3 years and 7 months ago on the day after this day my brother firefighters and I were called downtown for a ride none of us can ever forget, to try and find our missing brothers of the FDNY .

I Cannot Ever Forget

J.G. Schwam April 11, 2004

Sometimes late at night I wake to hear the howl the wind made amid the twisted steel.

Even though I was surrounded by thousands of others at times it was the often only sound I could hear.

In my minds eye the sound looked like the abject fear in Edvard Munch’s painting, the scream.

Then the smell creeps out of my memory and into my nose.

It is a smell that is not humanly possible to forget.

I had smelled it before that day.

It is a smell every firefighter learns early in their experience. It is the smell of anger.

It is smell of failure.

That is what it smells like.

Whether or not there was anyway anyone could have prevented our having to smell that smell that day.

It is worst smell you can ever smell.

It smells like death, for that is what it is.

If you have never smelled it you cannot know it, you cannot imagine it.

But this day was different.

It was hard to hear anything but the sound that silence makes.

There was nothing to say.

The shock we all shared that day was all we could hear.

It is a silent sound because there are no words to describe it. But we all felt it.

What we all knew was that thousands, we knew not how many thousands had died here that day.

We searched for them.

We dug to save their memory.

We crawled on our hands and knees and sifted through the ash that was their lives.

We tried to find piece of who they were.

It was a task doomed for naught but we carried on.

We had no choice but to carry on or explode in anger at what had happened or why they were all gone and we could not find them.

You see, firemen like marines cannot leave the dead on the battlefield that is the fire ground.

We risk our lives to bring the dead home to lie in dignity, not alone without their souls in the place of their passing.

Strangely, the clear bright sun shined down through the stinking, mephitic ochre haze under which we toiled that day.

Somehow some power saw fit to try to burn it away in splendorous sunshine in the midst of the horror of death that day, but we could not see the sun.

And so we toiled away and shared the sadness we could not speak of until our job was done.

But we did not know then that the task of bringing home the dead to our families and the families who lost part of theirs that day, would never be finished.

They were not there.

They were ether suspended amid that horrific ochre haze.

Through our masks and bandanas we breathed their remains that day.

No I cannot forget. It is one of those things like that smell. It will be with me always.

Every person that died in that pile that will be with me forever for I have breathed a part of their lives.

In their memory let us wage peace.

Because war begets war, it always has.

I remember that day and share the sadness of those that lost a part of their lives that day.

I share the sadness of those that died for freedom before that day, in Iraq, in Somalia on both sides and in Rwanda when no one listened.

I remember that day and remember the cries unheard in Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Tehran and Chechnya.

Let us wage peace in their memory.

Let us not wage death in their name.

For if we do there will only be more.

I have smelled that smell.

It is not a smell any firefighter ever wishes to smell again, but unless we learn to listen and learn to wage peace we will again.

Nunquam Alieno CCCXLIII

IX XI MMI

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J.G. Schwam is the managing editor of liberalpatriot.org and a contributing writer for liberalslant.com