00:00I was off duty the morning of 9-11. I didn't even know what was going on. I was
00:05in the shower. I got out of the shower. I got a phone call. It was maybe 9.30 in
00:11the morning. You know, a friend of mine just called, said, hey, are you, you know,
00:16wanted to make sure you're okay. I don't know if you were working today. You know,
00:20told me what was going on. I turned on the TV. I saw what everybody else saw. I
00:24immediately got dressed, jumped in my car, and I was living in Brooklyn at the
00:29time, and I was on the other end of Brooklyn where I lived, but where I
00:32lived, I had a clear view of the World Trade Center, so when I got outside, I
00:35got in my car, I happened to look, and I could see two towers burning. I made my
00:39way towards the towers, and I walked up whatever street it was. I was about a
00:43half a block away. The first guy I ran into was a guy from my firehouse, Richie
00:47Murray, and he looks at me. He goes, the whole truck is gone, and I was like, what
00:54do you mean the whole truck is gone? He said, they're all gone, he goes, because he
00:56had a radio with him. He goes, I've been calling these guys for the last 45
00:59minutes, they're not answering the radio. I'm telling you, they're gone. So when he
01:03told me who was working, you know, my heart was broken just thinking about who
01:07these guys were, you know, who had kids. The one thing that haunts me to
01:15this day is the sound of the pass alarms. There's an alarm that automatically
01:20turns on when you turn your oxygen tank on, and it's like a sensor alarm. If you're
01:25standing still for about a minute, it starts beeping, and then you have to
01:29shake a little bit to turn the alarm off. And the reason that we wear those is
01:32because if you're in a fire, and God forbid there's a collapse, you get knocked
01:37unconscious, or you're trapped and you can't move, after a minute, the pass alarm
01:43is going to go off, it's going to start beeping, and that's going to go into
01:46alert all the guys in the area, hey, somebody's in trouble, and you can follow
01:50the sound of the pass alarm. So being on the pile, all we heard was hundreds of
01:54pass alarms going off underneath us, and we knew what the sound was, and there was
02:01nothing we could do about it. You know, how many tons of steel were all these guys
02:05buried under? And over the course of the next hour, two or three, the battery
02:11started fading in those pass alarms, and one by one, the pass alarms just died out.
02:18Bobby Regan was the lieutenant of Ladder 118 that day. He ran the Little League
02:23out there where he lived. He had two kids. Our fire was unique in the fact that we all
02:29stayed in the kitchen morning, noon, and night. It was constant ball breaking and, you
02:34know, a lot of noise in our kitchen, but Bobby was very quiet, very laid back. He just
02:39took it all in. He was like our quiet leader. Vernon Cherry, he was the senior guy in
02:46Ladder 118. He had, I think he had 28 years on the job when 9-11 came around. He
02:52was the official singer for the fire department. He was involved with an
02:55organization called Songs of Love. If there was sick children, they would write a
03:03song that would be specific to the child, you know, the child's name, friends,
03:08parents, and, you know, incorporated into a song, and then they would go out and find
03:11people to sing the song. Leon was like our Superman. He was a giant. He had to be 6'4".
03:17He was a monster. We always thought, like, he was holding up those towers until everybody
03:21got out. Great, great attitude. Always in a good mood. Always laughing. We joked all the
03:28time. You know, his nickname was Physical Lee. Joey started off in Engine 205 and then, after a few years,
03:37he transferred across the floor to Ladder 118, because he wanted to get experience
03:43doing everything. And, uh, he actually got promoted to Lieutenant after he had passed away,
03:51because he passed the test. He was on the list. He would be the guy when, uh, school trips would
03:59come
03:59to the firehouse. Joey would be the guy spending an hour on his hands and knees in his full bunker
04:06gear,
04:06crawling around, teaching kids about fire safety, and then taking them into the kitchen for cookies
04:11and things like that. Pete Vega, I think he did six years in the Air Force. He also was an
04:16iron worker,
04:17and then he became a fireman. I think he had about eight years on the job when 9-11 happened.
04:22If it was
04:22around at a time, then his nickname probably would have been Google. You know, he was super smart. Uh, we
04:27always
04:28tease him because he had a big head, and we always, you know, make a lot of jokes about his
04:32big head,
04:32but he needed that big head because he had a store a lot in that big brain. Politics, trivia, anything
04:37he wanted to discuss, firefighting, military, you know, uh, construction, anything. Pete, Pete,
04:43Pete was a walking encyclopedia. Scotty came to the firehouse like he had 20 years on the job. His
04:50nickname was the dog, because there's an expression, I think it started in the military, called a salty dog.
