A Decade of Hope (40 page)

Cops and firemen are like Spartans and Centurions. At every family dinner Joe would shoot off something, John would counter, and I'd be in the middle, the arbiter. They might get a little heated, and Jan would step in and say, “It's over.” But on other nights it got exciting, arguing, Who does more work, firefighters or police officers? Jan stopped that too. But then I took it to another level when I started teaching the use of the Hurst tool [widely known as the Jaws of Life, an air-compression tool that can lift up a bus or cut through the doors of a car] around the country and took John, who as a firefighter was learning the tool, with me. And Joe said to me one day, “What about me? I'm not an orphan. I should go with you.” I said, “Joe, you're a cop.” He said, “I'm an
emergency
cop. I know more about those tools than John.” I said, “I'll take you, but John's in charge.” John loved it; he got to order his brother around. But they were both excellent instructors, which I had seen in the Boy Scouts. When John became an Eagle Scout he was my senior patrol leader, and I used to watch him counsel other boys. He just had a knack about him. Joe watched him, learned, and developed his own technique. They became quite successful when they moved into this instructing world with me. Joe and John were the glue that brought everything and everyone together.

So I watched them grow from little boys to young men in Boy Scouts, and then I got the opportunity to work with them as men in the world. I don't think you can measure that, and there isn't a father alive who can say he had a better life. Ours together was cut short. Yes, we banged heads, fathers and sons, and more than once I told them, “I'm not your friend. I'm your father, and there's a line you can't cross.” But man, I had nothing but good times with them for the thirty-four and thirty-six years that those boys were on earth.

 

On the morning of 9/11 Joe was working the day tour so he could be home to lead his son's Cub Scout troop. John was just going off duty when a guy called in and said his child was sick, so John said, I'm here, I'll stay. I was shaving when the phone rang, and it was Joe, in Truck 2 of ESU [Emergency Service Unit]. He said, “Dad, turn on the television. A plane just hit the World Trade Center.” Sure enough, Channel 5 was doing a bulletin, a report that a plane had hit. They were thinking it was a Piper Cub, and Joe said, “No, Dad, it's not a Piper Cub. I'm on the West Side Highway, and we're heading south right now. From the column of smoke, this wasn't a Piper Cub.” I said, “All right, Joe, be careful.” “Okay, Dad,” he said. “I love ya.”

That's how we ended our conversations every time I spoke with my sons. I spoke with John the night before, I spoke to Joe en route, and the last words I said to each were, “I love you.” Every time you get on that fire truck, you can die. Every time. I gave this advice to both my sons: “Don't ever leave your house pissed off at your wife or your kids, because you don't know if you're going to see them the next day.” I said, “So no matter what the gripe is with your wife, your girlfriend, or your children, put it aside. Hug them. Kiss them. Take it up the next day. Because the last thing that you want to remember is that you hugged them and kissed them.”

We can think about 9/11 from different points of view. Chief Dan Nigro [see page 1] looked at it from the command standpoint: Here were two huge buildings with many floors of fire, hundreds of people getting killed, so, tactically, what were they going to do? The chiefs knew you couldn't fight a high-rise fire like you fight fire in a tenement. In a project fire the heat was incredible; in the World Trade Center, you had a minimum of ten or fifteen floors being fed by jet fuel. Holy . . . God. I can't imagine the temperature.

Just two months before 9/11 John had called me up and said, “Dad, can you call the chief of department [Peter J. Ganci] and ask him to put Tom Haskell [see page 163] in my company?” I said, “John, I'm retired. How am I going to ask the chief of department to transfer somebody to your company ? Those days are over.” He said, “Dad, he's great, and he worked with you. We've gotta have him.” I said, “I remember he was a fireman, a big guy, but I never knew he was the captain.” So Tom Haskell was the captain the day of the attacks. He accepted the temporary assignment, but since he was on the list to be a battalion chief, he refused a permanent transfer.

