It Wasn't Suicide, It Was Work

It's three days past the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th, and I still have a lot of thoughts, more than in the past because I learned new things about that tragic day. I've been consuming a lot of media. Documentaries. Analysis of how the terrorists planned the attacks. Personal accounts from people who missed their train or changed their morning routine and lived because of it. The survivor stories that still, a quarter century later, make you hold your breath. I've encountered more information and different perspectives that we may not have been ready to absorb before.

I watched a video just this morning where the narrator described the firefighters climbing the stairwells as civilians rushed down. He said they were climbing on a suicide mission, knowing they would never return.

I had to set my coffee down.

I don't think that's what was happening. And I think calling it that, as reverent as it sounds, actually sells those firefighters short.

Now before you close this and write me off, hear me out. Because I'm not fighting the heroism. I'm fighting the narrative.

Here's what we've collectively forgotten, or maybe never knew. In 2001, the Twin Towers were understood to be overbuilt. The prevailing belief was that they could withstand the impact of a large aircraft. That wasn't some obscure engineering footnote. It was widely known. Building managers knew it. Emergency responders knew it. Complete collapse was not the working assumption inside those lobbies. The towers had absorbed the initial impacts and remained standing. FDNY commanders did not expect either structure to fall completely.

And the firefighters entering those stairwells were not beginning what they understood to be a march toward certain death.

They weren't walking toward death. They were walking toward work.

I know that sounds blunt. But think about what FDNY actually does, day in and day out. These are professionals who train relentlessly for high-rise fires. They understand how air moves through tall buildings. They know how office furniture, carpet, and ceiling tiles feed a fire and how to starve it. They know suppression strategy floor by floor. They are exceptionally good at what they do, and they had been doing it in the vertical landscape of Manhattan for decades.

What they had never done was face multiple floors of fire near the top of a skyscraper.

I think that's what we were seeing in those photographs. The footage of firefighters pausing in the lobby. The faces that have become iconic. That wasn't the look of firefighters resigned to death. That was the look of professionals staring down the sheer enormity of what was ahead of them. Seventy, eighty, ninety floors of stairwell in full gear before they could even begin the job they came to do. For many of them, no call had ever required a climb like this. The physical demand alone was almost beyond comprehension.

In the documentary 9/11: Escape From the Towers, survivor Neil Lucente, who worked on the 81st floor of the North Tower, describes meeting a firefighter who seemed to be in charge and was polling civilians as they descended. What floor were you on? Fifty-seven. The fire was above them. Sixty-seven. Still above them. When Lucente answered eighty-one, the firefighter's face went completely white.

Another survivor from the same floor, Charlie Ross, describes a separate encounter. Ross looked behind him and told a firefighter there was nobody left up there. Let it burn.

The firefighter's answer was simple: "It's my job."

Those are two different moments, but together they tell us something. One firefighter's face went white. Another explained why he was still climbing. Not because death was the mission. Because the work was.

Without a doubt, there were seasoned firefighters who had a gut feeling that this one was different. Years of experience build instincts you can't explain, and some of those veterans had to have felt something ominous they couldn't quite name. That gut feel, born from decades of doing the work, may have led some to wonder if this was their last call. I won't pretend otherwise.

But that instinct came from their training and their experience. It came from being professionals who had developed a sixth sense for when a situation was beyond the playbook. Even that gut feeling is a testament to their expertise, not evidence of a death march.

The suicide mission narrative sounds reverent. But it can flatten 343 highly trained FDNY members into symbols of sacrifice and obscure their expertise, judgment, and agency. They did not enter those buildings merely because someone told them to. They entered with assignments, plans, and a professional understanding of what they were there to accomplish.

The truth is harder to sit with because it doesn't wrap up neatly. Those firefighters were thinking. They were planning. They were strategizing. They were looking at a problem no one had ever faced and choosing to engage it with everything they had. They were going to climb those stairs, reach those floors, and fight that fire. That was the mission. Not death. The job.

That the buildings fell doesn't change what was in their hearts on the way up.

Their heroism does not require us to pretend they had accepted their deaths before they began climbing. What makes their actions extraordinary is that they believed there was still work to do, people to reach, and a fire to confront. They were not surrendering to an ending. They were trying to change it.

Twenty-five years is enough time for stories to harden into something that feels true because we've heard it so many times. But the firefighters of September 11th deserve better than a myth that accidentally diminishes them. They deserve to be remembered as what they were: professionals who faced something beyond imagination, committed to the work they had sworn to do, climbing toward a fire they fully intended to fight.

I'm fighting the narrative because the narrative isn't big enough to hold what they actually did.