Glory In The Glare

By Jodie Morse

In the winter of 2000, Mike Kehoe was called to a first-alarm fire at an apartment in downtown Brooklyn, N.Y. No one was home, but he scaled the roof to break a skylight and release the explosive gases building within. A photo of Mike perched atop a row of Brooklyn brownstones appeared in the Daily News the following morning. The guys at the firehouse joked for a few minutes that he was almost famous. His mother cut out the photo and filed it away in her scrapbook.

Mike didn't notice the second time he was photographed on the job. It happened around the 20th floor in a crowded stairwell of the burning 1 World Trade Center. A Port Authority contractor had grabbed his digital camera on his rush down from the 71st floor and released the shutter just as Mike, a fireman with Engine 28, was climbing to the scene of the blaze.

On the Friday after that Tuesday, the photo hit the Daily News. Mike's picture was the one record of the sweaty stampede out of the towers, the one frozen frame to give the horrors on the inside a face and a name. And suddenly everyone wanted a piece of him. There were 40 messages a day from reporters; well wishers sent checks, whiskey, prayers, cigars and a bald-eagle calendar. One particularly aggressive fan, "Judy C. from New Hampshire," wrote almost daily on stationery with pink hearts and drove all the way to New York City from Manchester just to see him in the flesh. Mike's father taped the photograph to his refrigerator next to a laminated postcard of Jesus. Mike even heard that British Prime Minister Tony Blair held it up and said, "This man is a hero."

The photograph fast became part of the redemptive fairy tale spun by Americans to make some rough sense of Sept. 11. The good guys like Mike saved the day, the evil ones were blotted out, and we all bought F.D.N.Y. HEROES caps and pinned red-white-and-blue ribbons to our lapels to celebrate the victory. But to those who lived that story and now rub up against its shards every day, resolution is nothing more than a mass-marketed myth. Their reality is raw and unending. Fire fighters and police brawl at ground zero. Tales of divorces spawned by Sept. 11 circle around the fire department. Widows squabble with one another over money, and this month one took her own life.

For Mike, myth and reality collide at nearly every juncture. People who see his compact, 5-ft. 7 1/2-in. frame in person insist he must be shorter than the beefy man in the photo. The guys at work grumble that all the attention is going to him instead of the six men missing from his firehouse. His wife E.J. demands to know why they have only had a 30-second conversation about Sept. 11. Everyone wants to know how many people the superhero pulled from the towers. The answer never changes: "I saved one person that day, and that was me, and it was by running for my life."

On the morning of Sept. 11, Mike and E.J. drove into Manhattan together from their Staten Island home after Mike picked up bagels and cream cheese for the firehouse. "You're buying the guys breakfast and you don't even buy it for your own wife," she teased in the car. Shortly after 7 a.m., he dropped her off at the downtown Manhattan radiologist whom she assists. She gave Mike a quick peck on the cheek.

The first and second alarms sounded in unison at 8:47 at firehouses across lower Manhattan. The third was transmitted at 8:48 as a 10-60, code for a major emergency. No fourth alarm was necessary; at 8:56 the blaze was upgraded to a five-alarm fire. Because the night tour was just then being relieved, two shifts of men were milling around most firehouses, bantering about the morning's headlines (AIR WE GO AGAIN, blared the New York Post about Michael Jordan's comeback) and the previous evening's calls. That meant that double the men were on hand to respond.

The noise of the first crash traveled two miles north to the Alphabet City firehouse that is shared by Engine 28 and Ladder 11. In good humor as always, Mike was sitting in the front office joking with guys changing shifts when the computer spit out the white slip of paper summoning Engine 28. The six men of Ladder 11 suited up and waited for their slip. Michael Cammarata, 22 and still living in his parents' basement, dialed his father. "Tell everybody I'm all right," he said. Lieut. Michael Quilty, the senior officer on the ladder, called his wife to say a quick "Hello, I love you." Then he called the dispatcher to say his unit didn't want to wait any longer. Ladder 11 was assigned to the second tower.

