One the Hard Way

Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman recalled hearing someone yell before the collapses that something was falling from the towers.
"It turned out it was people coming out, and they started coming out one after the other," she said. "We didn't know what it was at first, but then the first body hit and then we knew what it was."
"I was getting sick. I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn't have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit."

I don't know what people think anymore. I don't know if people even really do think, if you know what I mean. One thing I do know is you can't carry this shit around; it's no monkey on your back, it's a goddamned Acme safe straight from the cartoons. It'll flatten you quick, your Wil E. Coyote ass becomes two-dimensional. I couldn't watch the news for over a year after that shit. I wanted to hear something good, like Lassie saved Timmy from drowning in a well, but it's all just more death and shit, mierda. People in Wisconsin, people in Georgia, sure, they felt emotions, right?, but I saw charred flesh, I saw fucking human beings fall from the sky. I want people to get this, remember it like I do, and that doesn't happen with a fucking granite memorial sculpture in Manhattan. I don't know how it does happen, but Jesus, I need for people to know.

I lost a few friends that day, people I worked with, lived with for years, with their fucked up habits and their fucked up clothes and their fucked up tastes. But these friends were only doing what we get paid to do, and most of us love to do. It's no goddamned joyride to walk around a room with a temp of around 500 degrees plus Fahrenheit toting 80 pounds of gear, but you get in it and the shit you learned just kicks in. Trust your instincts, trust your equipment and save some fucking bodies. Not that day, my friend. We just got killed, fucking bombarded.


I never even got in the tower. I was on a crew setting water lines, and just like that Rikkert yells, "debris falling!" and we all look up, and fuck if it's not a human being, a real live living fucker spending the last moments of his life as a reminder that the acceleration of gravity is 32 feet per second squared. We watched him become a fucking human omelet, and we cried. I won't even tell you about the firemen who died; it's just too fucking hard.

You'd think it might be easier to go back to work the next day if you know you might never see the horror of the day before, right? You'd be dead wrong. Twelve dead on our squad from smoke inhalation. Four crushed in the rubble of the collapse, not even a body for a funeral. The same fuckers whose tastes and clothes I couldn't stand, I think about every night until the booze and the Valium kicks in, and I no longer want to jump from a flaming tower myself. You'd think four years might put some gulf or moat between yourself and your self-loathing and inability to save a single goddamned soul from frying to death 800 feet above you, and you'd be wrong again. And you would turn to something for escape, or you'd go bat-shit crazy, and then where are you? My girl left me about six months after the attacks, and I loved her more than anything, but I don't even think about her. At all. She deserved better than a shell of a man, and right now I'm not even that. I don't want to sap someone else's life of decency, I just want these memories to go away, and if you live like that, you can damn well expect to see your woman walk out the door. Fuck it, I go to work 4 shifts a week, 18 hours a shift. I put out fires, I administer CPR at pools and weddings and bat mitzvahs, I even pull cats out of trees like some Norman Rockwell bullshit, but what I don't do is forget. Drink as I might, I can't. And I won't, because of all the people who died, some right smack on the ground in front of me. It's four years now, but it's every goddamned day.