The Freedom Tower

Part III

Bob wasn’t on the job when the Twin Towers toppled. He wasn’t supposed to be downtown, after all the battalion he commanded was up in the Bronx and Bob lived upstate in Putnam County. He wasn’t even scheduled to work when the two planes hit the World Trade Center and every firefighter in the fire service knew immediately that nothong but the grace of God it could have saved them from the same fate. So, when the word spread that hundreds of their brothers were trapped in the rubble, and the word spread quickly, Bob made his way into lower Manhattan that afternoon along with every other able bodied working or retired firefighter who came to dig and haul debris and to hope to find any one of the firefighters in the rubble, dead or alive.

“I probably knew, personally, at least 100 of those fellows,” he reckons, describing the tightknit world of New York firehouses. When the New York Times published photos of the department’s 9/11 victims, he would later tell a newspaper reporter, he showed his son every picture.