Forty Feet Behind: A New York Firefighter's 9/11

Niels Jorgensen spent more than 21 years in the New York City Fire Department. He was at Ground Zero on September 11, 2001, and was later forced to retire after leukemia linked to the cleanup. Lex Fridman recorded the conversation on the 20th anniversary. Jorgensen now hosts *20 for 20*, a 20-episode series for the 20 years since the attacks. He does not open with geopolitics. He opens with a bright, late-summer Tuesday and a four-and-a-half-year-old at the door.

He left the house around 6:30 a.m. His daughter asked which truck he was driving — the fire truck, the oil truck, or the Boar's Head truck — because he held three jobs. Firefighters, police officers, and EMS workers in the city, he says, do not make much; if you want to live there while a spouse stays home with children, you hustle. He told her he was on the oil truck. She said he should be safe today. He worked for Quinlan Fuel on the north shore of Staten Island, looking out on New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, and, past that, the towers.

The first plane hit while he was on his route. News radio said an aircraft had struck the World Trade Center. He stopped the truck and saw dark black smoke. His first thought was a Learjet pilot who had veered off for a photograph and hit bad wind. He was already counting fatalities: the business day had started, the buildings should have been packed. A few minutes later the second plane hit. He knew immediately they were under attack, flew the truck back, told his boss he had to go, and headed for the city in a yellow Volkswagen Beetle.

Off-duty New York responders are not supposed to freelance a scene. Accountability and safety require that the on-duty platoon handle it unless a recall is issued — an order that every police officer, firefighter, and EMS worker report to their command, draw gear, and wait for deployment. Jorgensen thinks the last recalls before 2001 were the 1968 riots and a 1970s blackout. His father, 34 years in the FDNY, had drilled the rule: if something bad is going down, do not just rush in. If nobody knows you are there, a well-intended man can get lost, trapped, and unlooked-for.

His wife, who rarely raised her voice, yelled into the phone: do not go in, go to the firehouse first. He was on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at a bend they called Dead Man's Curve, deciding whether to take the Battery Tunnel into Manhattan or exit to Ladder 114. He had no gear, no protection, no breathing apparatus. She told him to do what his father would do — follow the recall. He hung up, said he loved her, and went to the firehouse. He still thinks that if he had driven into that tunnel unequipped, he would have been a liability, or the 344th name.

The voice in his ear was a man of few words. In 1978, at 38, his father was sent home with end-stage non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and told to get his affairs in order. He said he had three young kids. Hours later a doctor called: Sloan Kettering had a new drug; they wanted him as a test case. For four years he took the Staten Island train and the ferry, looking at the towers, then reversed the route every other Thursday for an infusion that left him violently ill for days. A ten-year-old Niels wiped vomit from his face in a darkened room. Saturday he might keep down tea; Sunday he put on a robe, drank black coffee, and watched the news; Monday he went back to work. He is 82 and still here. The hanging-up line was always the same: keep low. Stay below the flames. Follow orders. Go to the firehouse.

The 1880s brick firehouse was empty and eerie. The dispatch computer was still chirping. The ticket said Ladder 114, West World Trade Center, aircraft into building. Jorgensen logged himself in the journal, called the 40th Battalion, and started signing in men as they arrived. A lieutenant took command: get 12 guys, get a city bus, the Battery Tunnel would probably be closed on bomb threats, go to the Brooklyn Bridge. They flagged a bus. The driver would not give them the vehicle; he would drive them. They picked up off-duty crews from Engine 201 and 239 and ran for the bridge.

Just before they boarded, the first tower came down. Jorgensen had heard his lieutenant, Dennis Oberg, on the radio: Tally Ho — Ladder 114's nickname — responding to the command post. Oberg was taking the company toward a building when he looked up, saw what he took for disintegration, and turned the men around. Run. Don't look back. Don't look up. They sprinted and dove under a fire truck. The men 40 feet behind them were under a pile ten stories deep. Farther into that pile was Oberg's rookie son, Dennis Jr., detailed to Ladder 105. Beside them was Jorgensen's childhood friend John Schardt and Engine 201's crew. They were all killed.

