On the warm, bright and clear morning of Sept. 11, 13 men left a firehouse in Manhattan; 12 are now dead.
The survivor who was severely injured continues to try to understand why he survived when the others did not.
In “Firehouse,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam not only paints the portraits of the 13 men of Engine 40 and Ladder 35 who went into the World Trade Center that day, but also of the firehouse culture that framed the character of each man.
Halberstam begins the book with a history of the firehouse built in 1961 on the corner of 66th Street and Amsterdam on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The neighborhood had once been poor but in recent years the area had become so affluent many of the firefighters could no longer afford to live in the neighborhood they protected.
Halberstam recounts the experiences of each of the 13 men working the morning of Sept. 11 through his conversations with their families and the firefighters who were not on duty on that morning.
He tells the heart-wrenching story of each family as they waited to hear from their loved ones, and of the screams of a wife as she is told her husband’s entire company was missing, a “scream that seemed to be for everyone who had lost a fireman that day,” Halberstam wrote.
He wrote about the agony of each family as they prayed for their loved-one’s body to be found.
“The men sat there, playing the tape again and again, getting one last look at their friends, walking into the building from which they would not come out alive,” Halberstam wrote.
As the men watched the video of their colleagues enter the south tower they pick out their friends by the way a man is holding his tools, the length of a stride, a mustache.
“The schedules for that fateful morning, Sept. 11, 2001, are still on the house blackboards, unchanged, exactly as they were written out,” he wrote.
Halberstam lives just three and a half blocks from the firehouse but before Sept. 11, he had only noticed the firehouse and the men inside it in passing.
He spent six weeks with the survivors of his neighborhood firehouse getting to know the men who answered a call to duty above their own safety through the memories of the survivors.
“The most vivid image of that day is of the firemen going in when everybody else was going out,” Halberstam said in a telephone interview from his vacation home on Nantucket Island, Mass. “That’s what prompted me to do the book.”
Halberstam is donating part of his proceeds to a fund set up by the firehouse leadership for the families of the men who died.
“I did not want it to seem like I was going in there to write a story just to make money,” he said. Halberstam has not disclosed what percentage of his proceeds will be donated to the families.
Halberstam began his career in 1955 as a reporter in West Point, Miss., after graduating from Harvard University. He later worked as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean before covering the Congolese War for the New York Times. In 1964 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam.
He is working on a book on a battle in the Korean War that he plans to have finished in about a year and a half.
On March 21, rescue workers found all but one of the firefighters of Engine 40.
“A process of extremely painful waiting was over” for those families, Halberstam wrote. For the families still with a missing loved-one, “the small daily rituals of life became, if anything, even harder, and it made their status – still waiting, suspended as they were without hope and without bodies, and trying to accept the idea of death without a body – that much more difficult.”
