story5545.xml

story5545.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

I had just dropped my son off at school when I returned home to watch a little of the Today Show before I went off to the gym. As I'm watching the Today Show, they show us the first plane hitting the towers. My husband is a New York City firefighter, who happened to be home that day and was still sleeping. I ran inside our bedroom and told him "Hon, you're missing a good job today." I knew his firehouse would respond to this incident, just as they did in 1993. He then turned on the T.V. and started watching himself. We both then saw the second plane hit the towers and my husband's first words were "It's terrorists." I don't feel I really understood the full impact of what I was seeing. I then went to the gym and took my aerobics class. In the middle of my class, my husband came running into the gym and told me he had gotten called in for an "all hands emergency." He asked me to try calling some of the other firemen in his house that lived in our County. He had tried calling himself but couldn't get through to them. We were already starting to have problems with the telephone lines. My husband left and, little did I know, I wouldn't see him for another two days. I then went home myself and pretty much just glued myself in front of the T.V. and watched the horrors unfold. But I had hope. People were going to come out alive. At 6:00 that evening I received a telephone call from one of the wives of a firefighter from my husband's firehouse. She wanted to know if I had heard from my husband. Her husband was supposed to have gotten off of work that morning at 9:00 a.m. She hadn't heard from him and couldn't get through to him on his cell phone. I told her my husband got called in that morning at 10:00 a.m. and I hadn't heard from him yet. By 8:00 p.m. my husband called me. He borrowed someone's cell phone. He then gave me the names of the firemen missing from his firehouse. It was as if a knife had been put into my heart. Some of these men I have known since my husband got into the Fire Department, 13 years. I continued to watch the T.V., believing that these guys - my friends - would be found. At 10:00 p.m. I received another phone call from another firefighter's wife. She, too, wondered where her husband was, why he hadn't returned her messages that she left on his cell phone. But now I knew, he was one of the missing, but I couldn't tell her that. I then called another friend of mine, who happened to know her brother. She said she would call him and tell him he has to go see his sister and tell her in person - she shouldn't hear it over the telephone. The reality of what was happening was sinking in and it just made me sick. I held out hope for at least two weeks that they would be found alive. In the end we lost all of the six men working on the truck that day. If my husband would have been working, he would have been gone too. It was the first time I ever experienced the death of a firefighter that I knew and it hurt like hell. These were good men, with so much ahead of them. This is not the way it's supposed to be.