THE PATRIOTS OF 9/11

Hill gathers testimonies from those on the front lines in this oral history of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York.

The author, a retired New York Fire Department assistant chief, collects reminiscences from 26 first responders, most of them FDNY personnel, from top brass like then-Chief of Operations Daniel Nigro to ordinary firefighters, recounting their actions on 9/11 and afterward. Centering the volume are the accounts of those who were at the World Trade Center as the disaster unfolded: their rush to the site as news of the attack broke; their scramble to set up command posts at the WTC and organize teams of firemen to evacuate the buildings; and their shock at the collapse of the twin towers, which killed hundreds of their comrades and nearly killed some of them. The focus then shifts to the around-the-clock search for people trapped in the rubble at ground zero in a frenzy that gradually gave way to the somber realization that there were no survivors. Other sections explore the experiences of overwhelmed paramedics; dispatchers who fielded gut-wrenching calls from doomed people on upper floors of the WTC, pleading for help that could not come; analysts who studied the buildings’ collapses; and officials who comforted the families of the dead, organized funerals, and continue to attend memorials. These stories make the 9/11 tragedy intensely personal, capturing in plainspoken, evocative words the day’s bizarre horrors (“Just outside the North-Tower on West Street one firefighter was directing others exiting the building,” recalls one chief, “[t]elling them when no jumpers were coming down and it was safe to run out”), terrifying escapes (“I could still hear the building pancake-collapsing rapidly, loudly, Boom! Boom! Boom! [a]s each floor hit the one below it...[l]ike the world was ending”), and plangent losses (“People I knew so well who I saw…and then they were gone”). Accompanying the text are iconic color photos of the twin towers spewing black smoke, like hellish beacons radiating darkness into a brilliant blue sky, and of the colossal ground zero debris pile, a mountain of chaos under a ghostly ashen shroud.

A gripping re-creation of the catastrophe and the human drama of those who confronted it.