The irony still sits with him. In 1993, after the first Trade Center bombing, Jorgensen's senior man, Henry Miller, had told a young firefighter that the bombers had placed the device in the middle; in a corner they would have dropped the building half a mile to Canal Street. Don't kid yourself, Miller said: they will be back, and they will do it right. Miller died in the pile with Dennis Jr. Coming over the bridge, the second tower was gone. They felt like cowards for arriving late. A tenth-alarm assignment looked like 500 or 600 firefighters, plus Port Authority police, NYPD, court officers, transit cops. They thought everyone in there was gone. The FDNY would lose 343 members that day; Port Authority police 37; NYPD 23; EMS about a dozen; New York State court officers three; federal agents two.

Fridman asks about the famous photograph of a falling man — people above the fire choosing to jump rather than burn. Jorgensen calls those acts sheer desperation. He has been in enough heat, including a stay in a burn center, to know that even seconds of it are intolerable without gear. Some people took umbrellas or garbage bags, hoping to slow the fall. He does not fault them. The first FDNY member killed that morning, Firefighter Daniel Suhr of Engine 216, was struck by a jumper. A friend of Jorgensen's was ordered to carry Suhr's body about a hundred yards to Engine 10 / Ladder 10, lay it on a bunk, cover it with a sheet, and post a sign: firefighter killed, do not disturb. That assignment is why the friend's engine company lived. Their original path would have put them on the bridge with Ladder 118, in a photograph of a tractor-trailer rig aimed at two burning towers. In the fire service, as in the military, you do not leave anyone behind. The man who carried Suhr still carries the guilt of being alive because he was carrying the dead.

Ground Zero was controlled chaos: a semblance of command, a frantic pace, city blocks of pulverized steel, dust, and concrete, fighter jets banking around the Brooklyn Bridge. Pass alarms on Scott air packs — the motion devices that scream if a firefighter stops moving for 30 seconds — were going off under the pile. Jorgensen's crew searched a post office after 7 World Trade came down, then shuttled jaws of life, airbags, stretchers, and hundred-pound generators across a jagged ravine where a hundred feet could take half an hour. Seventy feet down, a firefighter from his father's old Ladder 172 asked what he heard. Hissing gas, falling sand, a woman's pocketbook, a high-heeled shoe, a sneaker with nobody in it. No voices. After about the fourth day the operation was officially a recovery.

That first night they could not breathe or see. They rode a city bus back through the Battery Tunnel. Unbeknownst to them, an off-duty firefighter named Stephen Siller, from Squad 1, had already run that tunnel. Traffic was stopped on a bomb report; he put on about 60 pounds of gear, ran two and a half miles, caught a truck on the far side, jumped off on West Street looking for his company, and was never seen again. His brother Frank built the Tunnel to Towers Foundation in his name. It has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to put gold-star families, severely wounded veterans, and killed or badly injured first responders into homes — smart homes when the wounds require them. Jorgensen says Siller did not have to do it. Nobody would have shamed him for turning around. That, to him, is the depth of a man's soul.

What does it mean to be a great firefighter, Fridman asks, and a great human being in a situation like that morning? Jorgensen says houses will argue definitions, but the industry as a whole knows the shape: you put everyone else first, especially the team. There is no *I* in TEAM. You run in with that team for strangers. He spent almost 25 years of adult life in uniform and saw people he calls giants in spirit. After a Christmas fire, someone in the kitchen would pass the hat — 50 dollars a man for presents and turkeys — and men making $12.25 an hour would not blink. The press, he says, does not show that soft edge. Warriors need a rough exterior or they die. The great ones keep a heart under it.

He became a firefighter because of his father. At five he walked into a house that smelled of smoke, diesel, and gear, got stuffed with ice cream in the kitchen, and decided the men were a baseball team in a garage. The civil-service exam came out when he was 14; he was furious he could not sit it. His father handed him a circulating copy. He scored a 99 on a practice run and still could not get hired. He wanted to come home smiling the way his father had after the burning 1960s and 1970s. He got paid to laugh, and sometimes to cry, and the job-breaking never stopped.