Mike remembers what followed only in spurts. The engine, which typically barrels straight to the scene, was doing a strange, slow zigzag as it approached the Twin Towers. When he climbed out he saw why: the street was already littered with bodies that had fallen from the sky. The fire fighters entered the lobby of 1 World Trade through blown-out windows and waited for their orders from senior officers at a desk that served as a makeshift command center.

While other squads extract people from burning buildings or handle hazardous materials, the sole job of an engine company like Mike's is to lay the hose to douse the flames. The members of Engine 28, each hauling more than 100 lbs. of gear, were dispatched directly to the scene of the blaze. Mike was in the control position that day, which means he was charged with carrying a spare canister of oxygen and a leather pouch of tools to connect the hose to the internal water pipes that run up the spines of skyscrapers.

A kind of eerie order presided in the stairwell. People were perspiring from the heat, but they were filing down calmly. Some, as if they were on the sidelines at a road race, even stopped to hand the fire fighters bottled water. "I have no idea how much time had passed," Mike says, "but we were up around floor 28 when it seemed like someone had grabbed hold of the towers, like King Kong was shaking the two towers." Within seconds, the call to evacuate came over the bullhorn. The members of Engine 28 turned and charged down the stairs. They lingered, breathless, in the lobby for an instant as some companies, ignoring the order, continued to run into the building. Roy Chelsen, a fireman with Engine 28, yelled, "We have to get out. Run!" Then King Kong returned.

Mike dived under a battalion chief's cherry-red Suburban. "The only way to describe it was like a blizzard, like a quiet blizzard where everything was black," he says. In the rush to exit the building, he had dropped all his oxygen, so he tried to hold his breath until the dark storm passed. When he finally stood up, he saw an abandoned Poland Spring truck and helped himself to a bottle of water to wash the ash and grime from his throat. He looked around for the other men of Engine 28 and then, for the first moment since he left her, thought of his wife. He ran the five blocks north to her office. Like everything else in the dead zone, it had been evacuated.

That morning, just as E.J. was leaving her desk to pick up X rays at 1 World Trade Center, a patient called to schedule an MRI. E.J. was ticking off available time slots when she heard a loud thud, like a large truck running over a grate. There was a gasp and then, "Oh my God! A plane hit the Trade Center," on the other end of the line. E.J.'s first thought was of Mike, and she ran outside to the corner of West Broadway and Duane Street to see if she could catch a glimpse of his engine. What seemed like hundreds of trucks screeched by, but not the one with No. 28 painted on the side. She ran back and forth from her desk for more than an hour, when she suddenly heard a "very loud crackling." The first tower was falling. She and four co-workers ran a few blocks, then turned back and stared. Strangers came together in spontaneous clusters, as they did all over the city. But E.J. heard only one thing they were saying. "Everyone was talking about the firemen," she says. "We saw one guy in his suit covered in ash sitting on a park bench and asked if we could help him, and all he said was, 'Those poor firemen. They were coming up when we were going down.'"

She eventually walked the two miles to Mike's firehouse. Neither the engine nor the ladder had been heard from, and wives were beginning to call and, like E.J., show up at the firehouse. The officers led E.J. into the kitchen and said she should help herself to the bagels Mike had brought that morning. Finally the phone rang, and E.J. heard an officer mutter a crisp, "All right, Mike." She screamed for the phone, to hear Mike's voice for herself. "He said, 'Oh my God, I love you, you're safe,' over and over again," she recalls. "But I wasn't sure it was Mike. It just didn't sound like him."

There has long been a code of silence among fire fighters, a tacit understanding that they "don't bring the fires home." It was true in 1963 when Mike's father Robert went to work for $9,000 a year fighting fires in Brooklyn. And it remained the rule when Mike, 33, gave up his unionized carpentry job to join the department 3 1/2 years ago. At work he unloaded the gory details about the calls he took; he brought home a heavily edited version to E.J.

