HEROISM: 9/11 firefighters saw things in the Twin Tower rubble you just should not have to see . . .
SEÁN CUMMINS has a presence that is familiar if you have ever been in the company of a man built for efficiency.
At 48, with a shaved head, he is muscular, with ripped forearms and focused blue eyes that track every movement in his surroundings.
Like many men whose existences are focused on pure necessity, Cummins exudes a certain coiled pain. He reads military novels and spy stories. He runs marathons. He loves movies. And he fidgets.
Cummins is also a hero. He is in the business of saving people’s lives, but he seems to do it more often than most. He’s got a collection of medals, for pulling a unconscious man out of car submerged in the Hudson river, for carrying an elderly woman out of a burning building, that sort of thing.
But today we are sitting in the living room of his somewhat drab house in Queens, New York – there are no awards or medals around – and he is trying his utter best to act like a normal person.
“Would you like some more tea?” he asks, standing in a kitchen filled with crammed bookcases. “Uh, don’t mind me,” he says as he pours himself another. “I drink at least 30 cups of tea a day.”
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, Cummins, who grew up in Finglas, Dublin, switched his shifts as a rescue New York fireman with two good friends so he could drop his mother at the airport for her Aer Lingus flight home. Both men died, two of the 343 New York firefighters killed that day.
“The hardest thing was seeing Sally when I was coming from the Pile,” says Cummins, referring to the mound of rubble left when the towers collapsed and his friend Stephen Siller’s wife.
“Really the whole year after is a blur.”
For months, Cummins worked at the smouldering pile at Ground Zero, digging out body parts, digging and digging when others couldn’t take it anymore. People ask him what it was like and mostly he doesn’t answer.
“I’ve worked rescue, I’ve been in the military, I still am. I know what’s it like to rescue bodies. But September 11? It was collecting things this size . . . ” He holds up a salt shaker.
“I put a woman’s hand in my pocket because I had no place else to keep things. You don’t want to tell people that.”
People considered Cummins a hero, but he was tormented by guilt, and he sought relief. Author Michael Lesy, who has written extensively on heroism, says the hero experiences “atonement mixed with brotherly love”.
“Heroism,” writes Lesy in his classic book, Rescues, “is a conjunction of opposites. It is both an act of self-sacrifice and an act of self-reclamation.
“The hero rescues his own self as he rescues another . . . Heroism is a dialectic; all the bad the hero knows about himself collides, in his conscience, with all the good he hopes to be.”
Interwoven, says Lesy, is the compelling force of love.
Atonement for Cummins, who served in the US navy, army, and air force, meant signing up for a one year tour of duty in Iraq. He believed there were weapons of mass destruction there, and he clearly believed there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and what happened in New York.
But going to Iraq, where he worked in special operations helping to rebuild infrastructure in villages, was about something more. Was Cummins testing fate, courting danger?
“Well, I thought, put it on the table. Put Iraq on the table. See how it goes,” he says. Growing up in Ireland, he adds, gave him a unique perspective in Iraq. “Americans see things as very black and white. But I could see the gray areas. Ireland is complicated, and Iraq was complicated.”
It might be unfair to describe Cummins as haunted; he has probably always carried the intensity of a man driven to work under extreme conditions. But before September 11th, he was able to get a good night’s sleep.
“Oh I think I’ve slept through the night four times in the last 10 years. But I did a couple weeks ago!” he says, brightening. “I went to sleep at 11pm and didn’t wake up till 6am!” He describes this event with the excitement of a person who has discovered something thrillingly exotic.
Divorced, he says he would be in Afghanistan right now but for his two 14-year-old daughters. Promoted after 9/11, his days are spent in the prestigious Rescue 1, one of the five rescue squads in New York, the oldest rescue squad in the US.
Whenever something bad happens in Manhattan – a steam pipe bursts, a crane falls over, a bomb explodes, something unimaginable happens . . . Cummins is there. He says he is especially happy about getting to work in the intelligence side of the fire department.
“Fire has a lot to do with terrorism. Look at that abandoned empty building. Nothing. Now it explodes and is on fire! They get attention with fire. It is the cheapest terrorist tool in the world.”
This weekend, Cummins will spend the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in a remote corner of the desert in Utah. He will don a respirator and complete a 40 hour course in chemical and biological detection at a vast US army facility that gained fame earlier this year for a secret “lockdown” after a vial of VX nerve gas went missing.
When he returns home, he is planning to attend another course to get his certification in EOD, the job called Explosive Ordinance Disposal that was depicted in the movie The Hurt Locker.
After that? Perhaps, sometime soon, Cummins will somehow find another peaceful night.
Seán Cummins is one of several Irish people caught up in 9/11 who are interviewed for Anne Roper's RTÉ documentary, The Ashes of 9/11,to be shown on RTÉ 1 television on Sunday at 9.30pm