Ladder 114's radio nickname is Tally Ho. In World War II, an airborne Ranger named Bad Jack Carroll jumped into Normandy, fought through Bastogne, came home, and joined the FDNY. When the trucks first got radios, a driver was supposed to answer “Ladder 114, 10-4.” Carroll refused. He answered Tally Ho — the yell when you leave the plane. Out of about 350 engine and truck companies in the department, Jorgensen says they are pretty much the only one called by nickname on the air. The shamrock is Irish neighborhood memory: they used to park the rig in front of church on Sunday with one man inside to hear the radio. He served eight years there. The shirt is a bragging right and a Bronx-quality insult magnet. He loves the jocular ball-breaking. That is the identity he later could not bear to lose.

Later that night, helping to dig two trapped Port Authority officers out of a crevasse, Jorgensen looked up at the Century 21 sign still hanging, some of the neon broken, some of it lit, and thought: this is a war zone. Cell phones were flip phones with no signal. He could not reach his family for 12 or 13 hours. His retired father had deployed to the ferry terminal to move bodies; they set up tractor-trailers as a morgue and never filled them, because there were no bodies to take. He has not been able to make sense of men who take life in the name of a religion or a cause. He grew up with Irish family history that included brutalization and rumor and the IRA, and he still will not justify bombs aimed at innocents. Taking a life for survival, as a cop or a soldier might have to, is not the same as taking it from bloodlust. That, he says, is evil.

Fridman argues that America is still a beacon, that Twitter division is a surface racket, that good people outnumber the rest. Jorgensen agrees, with a firefighter's analogy: embers go out if you leave them; a cup of gasoline turns them into a face full of fire. He thinks some politicians and media figures pour that gasoline because anger sells. Ego and arrogance, people who think they are better than the other guy, are the downfall. His mother came from Ireland at 16, one of ten surviving children out of 14, now living with Parkinson's and still helping everyone in the condo complex but herself.

Empathy, for him, is operational. Filling in at a neighboring house, he found an elderly woman in cardiac arrest and a husband of 65 years who would not let go of her hand. He winked the crew through CPR, held the husband's hand, and asked if he had faith and wanted to pray. They said the Lord's Prayer. The woman died; the man came back days later to thank them. Jorgensen made a habit of touching the hand of the dead and offering a short prayer, whether they had faith or not. A first responder, he says, is sometimes the last bridge between a family and a loved one. You only get that moment once.

The first day they had no breathing apparatus. Someone handed out 69-cent hardware-store paint masks that sweated through and stuck to the face in 30 seconds. It felt, Jorgensen says, like swallowing a box of razor blades: glass, cement, something caustic. Walking back up the hill to the firehouse that night, struggling to breathe, an older firefighter said, now we're all dead. Jorgensen said they had made it. The older man said they had just breathed poison for hours, then days, then months. Starting in 2003 and 2004, men began coming down with rare, fast cancers, and they were young. One of the first, John McNamara, was 33 or 34, colon cancer, gone in 2005. Jorgensen told friends he felt as if he were running through a minefield, waiting for his mine.

He felt wrong from 2008. In 2011 his blood work collapsed and they pulled him off the truck. A department doctor looked at an engorged spleen sticking out of his abdomen like a football, tipped his hand as if drinking, and asked if it had been a busy summer — the stereotype that post-9/11 firefighters had drunk themselves sick. Jorgensen screamed at him. His blood pressure was 240/140, platelets were gone, the spleen was about to rupture. A paramedic overrode another indifferent physician and raced him to Brooklyn Methodist. The ER doctor said he was not leaving. They would drill his hip for marrow. The team later told him he had about 48 hours to live. The leukemia was so rare that North America sees about 500 cases a year. Seven responders in his area — police and fire — got it in six months; two died in the first days of treatment.