But Mike clearly could not confine the details of Sept. 11 to the firehouse. The blasts instantly spread to every corner of Mike's immediate orbit. E.J. had seen bodies falling with her own eyes. Mike's brother Jim, a fireman who retired in 1996 because of a bad knee, put on his old uniform and rushed to ground zero to haul debris--as did Mike's tight-knit group of friends, mostly construction workers and policemen.

Grief cycled through their neighborhood on the south shore of Staten Island, an enclave of starter homes colonized several decades ago by fire fighters and policemen. Mike and his three siblings grew up there, and he never left. In the days and weeks after, when E.J. steeled herself by going to Mass, priests reversed bans on cell phones in church, just in case there was any good news. Mike's two young nephews, Christopher, 12, and Brandon, 7, attend St. Clare's School, a nearby Catholic day school connected to a church that has been burying firemen for months. The boys have heard the dirges of the pipe-and-drum corps from their desks; their classmates have served as altar boys. Mike's eldest brother, Robert, left Staten Island years ago, but the tragedy followed him: he works as a psychologist in the public schools of Middletown, N.J., the quiet bedroom community that buried 34 residents; six of his students lost a parent in the disaster.

For the first couple of days, Mike did not come home at all. Like firemen across the city and country, he worked 24-hour shifts, much of it on the pile, the putrid 16-acre wasteland where the laws of time and space simply do not abide. "We'd be working in one place for a bit, and they'd blow the horn and tell us to run because another building might collapse on us, and then they'd bring us back to the same place two hours later," he recalls. "You'd be doing your work, and then all of a sudden you'd look up and see Robin Williams and then the New York Giants. They were there to see us, they wanted to shake our hands."

The grim labor consisted of scooping handfuls of debris into 5-gal. white buckets. Mike picked through body parts and shoes and paperwork, but to him the most disturbing finds were the countless tools stamped F.D.N.Y. He and his Engine 28 colleagues were on a special mission as they dug: to find their six housemates from Ladder 11 who were among the missing.

What downtime there was, Mike spent at the firehouse, catnapping on the sofa or curbside, consoling the neighbors who came bearing quilts and clean socks and underwear. On days off, the men brought food and reassurance to the homes of their missing co-workers. E.J. felt guilty calling the firehouse during that time--after all, her husband was still alive--and Mike rarely checked in with her.

On his first afternoon off, he found himself with a sudden case of vertigo as he drove over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Staten Island. He floored the gas and looked straight ahead. At his father's house, he reunited with E.J. Racked with worry and relief, and vomiting from a migraine, she went straight to bed.

Two days later Mike was in the Daily News. TV anchors flashed the picture and said he was still among the missing; one headline read STAIRWELL TO HELL. E.J. was a widow for a day. Relatives who were sure Mike was alive called again to ask if they were hallucinating. Then reporters tracked him down at the firehouse from the number on his helmet, and a correction was made: Mike had indeed survived without a scrape.

A man of few words with even his closest friends, Mike has a natural inclination to shrink from the attention. He did just a handful of brusque interviews, assuring reporters that he wasn't the real hero. He let the rest of the calls ring through to the machine. But by then the picture had taken on a life of its own. A relative of a still missing person in the photo called to say he'd heard that Mike had miraculously saved people by leading them into the subcellar of the towers. Where were they now? The fan letters began piling up. A woman wrote from Australia that her three-year-old son Laughlin said his prayers each night to the photo: "You are the face [that] my son has identified as his hero." A man from Pensacola, Fla., wrote, "Your picture helped convey to the world how average Americans have always performed since our beginnings." Then he warned, "Your task now is not to be overly recognized."

