ORDINARY HEROES

A former assistant chief of the New York City Fire Department delivers a firsthand account of the terrible events of 9/11.

Pfeifer opens at a firehouse on Duane Street, where two young French filmmakers were shooting footage for a documentary tracing the making of a firefighter in the training of a young recruit. All that was needed was a fire. Pfeifer and the crew got far more than they bargained for when they watched the first hijacked plane crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. “As the closest chief in lower Manhattan,” writes the author, “I knew instantly I was going to be the first chief on the scene and would have to take command.” Upon arrival, he had to make difficult decisions: It would take firefighters 60 minutes to reach the 93rd floor, where the fire was raging. Meanwhile, the building was already beginning to teeter, finally requiring Pfeifer to go against the ingrained culture of the FDNY and withdraw his crews from the building and leave the area before the towers fell. That process was completed just before 10:28 a.m., when, as Pfeifer writes, “For the first time, I realized that both towers had completely collapsed. The buildings were not hiding behind the smoke. They no longer existed.” In the aftermath, Pfeifer—all of whose company survived, even though 343 firefighters, including his brother, would not—analyzed failures of communication that kept firefighters and police from coordinating their efforts, which he would see through to a thoroughgoing reform that paid off when US Airways 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson River in 2009. He also pioneered cross-agency counterterrorism efforts. “The heart of crisis leadership is the ability to sustain hope by unifying efforts to solve complex problems in the face of great tragedy,” he writes, and this account shows the great strides forward that he helped engineer after just such a tragedy.

A heartfelt, affecting book that sheds new light on one of the darkest moments in recent history.