Now, when they pulled up in front of the South Tower, they looked up and knew they were gonna get their ass kicked in this building; there was just no way you were going to hide. And nobody hesitated—they all followed him up the stairs. Watch the films. You see the fear in some of these kids' eyes; you see that they didn't really want to go, but they didn't stop. How do you measure that if you don't talk about heart, training, desire, courage? It's not just one quality. Those kids all showed what they had. Tactically, if I had been a lieutenant or a captain at that time, I wouldn't have hesitated. Once I was in the building, though, up close, the realization would have kicked in that we didn't belong there. I've been to more than a few fires in my career where I found,
This is not a good spot; now it's time to make a retreat
.

The people coming out of those buildings that day were men whose families relied on them, women who just went to work, your wife, your daughter, your niece going shopping—the people we were sworn to protect. When you saw them you knew there were more people in there, but you didn't know what situation they were in. You forgot about the fire; you forget about what was going to happen.
I gotta get those people out.
And that's what they did. Firemen are no different from cops. When they saw thousands of them fleeing, they knew there were more—there was always one more.

 

I never saw the fire. Chief Dan Nigro never saw the fire. Chief Pete Ganci never saw the fire. Chief Peter Hayden never saw the fire. What did they see? Tactically, they saw victims, people. The firefighters weren't there to put out a fire. They could have stretched all the hose in the world, but they weren't going to put out that fire. But they were going to get people out, and they did—thousands. The sad commentary is that we actually trained with high-rise procedures.

That day I watched the coverage on television, saw the impact of the second plane crashing into the South Tower, the column of smoke. I had to leave the house for a minute to run to the store, and on the way home flipped the radio on. The building had collapsed. I said to myself,
High-rises don't collapse. Floors can collapse in a high-rise; buildings don't collapse. Never. No high-rise has ever collapsed.
At home I put on the television and watched the second tower come down. I was dumbfounded.

The phone never stopped ringing. Because I knew that Joe was there, I tried to call the firehouse but couldn't get through. I called a friend of mine who's a dispatcher and said, “You gotta help me out.” And he said, “Let me see what I can do,” and then he called me back and said, “Don't worry about it, 132 relocated.” I said, “Okay, that's a good sign.” They didn't relocate. They went right to the staging area.

They sent a car to pick us up, to go to One Police Plaza. After thirty-six years as a firefighter I would have assumed that the Fire Department would take care of us. The Police Department I knew only as a peripheral thing, but now I saw how strong it really was, looking at it tactically. Streets were closed; policemen were everywhere, and not just traffic cops but armed policemen. And every place you went, there was a checkpoint. I said, “We're in a war here.” We got to One Police Plaza, and they take us into the auditorium where a few tables had been set up, where people were sitting there and waiting. My daughter-in-law Kathy, a police officer, arrived, and had already been up to Truck 2.

Nobody knew what the hell was going on, and then Commissioner Joe Dunne came in and said, “I want to keep you informed. Coffee and some doughnuts will be here soon.” They were assuming people weren't going to leave, so we camped out. It must have been two o'clock in the morning, and there were still ten families there, and nobody knew what to do. The Police Department didn't know what to do. Twenty-three NYPD officers were missing, maybe killed. At any other time this would have been front-page news for months all around the world. So we were walking and talking, and the adrenaline was flying. Joe Dunne came back in, and people were swarming around him. He came over to me and said, “Mr. Vigiano, can I speak to you? Most of these people have no idea what's going on, but you do. I want to ask you a favor, to explain to them how people survive in building collapses. About voids. About water. Food.” He said, “We want to try and keep their hopes up.” I said, “I didn't even see the building, I just saw it on television.” But I spoke to the people there as an officer experienced in emergencies. But one father of an officer just wouldn't let go; he wanted results. I said, “Look, I got two kids in those buildings. They're tough kids, physical kids. If there's a void they'll find it. There'll be plenty of food, because it's an office building. There's water, because they're putting out fires. Water pipes break. There's water fountains. There's plenty of air. You can last a long time in that environment.” I said, “We just have to dig them out. It's going to take time.”