The days were newly crowded with the parade of memorials and ritual embrace. Rescuers eventually turned up the remains of Ladder 11, crushed like a Coke can, and later the bodies of three of its men. In the first week of October, all six of the men were buried. There was Lieut. Michael Quilty, who had been on the job for two decades, and Michael Cammarata, just nine weeks in the department, who had a poster of the Twin Towers over his bed at home and a sealed envelope in his night table to be opened only if anything ever happened to him. "Don't mourn me," it instructed. "This was the career I chose." They mourned John Heffernan, a guitar player in a punk-rock band, and Eddie Day, who would slap a smiley-face sticker on the helmet of anyone who seemed even remotely down. Matt Rogan, a quiet man who spent all his time fixing things around the firehouse, was laid to rest twice--once with no casket and again after rescuers turned up his body. Finally, they honored the longest-serving man in the firehouse, Rich Kelly, who had spent the past two years slimming down on a "fat bastard" diet that prohibited him from eating greasy firehouse food.

At the solemn, stilted receptions following the memorials, the men and women took to opposite corners of the room. "We'd kind of huddle together and ask how each other's husbands were taking everything," explains E.J. "Some couldn't sleep or were having nightmares."

Mike seemed numb and detached. In curt monosyllables, he assured everyone that he was fine. Yet the pain seeped out in slight but revealing ways. Mike, who had helped build his father Robert's house, spent most of his free time tinkering with his masterpiece. "He kept forgetting things when he was working, or he'd bring the wrong tools. You could see he was within himself," says his father Robert. "It was almost like he was in a coma."

And E.J. couldn't do a thing to bring him back to life. Nearly every night of their four-year marriage, they had walked down to the Sedutto ice cream parlor on the corner. He always ordered mint chocolate chip in a cup; she got sugar-free, fat-free frozen yogurt. Mike had suddenly lost his taste for ice cream. "I'm just trying to be a little healthier," he would tell her whenever she suggested taking up the old routine. At a late-September reunion of her family, he seemed slightly more animated talking with her father and male cousins, but when E.J. came over to set down a bowl of potato chips, the men promptly shut up. The two had known each other since she was 13; still he had yet to tell her a single detail of the most terrifying day of his life.

"I know what my wife can take and what she can't, and this isn't something I can really talk to her about," Mike told me one afternoon while discussing Sept. 11 over coffee at his sister's house. "The firehouse is my therapy." Unfortunately, he couldn't take his usual refuge there. The attention heaped on him was beginning to grate on some of his colleagues. They joked about his newfound celebrity, dubbing him "Worldwide," but privately grimaced that he had become the poster child for the attacks. What little press Mike did came to no good: his fans sent checks, but they were made out to the wrong place--the department's general charity fund, not the special nonprofit the firehouse had for its widows.

While writing this article I received an anonymous call on my answering machine with the message that TIME was profiling the wrong person. "That picture doesn't say it all," the voice said. "The real hero is not in that picture." Things got so tense at the firehouse that Lieut. Jimmy Rallis, one of the higher-ranking officers, began pulling the men aside. "I told them they should stop giving him crap because these photographs have a long history. The guy in the Baby Jessica picture killed himself," says Rallis, referring to the fireman in Midland, Texas, who pulled a baby from a well in 1987 and committed suicide eight years later. "Mike didn't ask for his picture to be taken, and he doesn't need any more pressure because of it. It scares me."

On the day after Thanksgiving, Mike woke up and told E.J. he couldn't face going to work. He had often scoffed with his co-workers about the emotional help the department had been offering, but on this day he scheduled an appointment with a counselor to request a medical leave. His best friend Rob drove him to the session. Mike answered the counselor's questions--Are you having trouble eating? No. Sleeping? Sometimes--but he didn't volunteer any information. Still, he left feeling a little lighter and carrying explicit instructions to take a vacation with his wife.

On the 78th day after the attacks, Mike broached the topic of Sept. 11 with E.J. He was still on medical leave, but they drove into Manhattan for a dinner for the families of Ladder 11. The two were sitting in a bar in Alphabet City when Mike suddenly leaned in. "I just don't know what I'm supposed to be feeling about all of this," he told her. "I think I'm supposed to be feeling guilty, but I actually am thankful to be alive." And then he abruptly stopped talking.