Survival meant compressing two and a half years of chemo into seven days. Nurse Mike Nunez came in wearing a hazmat suit. A drip of the drug hit the IV tubing and the tube smoked and burned. Jorgensen refused. Nunez took his hand: if you don't take it you're dead; you have three kids; I have no other option. The burn ran from the vein up the arm, across the neck, into the head, to the feet in about a minute. He rode that pain for seven days, praying to die, refusing painkillers until the last day. It wrecked his hearing and vision. It also worked. On the first night he had a vision of people he loved who were dead, many of them in the Trade Center, ending with his mother-in-law, six months gone after a stroke and a brutal coma. She used to call him her boyfriend because they could talk for hours. She smiled and said he was not ready; he had things to do. A doctor uneasy with religion sent a psychiatrist who was also a rabbi. The rabbi believed him: same God, same corporation, different departments. They had 40 minutes of a paid hour left, so they watched the Yankees.

He got sick in August 2011, was told he was out in October, and was officially retired in January 2012 — less than six months. Walking his rescue greyhound in the snow when the call came, he was angrier about losing the job than about almost dying. He calls it a priesthood. He would have done it for free; he would have paid the city to let him keep doing it. Twenty-four-hour shifts, cooking, cleaning, relentless chopping. He hopes his children get to feel a brotherhood like that once. Older generations, when his father got sick, could linger in an office for a decade. Now it was the bottom line.

He had already left the city for New Jersey and then for a quiet farming stretch of middle Tennessee, trying to heal what he calls a fractured soul. Broadway theater security showed him the slide: public urination and defecation, tourists who did not want to see it. Two years before the interview, four teenagers jumped him coming off the subway because he was wearing an American-flag hat, videoing the punches. He had spent a life protecting the place and was getting beaten for nothing. He still recites the immigrant ledger: a Danish grandfather through Ellis Island in the 1920s with $25, a bakery, an apartment building; an Irish mother at 16, cashier 50 or 60 hours a week, night school, married a fireman. Nobody, he says, is breaking down the doors to leave.

The medical bill from a month in the cancer ward was $125,000. Insurers said terrorism was excluded. Workers' compensation said leukemia was not covered. A private investigator photographed his children in front of the house for a lien. He brought the kids inside and cried. John Feal, a construction worker who arrived the day after 9/11 to cut steel, had lost half a foot to an 8,000-pound I-beam, spent six months in the hospital, and faced the same unpaid bills. He built the FealGood Foundation, paid mortgages and childcare for men stuck between insurers, then took an “army” to Congress. Firefighter Ray Pfeifer left hospice with terminal cancer to finish the fight. Detective Luis Alvarez testified days before he died. Jon Stewart shamed the room. In 2006 the first official 9/11-linked death was a detective whose protruding lungs the city recast as opiate abuse because of talcum from crushed pills; a mayor said he was not a hero. Jorgensen's line is short: shame on you, Mr. Mayor. He watched politicians line up three deep for responder photos and #NeverForget tweets, then hide in cloakrooms. A western congressman who advertised 22 years as a cop voted no until a dying officer got out of a wheelchair and asked who was going to pay a half-million-dollar bill. The man signed, then called it pork for his district — unaware that ten people from that district had come to New York to help and were dying too. Jorgensen's cancer is covered; if it comes back, his wife keeps the pension. Friends with advanced autoimmune disease, which he says is flying off the graph and is still outside the law, leave widows with nothing. On average, he says, one responder or recovery worker dies of related illness each day, and two more are diagnosed.

Fridman asks whether any 9/11 conspiracy theories hold. Jorgensen answers with fire-science as he learned it. Structural steel fails at a sustained 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Kerosene-based jet fuel burns around 2,200. The planes hit at about 450 miles an hour, loaded with thousands of gallons. Building 7 held the city's emergency-management backup and a generator with a 25,000-gallon diesel tank meant to run for weeks. Aircraft debris started a fire; the diesel took off; the temperature was enough. The towers, he says, came down as designed in a collapse — pancaking on themselves. Had they failed sideways, they would have planed a quarter-mile or more toward Canal Street. He was in the area of 7 World Trade just after it came down, not beside it when it fell, and he would like to believe physics took its course. In his heart he hates to think anyone in government would perpetrate that for gain. He also knows, from a career of horrific calls, that some people have no problem with any level of evil.