At about two o'clock in the afternoon my daughter-in-law said to Joe Dunne, “I want to go to the site.” Joe said, “Okay,” and asked if I was going to go with her. They had a motorcycle unit drive us over to the site.

When we pulled up and I looked at that zone, I knew right then and there that there were no survivors. There were no survivors. There was no way anybody could be alive in that building. They had already gotten Jay Jonas out [see page 52] and all those peripheral people on the eleventh; this was the twelfth. Kathy walked the entire perimeter, questioning cops. She knew most of them because she worked the Seventy-fifth Precinct. I was right behind her; I'm just looking. Back at One Police Plaza Joe Dunne got ahold of me and asked what I had seen. “Well,” I said, “I can't make that speech to these people anymore.” He said, “That bad?” I said, “I really think so.”

The next day, the thirteenth, Truck 1, Emergency Service Unit, picked me up and took me to their quarters, where they gave me a pair of boots, a helmet, and some clothes. We went to the site and started digging, and they took me into some tunnel—probably one of the subway tunnels—and it was scary. We were poking around for about an hour but didn't find anybody. When we came out I watched the anthill with a thousand people picking stuff up and filling buckets. I walked around a little bit more, talked to firemen and some cops, and got back to 1 PP around seven o'clock

By now they had brought in army cots and were serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They were trying to make it hospitable, but we were still in an auditorium. Joe Dunne again came up to me and said, “I'm going to ask you a favor, Mr. Vigiano. I have a friend, Dennis Duggan, who works with
News
day
and wants to do an article. He's a friend of the Police Department, and he's the only reporter I would ask you to talk to. Would you consider an interview?” I said, “Do you want it?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Okay.” Duggan was a real gentleman, and the headline of his piece was TWIN TOWERS, which ran with photos of both boys.

Up to that point at One Police Plaza we hadn't been allowed to see TV or read the newspaper. They were sheltering us. Because I had been at the site, I was the voice, so fathers would come over and ask me questions, and I'd say, “They're working hard.” At around eleven o'clock each night kids from the ESU would come in, filthy, dirty, and would give us an update: We were digging here. We found this. We had a void. Most of the people had no idea what they were talking about. But everyone was getting information from the site.

At the end of the following day I got back to 1 PP around eleven o'clock, and Joe Dunne says, “I have another favor to ask. We want to get you people in a hotel. This is not good; you can't stay in an auditorium.” I asked, “Well, what do you want me to do?” He said, “Where you go, they will go. But they are not going to leave here as long as you are here.” I said, “I answer to Jan. You convince her. If she says go, we'll go; otherwise we'll stay here.”

He said, “Mrs. Vigiano, I'd like you and your husband to go to a hotel. We're going to take care of that. Would you please go?”

She said to him, “I have two sons probably sleeping on concrete tonight, and you want me to sleep in a hotel? That ain't gonna happen.”

Well, this six-foot-five-inch police officer was speechless. He got me outside and said, “Are you kidding me? You've got to convince her. Beg, do whatever it takes.” I said, “What, do you need the floor that we're sleeping on?” “No, no,” he said. “We want you in beds, with a shower. Police headquarters is not a place to live.”

I went back and talked to her. I said, “Mama, my back is killing me, these army cots are not doing me any good. I need a shower.” She gave me a look that said,
You wimp
, or words to that effect, but finally agreed, and Joe had us escorted to the Roosevelt Hotel before we could change our minds. The other families followed.

At 6:00 A.M. a police officer would be there to pick me up and take me back to 1 PP for breakfast. After breakfast I'd be out the door and down to the site, and I'd come back to 1 PP around eleven o'clock and stay there until twelve o'clock, when they would take me back to the hotel. This went on for two weeks, when Kathy told us that our grandson was waiting for us. He wanted to see us.

So we made a deal: From now on Mama would stay home and I would stay at the site until Friday night. On Friday I would come home, wash clothes, have dinner with Jan, and then go back in on Sunday afternoon. I did this until they closed the site down; that was my goal.