A Decade of Hope (24 page)

After the memorial service, I drove down to Key West, where I had rented a house, and brought Moira's sister and my niece. My father came down, just to take a break from everything.

And then, early on the morning of March 22, I got a phone call from my friend Kevin, a guy I worked with in the Thirteenth Precinct. He told me they had found Moira.

The department brought my uncle down to the site. He was a detective fifty years ago, and about eighty-six, and they all helped take her out. They drove by the Thirteenth Precinct, which had a formation outside that saluted, and then took her to the morgue. That day we flew back, and I went down and met the officers who had recovered her and thanked them. She was found with a couple of firemen and a Port Authority officer, and they think it's possible they were all together in the lobby. This time we just had a funeral service at our local church. We had a month to plan it, and people came from all over the world.

It's a double-edged sword in a lot of ways. I knew early on that Moira was dead, and that there wasn't going to be a miracle. I don't think her family actually believed it until they found her body. A lot of them kept thinking she was going to turn up somewhere with amnesia, or whatever crazy theory they could hang their hat on. I remember calling my cousin, telling her, “We found Moira.” And she said, “So, she really is dead.” And this was six months later.

But it is nice to have her home. It was good to find her, to know she wasn't lying out in some field blown apart, or in little bits scattered all over Lower Manhattan. So many other family members didn't have that, and still don't have that. So that was important, that finality. There is no miracle. There are no mistakes.

The Police Department took care of me, treated me like a father would treat a son; 3:00 A.M. on September 12 was the last time I worked. I took a year's leave of absence, and the next five years they kept me at the academy, where I was assigned to employee relations.

 

I didn't get married for the first time until I was thirty-eight—I wasn't the commitment type. Since I have retired I remarried, and have a two-and-a-half-year-old son, with another one due. We are living in East Hampton. It was easier the second time, but I had to have been hard to get along with. I was totally distracted, and for a long time I couldn't even read a book, and I was used to reading two or three books a week. That lasted about four years, and even now I pick up a lot of books, thinking,
Oh, this looks good
, and some of them I never open. I don't know if it's the inability to concentrate or a lack of desire.

I get a million offers to do things, and try to pick and choose what I think is going to be appropriate, to judge the balance between banging my daughter over the head with all this 9/11-related material and keeping Moira's name, image, and heroics relevant. I always ask, Am I doing the right thing or am I not doing the right thing? I try to play it how I feel. If I think I'm doing too much, I back off, and if I don't think I'm doing enough, I consider more. Also, I feel that no one is asking her sister, aunts, uncles, or cousins to do anything. They ask me, and so I do it for them too. I represent Moira for all of us. Not just for me and Patricia.

When Pope Benedict came, I got to meet him at Ground Zero. Then Patricia was given an award after the fifth anniversary, and her picture was in every paper around the world. When it was picked up in London, the British named her a children's champion. We were invited to London, and we went to 10 Downing Street and met the prime minister and his wife, who was actually on the charity that gives out the awards. Another time, Patricia met [Secretary of State] Colin Powell, and that's the kind of thing that I thought was appropriate for her: to travel and meet people, so somewhere down the line she can look back and say, This is what I've done. Because of her mother, these are some of the things that we've been able to do. This year we've been invited down to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl, where they are doing a 9/11 memorial float. There won't be a lot of chances to be invited to the Rose Bowl.

In thinking about 9/11 and Moira's death, I don't think I ever got to the rage stage. I was angry about a lot of things, but I knew I couldn't make it be about me. It couldn't be
Poor me.
It couldn't be
I'm a victim of this tragedy
. Rather than mourning Moira, I prefer to celebrate her. To celebrate who she was and what she did rather than commiserate about how she died. A tragedy would have been if she had been coming home from work at 4:00 in the morning and got hit by a drunk driver. The way she charged into those buildings time and again to get people out—that wasn't a tragedy. That was heroism, the definition of what it is to be a hero. I focused on that.

