later, long after it was clear that he had died in the disaster, his mother was still trying to figure out what it was that had set him apart. It was then that Nancy Marra found an essay about her son that her nephew Robert Perretta had written for a grammar-school assignment. The students had been asked to portray someone they knew, and Perretta had decided to write about his favorite relative: “He is a good and holy man. He thinks no one should have a bad life. He never hates anyone, and thinks everyone should have a good life. He respects other people and he respects himself.” How odd, she decided, that an eleven-year-old should get it so exactly right.

One thing that both Nancy Marra and Steve Kelly understood was that Mike D'Auria was very serious about his tattoos and that they were in their own way quite revealing—he did not, as was often the case, sport the names of loves past and present or various symbols of American patriotism. Instead, on one arm he had the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference between the two.” He also had on that arm a tattoo of Saint Anthony, the patron of lost things. On the back of his right shoulder, there was a tattoo of Saint Michael, the archangel, which his mother believed he put on because he had wanted a protector. He had been planning a tattoo for his other arm, and he had wanted to put a Native American leader there. He and Steve Kelly had discussed which chief he should choose, and Kelly had pushed for Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, but there was also some talk of Sitting Bull.

On Monday, September 10, D'Auria had worked a regular shift with his close friend Donald D'Amelio, who was also a probie at 40/35. D'Amelio was a year older than D'Auria, and he too was single. They had become buddies their first day together at the academy, two young men from similar backgrounds with similar dreams. D'Amelio liked to say later that they could finish each other's sentences. At the academy, they had often teased each other about their bright futures in the department. “I can't wait to see you in ten years when you're running the whole show,” each would say to the other. That Monday evening, they got off work at 6:00
P.M.
and went to The Saloon, a restaurant across from Lincoln Center. There they grabbed a bite and spoke quite candidly about the risks involved in their work; it was the kind of conversation that very young firemen sometimes have with each other, but dared not have with the veteran men, lest it be taken as a sign of timidity or fear.

D'Amelio was in a good mood that night, but he was bothered by the challenge of what they were doing and how hard it was, how much there was to learn and how quickly they had to learn it. After all, their lives were on the line. Midtown, with all its high-rises, was singularly difficult. Every building was different, and yet when you went in as a fireman, you had to have some sense of what these different buildings were like. You couldn't get it on the spot because there was usually so much smoke that the visibility was poor, and the pressures to respond under crisis conditions were immense. There had been a fire recently that they had not caught, but the other men had told them about. It had been in a duplex, and when the men had arrived, they had found the apartment filled with smoke. The place had, it turned out, a sunken living room, but the smoke had obscured it. Unable to see the floor, a couple of the men, including Captain Callahan, had fallen down. Midtown Manhattan, with its many architectural styles and idiosyncratic buildings, was filled with ambushes like that, D'Amelio pointed out to D'Auria. It was terribly dangerous, and it was their job to know the specific dangers. He was feeling frustrated because there was so much to learn, and yet he felt he knew so little at this point.

But D'Auria told his friend that they could not afford to worry about the risks—if they thought too much about them, they would never be able to do their job. They had to think only of their mission, he insisted, and their mission was to save lives. You could not be governed by fear. Saving lives, that's all I'm in it for, D'Auria said. Then they talked briefly about death, and D'Amelio said that burning to death was not a way he wanted to go. But D'Auria said he was not worried about that; he was sure that if he died, it was going to be in something big. “What! Are you going to die in World War Three?” D'Amelio teased him.

After dinner Mike D'Auria went with D'Amelio to Brooklyn to watch the
Monday Night Football
game, and when it was over, D'Auria caught a cab back to the firehouse, so he would be there on time for the mutual he was doing for Bob Menig, who had to leave the firehouse in time for his doctor's appointment. On the morning of September 11, Michael D'Auria had been a firefighter for all of eight weeks.

Nancy Marra had slept badly that Monday night and had gotten up late on that Tuesday morning, after 9:00
A.M.
Her husband, Bill Marra, told her that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. She had asked him if he thought Michael would be working there, and he had answered that he certainly thought Michael would be there, seeing as he worked in mid-Manhattan. At first Nancy had not been that worried, but they lived right across from the local school and by mid-morning she saw all the kids being let out and the parents coming to pick them up. It was then that she began to understand the magnitude of the disaster.

It was her time to start worrying—even though Michael had always said, “Mom, stop worrying—you worry too much.” Of course that just made her worry even more. (To the degree that his family was a firefighting family, it was from her side, the Cimeis, of whom there were nine members in the extended family who were firemen.) She watched the mounting horror that morning, and when the second tower fell, it seemed especially eerie, as if she were watching some kind of replay of the first collapse, rather than another real collapse, taking place live. She kept thinking to herself:
Am I really sitting in my living room, watching this?
For some reason she did not think Michael was in that much danger, and around 10:30
A.M.
her sister Angela Perretta called to say that she had seen Michael on television and he had been helping people get out of the building. That had been reassuring, because apparently the sighting took place after the buildings had come down.

But then time passed, and there were no calls from him. By then much of the family had gathered at her house, and she decided that they had to go on as if nothing was wrong. Michael will call, she had told everyone, and she went ahead and cooked dinner—pasta with a tomato and prosciutto sauce. A place was set for Michael. It was only when dinner was over, and she had put his full plate back on the stove, that the symbolism of the act struck her. Suddenly she could no longer control herself, and she burst into tears. For the first time she permitted herself to understand that perhaps he was not going to be coming home.

