Twenty-five years on, the loudest lesson from 9/11 is still the quietest one: appreciate every damn day. In this replay from the Independent Americans archive, Paul Rieckhoff — combat veteran, 9/11 first responder, and founder of IAVA — hands the mic to his friend firefighter Al Barry of Engine 65. Al walks us floor by floor up the North Tower stairwell, through the May Day at 22, through the collapse of the South Tower that he first mistook for elevators being recalled, and through the black cloud on West Street where he ended up at the bottom of a pile of strangers under a police car. It is not a war story. It is a working man’s story about a job that turned into history.
The conversation goes where most 9/11 retellings will not. Al talks about the years after — the ceremonial bugler who couldn’t hit the notes on TAPS anymore because his lungs were shot. The brother firefighter lost to suicide. The retired 40-year man lost to cancer. The father-in-law and the father and the brother, all gone in eighteen months. He talks about finally sitting with a counselor, about how the guys from Vietnam in his firehouse never spoke of it, and about how the newer generation is finally starting to. If you were not born yet in 2001, this is the episode to share. If you were there, this is the brother-to-brother conversation you already know by heart.
In this episode
- How a bad knee at every fifth floor of the North Tower stairwell almost certainly saved Engine 65’s crew
- The May Day at floor 22 — and why that number matters for the radios that failed higher up
- Al’s mistake that the South Tower’s collapse was ‘all the elevators being recalled’
- The bodies on West Street, the sounds mistaken for gunfire, and walking in as a nozzle man on his first big job at 65
- Getting buried at the bottom of a human pile under a police car when the North Tower came down
- Making a collect call to a cousin on Long Island from a pay phone to get word to his family that he was alive
- Engine 65’s rig found six stories below grade the week before Christmas 2001
- The slow unraveling — lungs, TAPS, a member’s suicide, a 40-year brother lost to cancer — and the years it took Al to sit with a counselor
- How the Vietnam-era guys in the firehouse never talked about it, and why the current generation finally is
- Paul’s throughline: never forget, appreciate every damn day, and go on the log flume