I never saw Moira as a victim—nobody did anything to her. She was where she wanted to be at the time she had to be there, and she did what she had to do. That doesn't mean these people weren't murdering savages, but she wasn't a victim. That poor guy having a cup of coffee on the ninety-second floor who got hit by an airplane was a victim.

Do I want to see these terrorists who planned these things go to their deaths too? Absolutely. Am I infuriated at Barack Obama, the president of the United States, and at Eric Holder, the attorney general? Absolutely. Because justice delayed is justice denied. I never understood the truth in that expression until now. Ten years have passed, and we haven't even begun the trials at Gitmo.

Family members started going down to Gitmo for the hearings. I haven't gotten my chance to go down there yet. They started hearings, and then all of a sudden, Obama wins the election, and the hearings are put on hold. Then they start talking about trying them like they are some sort of liquor store holdup men, up in New York City. They didn't drag Tojo to criminal court in Hawaii for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Our president Obama wants to reduce the gravity of it, what they did on 9/11 and in other terrorist activities.

 

I have a big problem with discussions of Islam being a peaceful religion with just a couple of crazies in it. That's like saying Germany just had a few Nazis and everybody else was okay. But they still managed to kill a lot of people. Maybe not everybody in the Soviet Union was with the Communists, but they killed forty, fifty million people before it was said and done. And so while maybe not all of Islam is complicit, they allowed a lot of people to be killed without a huge Islamic cry of murder. And if these killers are unchecked, a lot more will die. We have to demand that Muslims stand up and say, This is not us, this is not our religion. The whole idea that we have to be politically correct when we're talking about some of these issues is so frustrating.

I'm constantly arguing with my friends—all good-natured arguments about politics. Why are police officers and military people more likely to be more conservative than the average American? I think it has to do with the fact that they see so much more, on a day-to-day basis, of the horror and the misery of people—people at their worst. We see the best people at their worst. You come to realize that not everything can be handled by throwing money at it, or giving people things for free. Sometimes tough love has to work, in foreign affairs too. Soft voice, big stick.

We need leaders with character that will enable them to be heroes. Is Eli Manning a hero because he took the Giants to a Super Bowl? I love the Giants, I love Eli Manning. I don't think he's a hero. He's a good quarterback, but we throw that “hero” term around, and it dilutes what a hero is. The Chilean miners who were trapped are lucky to be alive, and they certainly had the fortitude to withstand the sixty-seven days they were down in the mine. But what choice did they have? They didn't have much other choice but to try to survive. Well, we all survive. It's what we do every day. But every day cops go out there, and people like Moira, every day she went out there to do the same job, and whether it was the towers or the Fulton Street fire bombing or the tunnel or the Fourteenth Street crash, if Moira was there, she did what she had to do.

Moira was a woman who was one of the most fun people to be around. She partied with the best of them when she had the opportunity, but she was a person of character and morality who constantly put herself second to the good of others. If everyone walked around with that attitude, what a different place this world would be—if everyone thought about doing the right thing at the right time, not worrying about the consequences to the self. Moira was a person who had a husband and a child at home, her own family life, but she put it behind her to do what she knew to be the right thing. And that's what I try to tell Patricia. She's asked me, “Well, why did Mom do that?” I want her to know it was her, who she was, it was in her character. She was a better person than most of the people you're ever going to meet. Why? Because she didn't worry about herself. She did what was required of her. She had a sense of honor and loyalty.

She was just thirty-eight. No one is going to know that she had a young child. No one is even going to put together that she had a life, and that she was content and happy and loved living. It just doesn't say that on a plaque, and it's not going to say that on the memorial wall. It isn't going to say that she was on Sixteenth Street and Third Avenue when the [first] plane hit, and she went there with all speed to help people. The committee that was making the decisions about the memorial worked so hard to not have any sort of special recognition. They wanted to be socialist, that everybody was equal. But I don't believe that. Like I said, my heart goes out to the man who was sitting in his World Trade Center office having a cup of coffee, you know, for his family, but his death and Moira's death are two different things, and I think that should always be recognized. Moira was not just courageous. She was a hero.

