Every September 11th, the memories return: the falling towers, the smoke, the senseless loss. This year, I discovered it just a block from my apartment, in the pages of David Halberstam’s Firehouse—written by a neighbor I’d never met.
Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, lived nearby and was searching for meaning after September 11th, just as I am now. He spent two and a half months with our local firehouse to write a memorial not just to the firefighters who died that day, but to the firehouse itself and to all the firefighters in New York.
On that day, the New York Fire Department lost 343 men. Our firehouse lost two entire companies—the 12 men of Ladder 35 and Engine 40—one of the worst losses in the city.
Halberstam takes us inside the firehouse, into a culture normally kept private. It’s an insular brotherhood of men who eat together, live together, play sports together, and help repair each other’s houses. While we see the public face of firefighters—the men running into the Twin Towers when everyone else ran out—we rarely see what lies beneath. As Ray Pfeifer, a veteran of the firehouse, says, “People think they know what we do, but they don’t really know what we do.” They don’t understand the real danger of being in a burning building when there’s a collapse and the exits seem blocked.
The swagger of a firefighter isn’t arrogance—it’s earned. Take the captain’s code: first in, last out of every fire. It’s a point of pride that sets them apart, especially from police officers. While cops climb the ladder toward desk jobs and safer assignments, firefighters advance toward greater danger—lieutenants get closer to the flames than probies, captains closer than lieutenants. It’s a confidence born from their unique relationship with risk, which explains the firehouse joke: “If firefighting were easy, the cops would do it.”
“I have always admired acts of uncommon courage on the part of ordinary people,” Halberstam writes comparing them the heroes of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War that he covered decades earlier. They live in a world of good and evil, where the good guys fight against a purely destructive force. As Angie Callahan, the wife of fallen Captain Frank Callahan, said, “Where else can you be brave in a time of peace, and where else can you do things that few other men do—deeds that save lives?”
To give you a taste of the book, here’s how Halberstam describes Captain Frank Callahan and the two traits that define great firefighters: staying calm and doing the right thing.
Wherever the fire was, though, he was very good at it. Very professional, and very calm. Calm was important; it was one of the most important words in the vocabulary of firemen, and a word they did not use lightly. That and the phrase “do the right thing,” as in, “He was the kind of fireman who always did the right thing.” Staying calm for a fireman was crucial—for unlike most other peacetime jobs, firemen were in the regular business of the suppression of fear. Every call might be a ticket to a burning inferno where there was no light, where falling walls and ceilings cut off exit routes, where a floor could give out, and where a fireman could become disoriented and begin to feel his source of oxygen failing as he grew weaker and as the heat grew more fierce second by second. Therefore keeping calm was a critical part of the job. Every serious fire could trigger powerful impulses of fear, and if an officer shows that fear on the job, if he is not calm and not disciplined himself, then the fear will spread quickly through the men. Calm is the most basic of the positive words that firemen use to describe one another.
David Halberstam, Firehouse
It’s a mindset most of us can’t imagine—being paid to suppress fear while everyone else is allowed to feel it.
Doing the right thing was equally important. When the men speak of a colleague who does the right thing, they mean he will stay at his post under terrible conditions and not panic. Doing the right thing was going in and risking your life for a trapped civilian or fellow fireman. Firemen define each other by their codes of honor, which, because of the nature of the job, are mandatory and must be instinctive.
David Halberstam, Firehouse
But Halberstam reveals that heroism in a firehouse isn’t just about the dramatic moments. It starts with something as simple as washing dishes:
The men have to be able to count not just on their officers, but on their buddies. Doing the right thing also involves small, seemingly unimportant things in the firehouse. It begins when you are a probie, and it means following certain customs, such as being the first one to the sink to wash the pots and pans after meals. The firehouse, like the military, is based on doing little things right, because if someone does not do the little things correctly, then he probably won’t do the big things correctly. Moreover, in a firehouse, if you do not do your share of the routine work, someone else has to do it for you, in which case you pull down the house, and you are a hairbag. You do not wait for someone to tell you to do it, you just do it. There is an additional reason: Between moments of fearsome danger, there is often a lot of slack time at a firehouse, and if you do not have codes like this, then it would be very easy for people to become lazy and get in a rut, and for the entire house to lose its sense of cohesion and its purpose.
David Halberstam, Firehouse
This September 11th, I’m thinking less about the towers that fell and more about the men who ran toward them. Halberstam’s Firehouse reminds us that heroism isn’t reserved for history’s darkest moments—it’s practiced daily by ordinary people who’ve chosen extraordinary lives. They’re still out there, still running toward danger, still doing the right thing.
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