|
|
 |
 |
by JAY PRICE
They brought the soldiers to the starting line first, wounded veterans straight from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, painfully young men in their running gear, walking tall on artificial limbs made of graphite and titanium. As if anybody at the start of the Firefighter Stephen Siller Tunnel To Towers Run yesterday needed to be reminded what personal sacrifice looks like, close-up.
The firefighters came next, hundreds of them, chased by the applause that's followed them since Sept. 11, 2001, when ballplayers and rock stars remembered that what they really wanted to be was a New York City fireman.
Then the Marines, running in their boots. The London Fire Brigade. Sgt. Anthony Ruiz, dressed in desert camouflage, Kevlar helmet and body armor, and carrying a full pack -- almost as much weight as the West Brighton fireman carried that other September morning, when he made the run of his life through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and got to the World Trade Center just in time to die. "For all the soldiers who couldn't be here," Ruiz said, holding a small American flag in one hand.
Behind him, another 10,000 runners and walkers were lined up in the E-ZPass lanes on the Brooklyn side of the tunnel.
They came to follow the footsteps of a hero. Now they were left to wonder, as the surviving spires of downtown Manhattan gleamed in the distance, what made men like Siller -- the ones just getting off duty, or just coming on, or headed for a golf date with their brothers -- to race toward the burning buildings when everybody else was trying to get out.
And what we ever did to deserve them.
The firefighters weren't the only ones who helped save the spirit of America, as Rudy Giuliani suggested.
In the hours after the hijackers drove the planes into the buildings, New Yorkers gave what they were equipped to give, whether it was the mayor or the lady who showed up at an aid station with a leaky plastic bag in each hand.
"I didn't have anything else," she said. "I made ice."
But the firefighters gave themselves.
"It sounds a bit corny," Tom Middleton was saying, "but you owe a debt to the blokes you're with."
Middleton's a retired London firefighter, as sincere as the broken nose on his face.
But what makes Siller's story so pure, and so compelling, is that he wasn't surrounded by other firefighters when he got to the tunnel, and found it closed.
And he went anyway.
The tunnel was a lot more crowded four years later, the sing-song cadence of the Marines echoing off the walls, carrying everybody within earshot.
Halfway through, uniformed firefighters lined the curb, holding American flags, and banners bearing the pictures of the fireman killed Sept. 11. Too many flags, and too many banners; 343 of them, in a line that seemed to stretch to eternity.
Some of the runners veered to the side of the roadway to touch a familiar name, or a face, the way they might at the Vietnam Memorial.
The firefighters offered encouragement, the way they did that other morning, when they were still going up when everybody else was going down.
Then the runners were in the sunlight again, passing the pipers waiting at the Manhattan end of the tunnel to bring the firefighters home; past the fireboat and the cheerleaders and marching bands, toward the spot where Stephen Siller was delivered into history.
"You know what it is," Vic Navarra was saying near the finish line. "People feel like they have to do something.
"This is what they do.
"This is like an annual cleansing."
And isn't that why we go to the Wall in Washington, or to Arlington National Cemetery across the river? Or to Gettysburg, where the men in Pickett's Charge kept pressing on until they were right under the Union guns; until the lines didn't break, or fall apart, they just evaporated, as if they'd never been there at all.
When Americans go to Normandy, they almost always find themselves at Omaha Beach, looking up at the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, wondering how ordinary men could've willed themselves up those sheer walls under fire on D-Day, on their way to save the world.
New Yorkdoesn't have any cliffs, and the Twin Towers aren't there anymore. That's why we'd need the Tunnel to Towers Run, even if it didn't already raise a ton of money for good causes; to remind us of the fireman's last run.
And if the mood at the finish line was as much a celebration as a memorial, why not? What city wouldn't celebrate the knowledge that it still makes men like that.
 |
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
