In the wee hours of the morning about to turn
into Sept. 11, 2001, Marilyn Smith has just pulled a 12-hour nursing
shift at Moses Cone. She unwinds with a blackberry brandy at her
new house in Greensboro, then goes to bed and has the worst dream.
She's out on a ledge and falling, falling, when a hand she recognizes
reaches to her from below. She wakes up to daylight, heart pounding,
covers on the floor, and instinctively dials her husband's number
at work -- Ladder Co. 118 in Brooklyn Heights. Brooklyn Heights
Ladder Truck 118 sits buried in rubble of the World Trade Center
after terrorist attack. They're separated, moving on with their
lives, but when you date someone since age 15 and you're now 45,
you can only get so far apart. Leon's been down the week before
to help move their twin daughters into college. By the time he
gets the hair dryers, ironing boards, refrigerators and all the
clothes unpacked, fussing the whole way, even a 6-foot-4, 210-pound
veteran fireman is worn out. "Let's go to your house and have a
drink," he says. "Because this is a moment we've been waiting for." So
she calls him that Tuesday morning at the firehouse where he's
worked for 20 years, where he's know as "Express" or "Local Leon," depending
on how fast he steers the truck through traffic. She starts to
tell him about this dream she had. "That's funny you should mention
that," he says, only half listening over the squawk of the radio
traffic. "A plane just hit the World Trade Center. I can't talk
that long -- the engine (205) just left, and I'm waiting for a
call for the ladder. Now, take a hug. I gotta go." The thing about
Brooklyn is, everybody has a nickname -- even Ladder Co. 118. They
call it "Fire Under the Bridge," for the traditional party the
company throws under the Brooklyn Bridge every July. Up until this
past July, anyway. The old firehouse on Phil D'Adamo Plaza, named
for a fireman killed in the 1980s, sits almost in the shadow of
the bridge, a straight shot over the East River to Lower Manhattan,
City Hall and the financial district. So it's no surprise when
the call comes. As the big tiller truck pulls out of the narrow
streets and races over the river, Leon at the wheel, a photographer
in the Jehovah's Witness Watchtower building snaps a picture. In
the foreground is the tiny image of a ladder truck crossing the
bridge, dwarfed by two smoking World Trade Center towers looming
a mile overhead. And that's the last glimpse anyone in Brooklyn
gets of the six men on that truck. The last known person to see
them alive is Bobby Graff, an elevator mechanic at the Marriott,
who later tells rescuers that he remembers them because they're
tall and wear the red 118 badge on their helmets. A photograph
of World Trade Center victim firefighter Leon Smith is placed in
the stones under artist Fritz Koenig's "The Sphere" sculpture after
a dedication ceremony. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) They form a human
chain to keep panicked hotel guests and staff from running out
of the collapsing building the wrong way. Everybody's trying to
head for the nearest exit, but this turns out to be an abyss, where
the fleeing crowd would have been buried alive if not diverted
by the firefighters. All the grim autumn and the winter that follows,
searchers dig through the cooling rubble and find the bodies from
Ladder 118, one by one, the last on New Year's Eve. They find all
except Leon Smith Jr., 48, the one man everyone would have expected
to make it out. "In our eyes, Leon was invincible," says John Sorrentino,
an 11-year veteran from Bergen Beach. "Leon was like Superman.
It would take both those buildings coming down." It is now Labor
Day, the second day of September, a dreaded month that seems to
arrive suddenly after a year of slow-motion agony. The purple and
black bunting still hangs over the front of the firehouse -- one
of 75 FDNY companies that lost firefighters Sept. 11 -- the flag
is still at half-staff, the candles still in a plastic case outside,
shielded from the rain. Sorrentino is the firefighter who wrote
all eight eulogies for Ladder 118 -- including those of a captain
and lieutenant from the firehouse who were killed the same day
while filling in at different companies. The months that follow
Sept. 11 find the surviving members of Ladder 118 sitting around
the kitchen table in the firehouse, which is covered with snapshots
and clippings about the eight men. Sorrentino might say, "OK, now
let's talk about Leon." And they would tell stories, most of them
funny, and Sorrentino would take notes, write something up and
then read it at the services, solid as a rock. More Sept. 11 anniversary
coverage Not Eddie Greene. He's a big "tear-jerk," as he puts it,
looking spent last Monday morning from an all-night shift and too
many Marlboro Lights. Asked about Leon, his face tightens and he
shakes his head: "I'm all talked out." But just then, the firehouse
alarm rings, the garage door goes up, and everybody rushes out
on a call, leaving Eddie Greene sitting here by himself. "What
do you want to know about Leon?" he says. Eddie worked and lived
sidebyside with Leon for the 16 years he's been at this firehouse.