Mike D'Auria was not the only person on the Engine who was silent during the ride down. What struck Shea was how quiet everyone was. The only conversation came from Lieutenant Ginley and Bruce Gary, who were on the radio to their superiors, and then talking to each other, trying to decide where to put the Engine. Shea had a sense that the veterans were so quiet because they all knew something that he did not. Nevertheless, Shea knew that this run was different from anything he had gone on before.

As they got nearer and nearer the site, Shea remembered, he saw a lot of smoke and a hole in one of the towers where one of the planes had hit. He saw cars on fire because they had been hit by falling debris. And then he saw people jumping from the buildings, and he heard the thud of their bodies as they hit the pavement—a sound he would never forget.

When they got there, there was mass confusion. The destruction of the city's Emergency Command Center in 7 World Trade Center had the effect of cutting off the nerve center for the fire department. Communications were terrible, and there was a good deal of uncertainty about what their orders were. They were waiting about 200 feet from the south tower, and Shea was carrying a Purple K extinguisher, which was used to fight fires involving airplane fuel—though these extinguishers were ridiculously inadequate for the massive amount of fuel that drove this fire. While they waited, Shea got out his camera and started videotaping the scene, thinking it might eventually make a good training film. Then the men got their orders to move in. Lieutenant Ginley led them toward the south tower lobby, and Shea was a few feet behind the others because he had been putting his camera away. Ginley had given him permission to look for his brothers from Ladder 35, his usual assignment. What the Engine was going to do was problematic at this point because it probably wasn't going to be able to do anything with water.

The morning of the tragedy Marion Otten, whose maiden name was also Otten, which made her technically Marion Otten Otten, was getting her kids ready for the school bus in Islip, Long Island. Because the bus was usually right on schedule, her eyes were rarely far from the clock at that time of the morning, and so she remembered that it was exactly 8:46
A.M.
when her husband, Michael, called from the firehouse to tell her to turn on the television set. “Why?” she asked.

“Because a plane has just crashed into one of the World Trade Towers,” he said. “Where is your brother?”

Her brother, also named Michael Otten, worked at the World Trade Center. “I think he's in Tower Two,” she said. Indeed he was, working for Mizuho Capital on the eightieth floor of the south tower. “I need to go. I've got to get the boys on the bus,” she told him, referring to their three sons, Christopher, eleven, Jonathan, eight, and Jason, five. “I'll talk to you later.”

Marion's husband, forty-two-year-old Michael Otten, the son and grandson of firemen, was at the firehouse that morning working a twenty-four-hour shift. That was a break from his usual routine, which was to get up at 5:30
A.M.
and be out the door by 5:45, in order to make a ninety-minute commute—he would shower and eat his breakfast at the firehouse. The commute was about as long a commute as one could reasonably make, and it was hard for Michael. A firehouse in Queens or Brooklyn would have been far easier for him, but he had no desire to transfer. Often Otten would drive in with Ray Pfeifer, who lived nearby and was his closest friend in the house.

Marion Otten finished putting the boys on the bus and then went back into the house, just in time to see the second plane hit. Her husband, whom she would soon start referring to as My Michael, in order to differentiate him from her brother, had not been scheduled to work that day, but he was doing a mutual for one of the men, who was getting married in a few weeks and who needed to prepare for the wedding. In addition, Michael Otten had relieved another fireman early that morning and sent him home, so that in subsequent weeks when Marion saw the other fireman, he had great trouble looking at her, and he would say things like, “If I could change places with Mike … if I could only manage to switch places with him.”

At first it was her brother Michael whom Marion worried about. She tried calling her sister-in-law and her mother, but there was no one at home. It was a morning of frantic phone calls all over the city, and it was difficult if not impossible to get through to anyone. Michael, who was thirty-five, had lived through the first World Trade Center attack eight years before. When the first plane struck the other tower on September 11, Michael had heard a terrible noise, and like everyone else, ran to the window, and saw great clouds of smoke pouring from a giant gash in the north tower and what seemed like millions of pieces of paper flying out. The managing director of his firm, Yuji Goya, was already in command, telling everyone, “Get out! Get out!” Otten went to get his cell phone and briefcase, but Goya screamed at him, “Forget it. Get out!”

Michael Otten made it to the stairwell, already filling up with people from the floors above them—everyone, he thought, was behaving very well and the exodus was surprisingly orderly. He had gotten down to the forty-sixth floor when they heard an announcement saying everything was okay, they could continue out, or go back to their offices. There was an express elevator on the forty-fourth floor, which went back to the seventy-eighth, and most people seemed to be crowding onto it. Otten wondered what to do. Even as he was deciding, the elevator took off for the upper floors. About three or four minutes later it returned. Otten decided to get on, but the elevator was so crowded that the door would not close: It was blocked by a young man's backpack. Again and again the backpack blocked the door. Michael was about to ask the young man to move farther into the elevator, just as the second plane hit their tower. The explosion was immense, like nothing he had ever heard or felt before. He remembered the walls of the elevator began to collapse inward, and he was suddenly terrified that the elevator itself would go into a free fall to the bottom of the shaft. Everyone managed to get off. There was debris everywhere, and for a time it was hard to see. The building seemed to move three or four feet, swaying back and forth; Otten had to reach out to the wall to prop himself up and to keep from falling.