The discussion resumed a week later, aided in no small part by Mike's photograph. One night I went for steaks with Mike and E.J. and their friends Rob and Lori Borrazzo. The two couples spent much of the meal reminiscing about vacations they had taken together. There was a trip to the Dominican Republic, where Mike got sick from the water and danced by himself, and the winter ski house upstate that Rob trashed--and Mike cleaned up--back in their bachelor days. As the evening wore on, the bartender, recognizing Mike from his picture, sent over round after round of beers. Then the talk turned, as all New York conversations eventually do, to Sept. 11. At one end of the table, Mike was finally speaking to Rob about that day. His main problem was that most of the time, he thought he felt pretty good. "I feel guilty, like I should be having nightmares, or I should be feeling more. I mean, how come I'm happy about surviving?"

E.J. broke in: "You know, you haven't said a thing to me about that day."

"Yes, I have, I told you about the blown-out windows, how we entered the lobby through the blown-out windows."

"No, you never told me about the windows or about anything. You didn't say a thing to me about Sept. 11 until the other night."

Those are the last words the two have shared on the topic. E.J. says she has stopped trying to prod. As long as he's talking to someone--his friends, a counselor, a reporter--she feels he's getting the outlet he needs. "Maybe he's just trying to spare me," she says of his silence. "But I do ask myself if one day all of a sudden it's going to hit him, if it's finally going to become real."

Three months after the attacks, there are only brief flashes of reality. Mike returns to work at the firehouse, but the reminders of Sept. 11 are everywhere. The chalkboard still bears the names and assignments of those on duty that morning. Guys show off their new 9/11 tattoos memorializing their housemates; one depicts a helmet, another the Ladder 11 company patch. A masseuse stands by to give free massages; there are free tickets to the Broadway show The Music Man and a lottery for trips to Hawaii and Barbados. To unwind one evening after inspecting a gas leak, the firemen watch outtakes from The Bravest, a TV show chronicling the lives of fire fighters with real footage from New York companies; they pause the tape every few minutes to honor the men they instinctively refer to as "missing."

Mike still wears his hero's mantle awkwardly, like a blazer that's several sizes too big. On a stormy morning in December, he and E.J. and his older brother Robert pile into his blue Ford Expedition and drive to Dingman-Delaware Elementary School in the Pocono mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. A third-grade class has pooled their piggy banks to raise $150 for the guys in Mike's firehouse, and a local resort has donated a free night's stay. The school's students, told to wear red, white and blue for the occasion, welcome him with a medley of patriotic standards. Two TV stations and the local newspaper are in tow to cover the event.

A teacher stops him in the hallway. "My cousin was in Rescue 5 in Staten Island," she says, grabbing his hands and crying. "He..." Mike, who had done a rotation in that house, knows the name. "He was a good guy," he tells her.

When Rosanne Cacciarelli Wise, the third-grade teacher, first sees Mike, she too bursts into tears and does a small swoon. "Before Sept. 11, a hero to these children was Superman on TV," she tells him. "After everything awful that happened, they need some good to come out of it, and you've been that for them the last few months. They need a hero they can see and touch."

Her third-graders have taped Mike's photograph to the chalkboard. One girl gasps when he walks in, several blink to make sure he's actually real. They all want his autograph in their notebooks and on stray math work sheets. "Will you sign my baseball?" asks one boy. Then the students take turns standing next to Mike and reading aloud Christmas cards they have made for him to take back to the firehouse.

The last student to come to the front lost a relative in the towers. He asks Mike to read his card, a Christmas tree rendered in crayon on blue construction paper. "I like you because you saved so many people in the Twin Towers," says Mike, tripping over the little boy's handwriting. "Thank you for trying to save everybody's life. You are very brave. Too bad you didn't save more people. I wish you could have saved Kris."

Mike hugs the boy and then turns away from the photographers. He is weeping, but this time he won't look straight into the camera.