Ordinary Heroes

The morning starts as routine. That’s 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 one of only three known videos 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.

That look between the brothers is the most devastating moment I’ve found in any book about that morning, and it’s two sentences long. Pfeifer doesn’t milk it. He tells you Kevin went up and moves on to the next company, and it leaves me stunned.

What does a command post do when nothing works?

No other account can give you this, because the man writing it is the one who sent those companies up.

Pfeifer couldn’t 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 didn’t know a second aircraft had hit until somebody said so, and he didn’t 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 didn’t work reliably, transmissions from high in the tower didn’t reach the lobby, and evacuation orders that were given weren’t heard by people who needed to hear them. Firefighters died in stairwells because a message didn’t arrive.

The radios are inexcusable. People died in stairwells because a repeater didn’t do its job, and anyone who has ever treated communications equipment as a line item to trim should read this chapter and feel it. He also couldn’t 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 didn’t reach the people in the building.

Watch: Ordinary Heroes: A Memoir of 9/11 by Joseph Pfeifer · Audiobook preview, Google Play Books

What happened to the author’s brother in Ordinary Heroes?

Kevin Pfeifer went up the North Tower stairs with Engine 33 and didn’t come back. Joe handles it with almost no adornment. That’s the only way it could have been handled. There’s no dramatic farewell scene, because there wasn’t 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 his body recovered.

Writers reaching for a moment like this almost always inflate it. They add the last words that weren’t said, the premonition that wasn’t felt, the significance nobody could have seen at the time.

Pfeifer does the opposite. He reports that his brother went up, that he didn’t think much about it because it was the job, and that this is the thing he’s carried since.

It hits harder for the restraint. The reader supplies the weight. That’s always more effective than being handed it.

What did Joseph Pfeifer do after September 11?

This is the half of the book most 9/11 memoirs don’t attempt, and it’s 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’re more analytical than the narrative sections without becoming a management book. That’s a difficult balance and he mostly holds it. I have one complaint. The analytical chapters hold together, and they’re still a drop in temperature after the heat of the lobby. I’d have taken a little less framework and a little more of the man.

What connects the two halves is that he treats the grief and the work as the same subject. He’s explicit that the reason he spent seventeen years on radio interoperability is that he watched what happened when it didn’t work, and that this was a way of carrying his brother that was more useful than not carrying him.

I admire this part of the book most. Grief usually turns inward, and Pfeifer turned his into seventeen years of fixing radios and forcing agencies to talk to each other. It’s unglamorous work, and it’ll save people who’ll never know his name.

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 didn’t know it would fall down, nobody did, and the decision was correct on the information available. He’s honest that knowing this doesn’t help as much as it should. That’s a more useful account of command than most leadership writing manages, because it doesn’t resolve. The book doesn’t 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. I trust this account of command more than a whole shelf of management books, because it refuses to let the leader off the hook or to hang him on it. It’s the only description of that kind of responsibility I’ve found convincing.

Anyone who has run an operation where a decision cost somebody something will recognize the tone. It’s not guilt and it’s not self-justification. It’s 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 don’t 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. That’s a rarer response than grief or anger and considerably harder.

It’s a nine for me, and the only thing keeping it from a ten is that cooler stretch in the later chapters. Read it next to Spencer and you’ll understand that morning from the sky and from the lobby at once, and you won’t forget Kevin Pfeifer’s name.

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