WSJ

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Common Valor New York's firefighters didn't lose their lives. They gave them.

Friday, September 14, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

If firefighters possess a gene lacking in the rest of us, it must have something to do with their sense of direction. America saw that on Tuesday. While thousands of frightened workers tried to make their way down the stairwells of the World Trade Center, the city's bravest went the opposite way: out of safety, up and into the flames. And so when the towers came down, they took some 300 firefighters with them-the greatest single loss in the department's history.

The firefighters were by no means alone, of course. As the smoke literally clears from lower Manhattan, glimmers of courage on an extraordinary scale have already appeared. From the tower personnel who stayed behind to direct others out, to the passengers of United Flight 93 who appear to have taken on their hijackers despite certain death, to the police officers, doctors and volunteers working themselves to exhaustion, America has witnessed heroism on a Homeric scale. How much more poignant to realize that the overwhelming majority of these quiet acts of valor will remain unknown but to God and the ordinary men and women who attempted them.

It diminishes none of these sacrifices of self to note the unique character of those performed by our firefighters. A soldier may spend an entire career without ever having a single shot directed at him. A police officer's family prays mightily for the same. But from the smallest hamlet to the biggest metropolis, firefighters, volunteer and professional alike, routinely face a life-taking enemy that always enjoys the advantage of surprise and unpredictability.

The casualties tell some of the story. There are, first, the sheer numbers. Only weeks ago, 10,000 firefighters from all over America came to mourn what local papers rightly played as a Father's Day catastrophe: three firefighter deaths in a single day, leaving eight children fatherless. To put this in perspective, figures from the National Fire Data Center indicate that the number of firefighters who perished in the World Trade Center Tuesday is nearly thrice those lost in a typical year across the entire nation.

Surely it speaks to the vocation that the human losses are not confined to the ranks: The dead include First Deputy Fire Commissioner William Feehan, Chief of Department Peter Ganci and Chief of Special Operations Raymond Downey, who in 1995 was dispatched to Oklahoma City to help authorities there after the bombing of the federal building. This time, too, the tragedy took from the department even its comforter, Chaplain Mychal Judge, who was killed shortly after administering the last rites to another soul whose life he put before his own, just like the men by whose side he served.

In the academy, recruits learn that a firefighter performs but one act of bravery in his career, and that's when he takes the oath of office. Everything after that, it is said, is simply in the line of duty. Amid the thousands of funerals to come, those from New York's Fire Department represent but a fraction. But in the midst of tragedy we do well to recognize that these firefighters did not lose their lives. They gave them.

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001