TL;DR
9/10. Joe Pfeifer was investigating a gas smell in lower Manhattan when American 11 went into the North Tower directly above him. He was the closest chief to the scene and ran the initial response from the lobby. He also sent his younger brother Kevin up those stairs.
The morning starts as routine, which is what makes the opening so effective. A battalion chief and his companies are out on a reported odor of gas in lower Manhattan, a nothing call. A French documentary crew is filming them, because Jules and Gedeon Naudet happened to be making a film about a probationary firefighter at that house.
Then a sound overhead, and the camera turns, and Jules Naudet captures the only known footage of the first aircraft striking the tower.
Pfeifer sets up the command post in the North Tower lobby and starts sending companies up. Among them is Kevin Pfeifer, his younger brother, a lieutenant with Engine 33. They exchange a look. Neither says anything. Kevin goes up.
What does a command post do when nothing works?
This is the part of the book you cannot get anywhere else, because it is written by the person who was doing it.
Pfeifer could not see what the rest of the world was watching on television. He was inside the lobby with a view of the plaza and no information beyond what came over the radio and what people told him face to face. He did not know a second aircraft had hit until somebody said so, and he did not know the buildings could come down, because nobody believed they could.
The radios failed. This is the operational heart of the book and he returns to it repeatedly. The repeaters in the building did not work reliably, transmissions from high in the tower did not reach the lobby, and evacuation orders that were given were not heard by people who needed to hear them. Firefighters died in stairwells because a message did not arrive.
He also could not coordinate with the police, who had helicopters overhead and were seeing things nobody in the lobby could see. The two departments ran separate systems and separate command structures, and the information that existed in the air did not reach the people in the building.
What happened to the author’s brother in Ordinary Heroes?
Kevin Pfeifer went up the North Tower stairs with Engine 33 and did not come back.
Joe handles it with almost no adornment, which is the only way it could have been handled. There is no dramatic farewell scene, because there was not one. There was a look between two men doing their jobs in a lobby full of people, and then months of digging on the pile, and then a fragment recovered.
Writers reaching for a moment like this almost always inflate it. They add the last words that were not said, the premonition that was not felt, the significance nobody could have seen at the time. Pfeifer does the opposite. He reports that his brother went up, that he did not think much about it because it was the job, and that this is the thing he has carried since.
It lands harder for the restraint. The reader supplies the weight, which is always more effective than being handed it.
What did he do about Ordinary Heroes afterward?
This is the half of the book most 9/11 memoirs do not attempt, and it is why this one is more than an account of a single day.
Pfeifer stayed in the FDNY for another seventeen years, retiring in 2018 as an assistant chief after thirty-seven years of service. He founded the department’s Center for Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness and spent the rest of his career on the interagency communication failures that killed people that morning.
He studied it formally as well, and the later chapters draw on that work. They are more analytical than the narrative sections without becoming a management book, which is a difficult balance and he mostly holds it.
What connects the two halves is that he treats the grief and the work as the same subject. He is explicit that the reason he spent seventeen years on radio interoperability is that he watched what happened when it did not work, and that this was a way of carrying his brother that was more useful than not carrying him.
What is leadership under these conditions?
His answer, stated plainly, is that leadership under extreme conditions is mostly making decisions with information you know is incomplete, and then living with the ones that turn out badly.
He sent people into a building that fell down. He did not know it would fall down, nobody did, and the decision was correct on the information available. He is honest that knowing this does not help as much as it should.
That is a more useful account of command than most leadership writing manages, because it does not resolve. The book does not conclude that he was right or that he was wrong. It concludes that this is what the job is, and that the people who do it carry the outcomes either way.
Anyone who has run an operation where a decision cost somebody something will recognize the register. It is not guilt and it is not self-justification. It is the permanent residue of having been the person who decided.
Verdict
The essential ground-level account of that morning, and the necessary companion to the aviation side. Read it for what command looks like when the information is wrong, the radios do not work, and the building is coming down.
Read it also for a man who converted the worst day of his life into seventeen years of trying to fix the things that made it worse, which is a rarer response than grief or anger and considerably harder.
Explore further
September 11th: A Writer’s Tribute: the day, the record, and what writers owe a subject like this.