04:55It's somebody who has a lot of, a lot of time on the job. Also, because he wasn't the cleanest
04:59guy in
05:00the world. He, he, Scotty was, uh, well known for wearing everybody's clothes but his own. Scotty was the
05:06biggest ball breaker you ever met, but he had a way, he had a way of insulting you, but you
05:14were almost
05:14flattered by it. But he was, uh, a great fireman. He always said if you were going to build a
05:20fireman from
05:21scratch, he would be the prototype. You know, he had the build for it. Um, he was fearless. We do
05:26a drill
05:27twice a day, one during the afternoon and one at night for like an, like an hour. We might go
05:31into a
05:31building and, you know, size it up and talk about what would we do if there was a fire here.
05:36The deputy
05:36chief shows up and he wants to sit in on our drill. And he wasn't most, the most liked chief
05:44on the job. He was,
05:46you know, he was a stickler for detail. A drill was from seven o'clock to eight o'clock at
05:50night and
05:53eight o'clock on the dot. Scotty gets up, goes, okay, that's it. Drill's over. Thanks for coming,
05:59chief. And he walks over, he takes the chief hand and he kind of makes the chief stand up
06:03and he puts his arm around the chief and he walks him out the kitchen door and he goes, chief,
06:08he goes,
06:08he goes, I don't understand why the guys don't like you. I think you're okay. And like the chief was
06:12like dumbfounded. And the chief looked at him, he's like, what's your name? And he goes, Eddie
06:16Green, because he was wearing another guy's shirt. And he walked the chief out the door and the chief
06:22never came back to one of our drills ever again. Scotty is also, you know, Pete Davidson's dad. I've
06:28known Pete since he was born. And after 9-11, like I said, we stayed as close to the families
06:35as they
06:35would allow us and always stayed very close with Pete's mom. In 2019, he called me up and he said,
06:44I'm doing a movie with Judd Apatow. He's directing it. And there's some fire department stuff in the
06:51movie. And Judd wants to meet some of my father's friends. So I rounded up a bunch of old timers
07:01and we went to breakfast at a diner in Brooklyn near our firehouse. In my head, I was like, man,
07:07I said, I could play myself. I wonder if I could get a part in this movie. I go in
07:12for my audition
07:13with Pete and I walk into the room and he looks at me, he goes, he's like dumbfounded. He's like,
07:17what are you doing here? I said, I'm auditioning for role. I said, but I don't want to ask a
07:21favor
07:21because in case I'm no good at it, I don't want to put you on the spot. Pete called me
07:25the next day.
07:25He said, hey, congratulations. You're going to be one of the firemen. So I actually ended up playing
07:30the captain of the firehouse. Put the mask on before we get off the rig. I mean,
07:34I'm standing at that front door for a minute waiting for you. What the hell? Marty Egan was our
07:38lieutenant. He got promoted to captain not long before 9-11, but he worked on our house for a lot
07:45of years and he was, he was the master. He knew everything. He was a great teacher.
07:51He was a great officer. He was another guy. Like I said,
07:53he hung out with us all the time. He went out after work. He was like one of the guys,
07:58Bobby Wallace. He was a lieutenant in engine 205, but he was working in engine 226 on 9-11.
08:04His vacation ended a few days before 9-11. So he wasn't even scheduled to work on 9-11,
08:10but I think he owed the city a tour. Like sometimes you're able, like if you need off for something,
08:15you can take off and then you got to work on a day, you know, to pay it back. And
08:19he came off his
08:21vacation and he was paying back a tour and that's where he worked that day. You know,
08:26it's 50 guys in the firehouse and we're all tight. We're all like brothers. You know, they call it a
08:31brotherhood because that's what it is. It's a brotherhood. I think that if, if, if we had to do
08:36it all over again, we'd still all be down there, down at ground zero, even though they told us the
08:43air was safe and we knew it wasn't, we'd still be down there doing what we did back on 9
08:49-11. But,
08:51you know, I, I just think it's important that people, you know, never forget what happened that
08:57day, but it's a lot of us are still living it today and we're going to live it for the
09:02rest of our lives.
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