Dan D'Allara is the twin brother of John, who was an Emergency Service Unit (ESU) detective. John was assigned to Truck 2 and his first call that fateful morning was an order to respond to the World Trade Center.

 

 

 

I
n remembering my brother John, every question I am asked about his life begets another question. I have often asked myself,
Why did John do this or that?
The why is always answered for me by the first line of the medal the New York City Police Department gave to our family, the NYPD Medal of Honor, which reads: IN RECOGNITION OF AN INDIVIDUAL ACT OF EXTRAORDINARY BRAVERY PERFORMED IN THE LINE OF DUTY AT IMMINENT PERSONAL DANGER TO LIFE AND SAFETY. It is the “extraordinary bravery” that explains him.

John, my fraternal twin, was five minutes older. We were born in New York Hospital and grew up in the Bronx, on Allerton Avenue. We attended St. Lucy's School in the Bronx and Christopher Columbus High School on Pelham Parkway. We're twin brothers but exactly the opposite: John was more driven academically, I was more driven to get out in the world, play my guitar with different bands. John was at Lehman College and studied phys ed. He had a minor in biology. He also did some work at a Colorado university. He became a teacher, though he always wanted to be a cop. He had taken a few police exams and finally got called by the NYPD.

I was in the city working at a quarter to nine on September 11, 2001, in the decorator building on Fifty-ninth Street. Someone said a plane hit the World Trade Center. The first thing I did was pick the telephone up and call Truck 2; no answer. I knew they had already left quarters because my mother was listening to the police radio and she heard them leave. We're a police family; the day after the first Trade Center bombing, in 1993, I bought a police radio and have it going all the time. It's the best source of real-time information you can get. My brother likened my mother listening to it to the old tenement days when people would peek through the blinds. This radio was a big electronic window, and it wasn't unusual for me to call my mother and say, You got your ears on, Mom? What's going on here? What's going on there?

At that minute we became ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Though I'm a fraternal twin, my twin experience on the morning of September 11 gave me such a strong feeling that John was there. Maybe it sounds too dramatic, but that really happened. I just knew that my brother John was down there. But I didn't know what was going on, what exactly he was doing. I called my wife, who was down on Forty-second Street and who was concerned about her brother-in-law, who was working down on Wall Street. I called Truck 2; John wasn't there. I called my sister-in-law, Carol, and asked, Where's John? At work, she told me. We were concerned about everybody downtown, as even uptown we could see the smoke.

I went into the Barney's store on Fifty-ninth Street and sat down just as the radio antenna of the North Tower was collapsing. I jumped out of my chair with a burst of anxiety.
Holy shit—John. Holy shit, holy shit
. I went back to my office and was confronted by my manager, who asked, “Where are you going?” I said, “My brother just got killed, I got to get out of here.” And he says, Go back to your desk—you don't know that for certain.

I walked around a little, and then remembered a conversation we had had at my house. My brother had trained in antiterrorism [response]. He had just been in the subway, doing a test with a remote-controlled robot. Because of the sarin gas attack in Tokyo, the Police Department was looking at ways to disarm dangerous devices. John had said to me, “If anything happens in the city, get Angela, and get out as soon as you can, as fast as you can. They are going to shut it down.” So I ran down to Forty-second Street, where my wife, Angela, works, and on the way there found myself on Lexington Avenue looking up at the Citicorp building. They then thought there was another plane inbound, and I said to myself,
Oh, my God. I've got to get away from this building
. Madison Avenue looked like a Godzilla movie: Traffic was jammed, as everybody was coming uptown. I got Angela, but she couldn't run for her life in heels, so we stopped to buy sneakers. My plan was to get to the FDR Drive, walk up the drive over the Willis Avenue Bridge, and get a gypsy cab to our home on City Island.