Why do the theories take hold? He is conflicted enough to admit he no longer knows whom to believe, and he can see how that mood helps a doubter. The pandemic, in his telling, is another campfire waiting for gasoline. People have extra time, need to belong, and start repeating the same story until they believe it. He will not doubt their intelligence or their intentions. He just does not find a plot of that size plausible; the operation would have been too big to pull off. Faith is the other side of the same problem: some people need to hold a fact in their hand. An atheist once lectured him on the Big Bang; Jorgensen, who barely got through high-school chemistry, asked who created the gas and the molecules. He had no figures either. He still thinks most people are good, and that the bad outshine them because if it bleeds, it leads.

Modern communication, he argues, has not made us kinder. His grandfather Nels, dead in 1979, paid every bill in person and did not trust banks. His father, born around the start of Hitler's war, is comic on an iPad. Jorgensen saw someone nearly walk into an open manhole while texting, and he has sat in restaurants where people at the same table texted each other. Look up from the phone, he tells his kids. He used to wait two weeks for an airmail letter from his grandmother in Ireland addressed to Master Niels William Jorgensen. He still writes by hand.

After he lived, he wrote David Koch to thank him for funding cancer research. Koch was a controversial business titan; the press was pounding him over politics. Jorgensen is a union man, and men like Koch, he notes, are not usually fond of unions. The letter said they might agree on nothing, but a regular dude was watching his kids grow because people like Koch believed research was worth the money. Koch's secretary called. The billionaire got on the phone, invited him to Sloan Kettering to dedicate a new cancer wing, and felt, Jorgensen says, like hanging out with his father. Both men were survivors. The commonality was the sledgehammer to the chest: you have cancer, you cannot breathe for 30 seconds, and then you ask the doctor to repeat it. Money and degrees do not enter that room. The morning of the towers, big-firm brokers and dishwashers making five dollars an hour on the 107th floor at Windows on the World died together.

In the ward he appointed himself a shaky ambassador. An older Black man with advanced throat cancer could not be understood unless you put your ear down; nurses were too busy. When the man was dying, Jorgensen rolled his IV pole down the hall, called a sister in North Carolina, and held the phone so a man who could barely speak could say he loved her and that he was going home. An hour later he was gone. A young woman with a leukemia they could not type — there are 49, each with its own treatment — refused the hip drill. He asked whether she was more scared of the needle or of dying, held her hand, counted ten more seconds, and they got a sample that put her on a road to recovery. He had spent a long time asking God why he had cancer. Then he stopped: he had not died with his friends; he had watched a little girl being born when John never saw his son. After that it was all gravy. He thanks God for the cancer because it let him walk the walk with people who cannot talk.

Love, in the last hour of the conversation, is the ingredient he keeps putting back on the table. His wife is the drill sergeant; his son once said, at 12, that he was scared of Mom and not of Dad. Children, from any background, become successful adults if they are loved, taught, and put first — the way a crew is the team, not the self. On the set of *Rescue Me* he hugged people until some came looking for the daily hug because it made them feel that somebody gave a damn. Small-town Tennessee neighbors check on you when the tractor is in a ditch. He has been praying to become a billionaire, which his wife calls a sin. He means he wants to give it away: therapy dogs for mentally wounded veterans, thousands of names on a waiting list, and old closed bases like Fort McClellan turned into places where vets can live and do light manufacturing. A veteran who did six to twelve years and five or six deployments at $7.50 an hour should not come home homeless. Ladder 114's old-timers once hung a sign that said “I am content.” Rival companies stole it. He is content, he says, and restless, because he still wants to do more good.

Fridman puts the 20-year Afghanistan war on the table: an October 2001 invasion, an abrupt withdrawal, more than 7,000 American dead, on the order of six trillion dollars, and more than 800,000 people killed in the wider conflict, many of them civilians. Jorgensen is a patriot who was a combat medic in an armored cavalry unit, trained for desert warfare before the first Iraq war ended without him. He did not want to go. He did not join to kill. He would have gone if sent, because he took an oath. His analogy is cancer: if you know the cells are there and you do not take them out, they spread and kill you. One of the hijacked planes carried a three-year-old Irish girl from the area of his mother's hometown. A friend, later dead of a 9/11-related heart attack, found her shoe with remains in it and thought it was a sick joke, because there were no children in the Trade Center. Jorgensen said it was from the plane. He has never gotten that shoe out of his mind. The people who did that, he says, needed missiles, an annihilation like a tumor.

