When the Story Is Too Big to Comprehend, Tell It Through One Life

Introduction by Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications

I was born nine years after the end of World War II. As I grew into adolescence and adulthood, I often asked my grandparents where they were when they first heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Even after hearing their stories, the event still felt somewhat unreal—an abstraction of sorts.

September 11 can too easily become something similar: numbers, photographs, memorial ceremonies and the familiar instruction to “Never Forget.”

But how do we remember something so enormous, especially when a growing portion of the country has no memory of that morning at all?

In an extraordinary piece for The Atlantic, Sally Jenkins answers that question by making the story smaller.

She tells us about Kevin Dowdell, a lieutenant in the Fire Department of New York, a husband, father, decorated firefighter and member of the elite Rescue 4 company in Queens. On September 11, 2001, Dowdell led his men into the South Tower. He never came home. His remains were never found.

But Jenkins’s story is just as much about what happened afterward. Dowdell had taught his sons, Patrick and James, not to stand on the sidelines when someone needed help. After their father disappeared, the teenage boys went to Ground Zero and helped search, not only for their father, but for other people’s fathers. In the years that followed, Patrick graduated from West Point and served in Iraq. James became an FDNY firefighter and eventually a lieutenant, his father’s rank. Their mother, RoseEllen, somehow carried the family forward.

Today, the Dowdells still leave Kevin’s chair empty at their September 11 family dinner. A glass of red wine is placed before it, and the family passes the glass around the table, telling stories about the man who should be sitting there.

There were 2,977 people killed on September 11. Numbers tell us the size of the tragedy. Stories like Kevin Dowdell’s tell us what those numbers mean.

Kevin Dowdell’s Boys

When a veteran firefighter vanished on 9/11,
his teenage sons went looking for him.  

By Sally Jenkins, The Atlantic

To a fire­fighter who is inside one, a fire cre­ates as much dark­ness as heat. Flames start bright but throw off smoke that can swathe everything in pitch black. Lieu­ten­ant Kevin Dowdell did not fight fires so much as he groped through and prob­lem-solved them, rely­ing on half-blind judg­ment and expert­ise—and his fel­low fire­fight­ers to keep flam­ing debris off his back.

At the cin­der­ing end of a suc­cess­ful 24-hour shift with the New York City Fire Depart­ment, Kevin would hang up his hel­met, so ash-rubbed that it looked salty, and drive home to his wife and two sons in Rock­away Beach, Queens. “Oh, we had a good job last night,” he’d say, elated as well as exhausted. By “good,” his fam­ily knew, he meant the fire had been big.

In his inner­most fire­fighter’s heart, Kevin liked it when the alarms went off. A good job broke the tedium of drills and dough­nut-dunk­ing in the fire­house kit­chen. It called on Kevin’s whole mind and body; he had to cal­cu­late burn rates and air­flow while wield­ing 40 pounds of gear. Fire needs four ele­ments: oxy­gen, heat, fuel, and a chem­ical reac­tion. Deprive a fire of even one of those, and it goes out. But in New York—a steel-stacked, deep-tunneled met­ro­polis with archi­tec­ture ran­ging from tene­ments to glass towers—the inter­ac­tion of the ele­ments is com­plex. One of the ques­tions on the test to become a lieu­ten­ant: What is the expan­sion factor of a 100-foot steel beam as it reaches the inher­ent heat level of 1,200 degrees Fahren­heit?

A fire­fighter had to be part chem­ist, part engin­eer, and part dare­devil. But the mis­sion itself was simple. “You show up on someone’s worst day and try to make it bet­ter,” Kevin told his sons, Patrick and James.

The FDNY had a say­ing: There were people who just worked for the depart­ment for a paycheck, and then there were fire­fight­ers. Kevin was a fire­fighter. “They love to go to a fire,” his widow, Roseel­len, told me, sit­ting at Patrick’s kit­chen table in Rock­away Beach. “They’re wait­ing for a good fire.”

But on Septem­ber 11, 2001, Kevin met a fire that looked like hell’s own flames. It burned a quarter of a mile up in the sky, unreach­able by any lad­der, almost at the top of the World Trade Cen­ter’s Twin Towers. Kevin’s unit, Res­cue 4 in Queens, arrived about 20 minutes after the second hijacked plane had hit. He would have read the color of the smoke and picked apart the ele­ments of the fire: avi­ation fuel, com­bust­ible office mater­i­als, and an oxy­gen-rich chim­ney effect. They did not make for a good fire. They made for an uncon­tain­able one. Nev­er­the­less, Kevin led his men into the South Tower.

Twenty-five years after the attacks, “Never For­get” is a T-shirt slo­gan. A third of the Amer­ican pub­lic is too young to recall that day. Anniversar­ies have become rote rituals in which politi­cians describe scenes they did not wit­ness and national unity that no longer exists. To get bey­ond the benumbed abstrac­tion, it’s neces­sary to remem­ber with spe­cificity. Septem­ber 11 was a lived event. One way to recall it mean­ing­fully, then, is through a life.

To read the rest, please click here.

 

Photo Credit: ChatGPT