Brian McDonald - Five Floors Up: The Heroic Family Story of Four Generations in the FDNY

When you have a department whose men and women are expected to be ready at any moment to put their life on the line, to go to the aid of a stranger even when it means that you might put yourself in harms way, actually in dire peril, I dont think you could pay people to do that job. There has to be something beyond money that makes them do that.

William M. Feehan, chief of the department, FDNY, 1991

I dont think theres any point in being Irish if you dont know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. senator from New York, November 22, 1963

Lord, take me where You want me to go;

Let me meet who You want me to meet;

Tell me what You want me to say; and

Keep me out of Your way.

Father Mychal Judge, FDNY chaplain

A t another time, on another evening, the gathering at Tara and Brian Davans might have been a late-summer barbecue. The evening was warm, and the fading summers air carried the scent of ocean salt. But there was nothing ordinary about this day.

In the backyard, Billy Feehan cupped his hand over one ear with his cell phone pressed to the other as F-16 fighter jets screamed overhead. He and his family had just arrived from Princeton, New Jersey, where they lived. Three police departmentsthe Princeton Junction, the New Jersey State Troopers, and the NYPDhad formed a relay team to escort them from the leafy town fifty miles south of New York City to his sister and brother-in-laws house in Belle Harbor, New York. It was mid-span on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge when Billy had his first glimpse of what was left of the World Trade Center. Even from that distance, the enormity of it shocked him. The thick black smoke seemed to reach a mile into the sky.

John Feehan, Billys brother, and Brian Davan, both firefighters, had just returned home from the Trade Center site still wearing turnout gear. The cement dust that covered them gave their faces a ghostly white appearance, and their eyes were red from the acrid air, exhaustion, and tears. What they had just seen was beyond their understanding. A six-inch shroud of dust covered the remains of the mighty World Trade Center. Brian likened it to walking on the moon. But what he remembers most is not the deadly dust, the moonscape, or even the twisted steel girders. It is the sound of the firefighters Scott Air-Pak PASS alarms, hundreds of them, buried under a million tons of cement and steel, that he can still hear in his mind today.

On the phone with Billy was Henry McDonald, his fathers executive officer, sort of an aide-de-camp. Henry had been the one to call Billy to tell him that his father, Chief William Feehan, had been killed in the attack. Though Henry had retired from the FDNY a few months earlier, there was no one in the fire department who was closer to his dad. Billy wanted to get into the city to see his fathers body. Though Manhattan was essentially sealed to traffic, he knew Henry could make it happen.

The Feehan brothers arrived at Bellevue that night around eleven-thirty. A police lieutenant named Jimmy Marron from the 100th Precinct in Rockaway arranged to get them through the police checkpoints. Marron practically grew up with the Feehan children. His dad had come onto the fire department with Chief Feehan and had remained one of his closest friends. A cop in Bellevue led them through a room the size of a gymnasium. A couple dozen doctors and other medical professionals sat at desks waiting for the injured who would never come. Few in the buildings of the World Trade Center survived the attack. The brothers passed a gurney that held the body of a victim. You couldnt even call what they saw remains. Billy was not a firefighter, like his brother, father, and grandfather. He hadnt served in the Army. But its doubtful any experience could have prepared him for the sight of a body on which a 110-story building had fallen. He turned away and almost lost his nerve.