What he does not want is another generation thrown into an endless war. If a camera crew can film pickup trucks with heavy guns, he asks, why can drones and radar-assisted systems not say good night and do it again tomorrow until the message lands? Fridman recounts putting the Dire Straits song “Brothers in Arms” to Jocko Willink — the idea that kids on both sides are thrown into death — and getting a hard no: some people are evil and do not deserve that compassion. Jorgensen sides with Willink, with a finer cut. World War II conscripts in Germany, Russia, and America were defending homelands they had been taught to trust. Soldier versus soldier is a rule warriors understand. Soldier versus civilian writes you off as a different beast. The enemy who treats a dead child as an asset for power is a rattlesnake. You do not pet it. You cut off the head.

He does not want U.S. troops committed there anymore. Hit surgically, hit hard, and stop pretending the region can be rebuilt out of thousands of years of tradition people do not want changed. At home he offers two metaphors he knows are argued. The garden theory: tend your garden inside the fence; weeds outside are not your first problem if they stay outside. The lifeboat theory: how many people can you pull in before the boat itself sinks? If the country cannot house its own homeless veterans, the ledger does not add up. Fridman quotes the line that we sleep because rough men are ready to fight. Jorgensen wants that strength coupled with a timeout to invest in people here.

The 20 stories in *20 for 20*, Jorgensen says, keep returning to the same few themes: selflessness, help offered to strangers, love, and faith. Mark Hanna, a Coptic Egyptian immigrant and Port Authority building engineer, helped get dozens of people off upper floors, then was ordered to walk an 89-year-old man down 78 flights. On the 21st floor he met Captain Paddy Brown of Ladder 3, who told him to evacuate and picked his brain about the structure. Brown and his crew kept going and were killed. Hanna and the old man were the last two known survivors out of that tower. Hanna is now a Coptic priest at St. Mary's in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Mariah never met her birth father; she had a premonition that someone in the family had died, and her adoptive mother said everyone was fine. Three years later she legally learned that her father, Tom, had been on Flight 93 with the “Let's Roll” passengers. Robert Burke, a working Hollywood actor (*Rescue Me*, *Blue Bloods*, *Gossip Girl*), gets out of bed at 2 a.m. as a volunteer firefighter because his best friends were Paddy Brown and Father Mychal Judge, the FDNY chaplain who had just given last rites to Daniel Suhr, was praying in a lobby, and was killed by debris. Judge, a Franciscan in sandals and a robe, had walked New York helping AIDS patients with whatever they needed.

Fridman offers a turn. In the years after the attacks people repeated two words: never forget. Perhaps what needs remembering is September 12. Jorgensen takes the handoff. That morning the West Side Highway was lined with people holding signs and American flags, every country, race, and creed, hugging, crying, thanking rescuers. A crew that had been beaten down the day before felt its morale lift. It was the first time he realized people really did give a damn. His grandfather Nels used to tear up at the flag and call them tears of joy. Jorgensen had been proud on the 10th and the 11th; on the 12th he was proud of the people. His fear is that only another catastrophe brings that back. He would rather skip the catastrophe. Stop the finger-pointing and the tantrums. A two-year-old on the floor for candy still does not get the candy, and still gets a swat.

He does not want photo ops. He wants to point: there's a dog, there's a dog, there's a dog. He has a large credit card with God, he says, and he intends to spend the rest of his days paying it forward, hoping that when the last day comes — 30 years or 30 months — he can say he made the most of the second chance from 2011. Fridman leaves him with Franklin D. Roosevelt: human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people; a nation does not have to be cruel to be tough. The practical list is already on the table. Push to close the autoimmune gap in 9/11 coverage so spouses do not lose a pension. Support Tunnel to Towers. Fund the therapy-dog waitlist. Do not let a doctor wave off a man who says he feels wrong. Write a specific person a letter. Remember the 12th.