Free Firehouse by David Halberstam Page A

regarded as the hardest working young man in the house’s recent history. Shea’s nickname for a time was Ricochet (or Rick O’Shea) because he moved around the firehouse so fast. What Gary particularly liked about Shea was that when he made coffee in the morning, he did not simply prepare one big pot and try to make it last too long, but, because coffee gets bitter when it sits, Shea would make it fresh five or six times each morning. At 7:00 A.M. Gary might have his first cup of coffee, and he would tease Shea: “This tastes old, like six-thirty coffee.”
    â€œNo, no,” Shea would say, “it’s six-forty-five coffee.”
    â€œYou absolutely sure about that?” Gary would say. “It tastes more like six-thirty than six-forty-five.”
    Most of the men in the house had other jobs—they were plumbers, or carpenters, or mechanics—and Shea had one, but it was typically quite unfireman-like: He entertained at children’s parties by impersonating Big Bird, a Ninja Turtle, Barney, or Elmo. This did not entirely please Bruce Gary, who thought it somehow beneath a fireman’s dignity to dress up in goofy costumes. “We can’t have someone from this house going as Daffy Duck or Barney,” Gary told him. “A fireman dressing up as a purple dinosaur! Jesus! You’ve got to go as a hero.”
    â€œWhat about if I go as Spiderman,” Shea asked, and Gary said, yeah, that was better—Spiderman was all right, a lot better than Barney. And so Shea worked a few parties as Spiderman, and in time showed up dressed as the superhero at the firehouse picnic for the benefit of everyone’s kids.
    Shea had just been relieved when the first call had come in on September 11. He was loading his personal gear into his car, parked across the street. He tried to get on the Truck, his usual assignment, but all the seats were taken. So he went to the office of the Engine, where Lieutenant Ginley was working, and asked if he could go with the Engine. Ginley said they hadn’t been called yet, but he gave Shea permission to join them if they were.
    Shea was still taking care of his gear when the Engine got the call. That was, he remembered, almost immediately after the second plane hit. At this point, Shea put on his gear and he took his video camera with him. His account remains the only record of what happened on either the Truck’s or the Engine’s rides down, because he was the only survivor of the thirteen men who went out from 40/35; his account is fragmentary because of the injuries, both physical and emotional, he suffered that morning, including a severe concussion. Much of Kevin Shea’s recall of what actually happened at the site remains clouded.
    On the ride down, Shea sat next to Mike D’Auria, the twenty-five-year-old probie who had not even graduated from the academy yet. This was only D’Auria’s second real fire. They got to the site amazingly fast, Shea thought. Normally the traffic in midtown Manhattan tended to slow the rigs down, but this morning they moved practically unimpeded down the West Side Highway, as if somehow everyone had known in advance that something terrible would happen and had stayed clear of the highway. As they were riding, Shea was thinking, two planes, two towers, that had to be the work of terrorists, and he asked Lieutenant Ginley if he thought it was terrorism. “It appears to be so,” Ginley said, “but we just don’t know yet.”
    Mike D’Auria was a quiet man, and in that way the antithesis of Shea, who was always talking. Shea tried to engage him in conversation but D’Auria seemed very much inside himself. Shea knew how hard it must be for the probie, so young and so inexperienced, traveling toward so dangerous a site. Shea knew that Steve Kelly, one of the senior men at the house, thought D’Auria was unusually reflective and sensitive, somewhat different from