A Decade of Hope Read Online Free PDF Page A

knowledgeable about the details. I knew about it because it was Port Authority, and the authority is exempt from local building codes. I don’t know if any of our department leadership was on the job when it was being built, but maybe we were just at the beginning of our careers. Were any of us aware that those trusses might have rendered the building less strong than others that we’d been in? Probably not. We were probably not as aware of the skeletal structure as we should have been. And that speaks to some ofof the inadequacies I felt afterward. Here I was, in a very high position in the department, and I didn’t know this. We all should have known more, maybe. But I can only speak for myself. I have always considered myself to be knowledgeable, but I wasn’t as knowledgeable as I thought I was.
    I’ve seen one of the chief structural engineers of the Trade Center [Leslie Robertson] on TV since, and he doesn’t feel that way, but I’ll let him deal with whatever demons are in his head. And I’m sure they’re there, each and every day. I have enough of them in my own head to deal with. Here we had the biggest buildings in New York, and I don’t remember ever seeing a fire-load analysis of those structures. We probably were just creatures of experience. In the New York City Fire Department most everything we do is based on our experiences. Overseas a lot of the chiefs have to have degrees in engineering to reach the highest levels in their departments. In New York we’ve always had a guy who has been to five thousand fires leading us. It did work, for the most part, but it didn’t work very well that day.
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    So we have the firefighting issues, the construction issues, and the issues of the attackers. I’m always shocked by how casual people remain in this country about the whole issue of Islam, that they are willing to believe that these nineteen people who hijacked the planes were an aberration, that everyone else in the Muslim world is just peace and love. There’s no way we have to be nice, that we have to be kind, that we must consider it could be our fault that this happened. Because we’re not nice to others around the world, it’s our fault? I’m not willing to buy that; I think it’s crap. I think people who want us to believe in the “it’s a few radicals” idea have some nerve. They want to sacrifice another few thousand people, another 343 firefighters, with this stupidity.
    We’re a country built on individual rights; I hear this all the time. How far do we extend that? How far? Should we stop searching people going onto planes? Why do we have to ask politely when we want to question these criminals about their behavior? Let’s not worry about our society, some politicians seem to be saying, but let’s worry about them. Let’s not worry about the people they are going to kill. Let’s worry about the well-being of the killers. And it’s going to happen again. The firefighters still think about it every day. Their families think about it. My two daughters think about it, with their firefighter husbands, that firefighters are out there and could be sacrificed again.
    We should, must, remain vigilant against people who want to harm us. I don’t know how we can solve their problems. I don’t know what they want. What is it that they want? What is it that sent these people out to kill us? What is their goal? If the goal is the destruction of our culture, then the only answer for us can be to defend ourselves and our families to whatever extent we have to.
    I think our intelligence community was persistent, for instance, in staying after bin Laden, and that persistence paid off. I was in no way gleeful when I received word of his death, but considering the life he chose, the life of a mass-murdering criminal, he certainly got what he deserved.
    I don’t think the forces that brought us to 9/11 have