He's from Bay Ridge, of Irish descent; Leon from Bedford-Stuyvesant,
African American. It was uncommon for a black man to join the department
as Leon did 20 years ago, first working for sanitation, then traffic,
then passing the police exam. Still, he held out for the profession
that was his life's dream since he was 8 years old. Though black
firefighters are still few in New York -- a fact apparent in yearbook
photos of the 343 firefighters killed Sept. 11 -- things mesh for
him just fine. He goes out of his way to get to know the neighborhood.
He makes it to every picnic, Christmas party and wedding, even
when his wife is eight months pregnant with twins, even when it's
in Staten Island, where a white neighbor cracks to the host that
he's entertaining guests "from the other side" of town. "You gotta
problem with that?" the white firefighter snaps. After all, they're
roommates. They bunk in a big dorm upstairs at the firehouse, play
basketball and "foosball" to blow off steam, take trips to Florida
together, put on a benefit for a neighborhood girl with leukemia.
The firefighters all work two jobs, and they often do that together
as well. Leon and Eddie both work for a company that confiscates
knock-off designer watches, though Leon is a mechanic by trade.
He works on the 118's ladder truck, his "baby." For a long time,
that's all the company finds of the crew -- the truck. They salvage
some of the lights and a ladder, and it's stored in the garage,
precious metal the more seasoned firefighters are saving for a
memorial. The firehouse door goes up again, and the spanking new
118 replacement truck pulls in, carrying some of the probationary
recruits who have rotated in to bring the company back to full
strength. They stand out in their pristine helmets, with shiny
118 badges. "You can tell the new guys from the old guys," Eddie
Greene says. "I don't know those guys." He's tired. He got to the
trade center five minutes before the second tower collapsed, rushing
in there, just about to his death. Caught in the collapse, he wound
up with a scratched cornea and pneumonia, maybe just from exhaustion.
His wife and children worry about him every time he goes to work,
and he and the other members of 118, in turn, fret about the families
of the fallen firefighters -- eight out of a 25-man company. They
do what they can. When Leon's family came from North Carolina to
see ground zero, one of the firefighters handed Marilyn Smith a
paper bag and said, "Take this." She and her daughters were halfway
back to Greensboro before they looked in the bag. Inside was $5,000
cash. Had the shoe been on the other foot, Eddie knows, Leon would
be doing the same for Eddie's two children. Still, it all takes
a toll. Like a third of the department, including all the officers
remaining at this firehouse, he's thinking about retiring when
the time comes. But he won't give his age -- on Sept. 11, he suddenly
became the oldest man left at the firehouse. "If those guys find
out how old I am," he says, tilting his head toward the kitchen,
where the "probies" are cooking lunch, "I'll never live it down." M
emorial services are different from funerals. There's no casket. "That's
where my baby is buried," Leon's mother, Irene Smith, tells people
about ground zero, where her only child perished. Sometimes it
seems like there's nothing left of him. But then you meet Tiffany,
19, walking across the green at Bennett College on the first day
of class. Of the fireman's three daughters, including twin Yolanda,
Tiffany seemed to take it hardest. She pulled out of college in
Charlotte, where she'd been enrolled as a freshman for only a week
before Sept. 11, and moved back in with her mother in Greensboro.
That's when the men from 118 started calling. Every single day.
You have to go to college, they kept saying, and it was as if her
father were talking. "You're women and you're weak and you're a
SMITH!" he was always saying to them, the three girls and their
mother. "If anything ever happens to me, you get your butt into
school, 'cause I'll be watching you." Tiffany wasn't even born
that February night, 20 years ago, when Leon Smith drove his wife
to look at the little firehouse at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Marilyn asked if he was sure this was what he wanted, and he answered
yes, he would die for this job. "Every one of those guys had a
story," Marilyn Smith was saying recently, as the family prepared
to return to New York this week for the ground zero memorial. "September
11 is a sorrowful day, but it represents a lot of other things,
too. Even though you can be hit with the worst thing imaginable,
you find the inner strength to pick yourself up and continue to
press on. It's like everybody's one, now." Contact Lorraine Ahearn
at (336) 373-7334 or write 200 E. Market St., Greensboro, N.C.
27401.
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