There's
a friary next to the Church of St. Francis of Assisi
on New York's West 31st Street. The friary is a building of stone
turned dark by the city's grime. There, the Rev. Mychal Judge
lived for 15 years. The priest's room was small and spartan.
He had a desk, a chair and a couch that turned into a bed.
The morning of September 11, 2001, the priest left
that room to do what his God had asked of him.
There was fire. It was fire where no one ever had
seen fire. A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, gouging
a wound high into the north tower, fire and smoke roiling from
the wound. Before anyone could know what had happened, before
anyone knew about a second plane, before anyone knew what evil
had done, firefighters from the 31st Street firehouse did what
firefighters do. They ran to the fire.
Those firefighters knew the priest from across
the street as "Father Mike." He was 68. His hair was
white and his cheeks were those of a boy, the color of roses.
A friend, Harry Ryttenberg, told the Washington Post that Father
Mike's face was "a map of Ireland." Once, working with
the city police, the priest spoke of an officer rendered quadriplegic
by bullets. He said, "We have to drop the baggage of hate.
We have to move on."
If only we could.
Hate brought fire to the World Trade Center, to
the Pentagon, to a field in Pennsylvania. President Bush says
we are at war. It's likely that more Americans were killed in
these acts of war than in any others on our land in a single
day. In the deadliest single day of the Civil War, 3,620 men
were killed at Antietam. If the death toll of September 11 reaches
5,000, and it may, more Americans will have died on one day in
New York than died in all but the five bloodiest years of the
Vietnam War.
Hundreds of our dead were firefighters, those men
and women whose courage and commitment are so profound that as
people run away from fire, they run into it. The World Trade
Center towers burned with 1,800-degree flames given life by jet
fuel. What can be done when elevators no longer 
work
and the fire is 80 stories above the street? This: Firefighters
in full gear begin climbing stairs to get there.
Father Mike was there. He had left the friary and
gone five minutes down the West Side Highway. A fire department
chaplain for nine years, he did his work.
He knelt at the side of a firefighter who had been
killed when a person falling from the building struck him. He
gave the man last rites.
Then debris from the collapsing tower rained down
on them both.
At ground zero, there was horror. An eyewitness
account from Richard Bodmer, a national account manager for The
Sporting News, a former Navy fire and rescue worker who volunteered
and worked with an EMS crew: "It was more frightening than
I can describe. What you saw on TV doesn't begin to tell the
story. There were fire engines covered with ashes and dust, and
you knew their guys were lost. One EMS ambulance was running
with nobody there. Very, very spooky. Before I could understand
what I was seeing, we were moving the body of a policeman crushed
to death by a piece of the building."
Soon enough, Bodmer saw more.
"The most amazing thing was the character
of an army of men who didn't know one another. They came from
all over the country, and their spirit was incredible. No panic,
only unity. This nightmare that was supposed to kill our spirit,
didn't; it did the opposite. I saw honor, pride, integrity, courage.
These were Americans united. If you weren't a patriot before,
you were after seeing that."
Joan Fiesta, an Illinois police officer, thought
her urge to help was only that of her job. "I was mistaken,"
she wrote in an e-mail. "It was an American urge, a human
urge." She went to a blood bank and was told to come back
later because the bank already was at capacity. At every turn,
she found "humanity, kindness and caring. .
. . As I watched with friends the firefighters in New York pull
those living souls from the rubble of the towers, our spirits
soared."
On a normal weekend, Fiesta said, she would work
a college football game. She thought it would have been good
last weekend for people "to sit together, sing the National
Anthem with pride, and watch a game that is all-American."
It's also true that it's all-American to raise high a flag and
say a prayer and reach out to those whom we love. It would be
nice, too, to drop what Father Mike called the baggage of hate.
Firefighters found the priest dead. They carried
him away from the rubble to nearby St. Peter's Church. There,
they prayed for the man who had prayed for so many of them. Then,
they carried him from the church and they carried him through
the streets and they carried him to the 31st Street firehouse
and they carried him to the friary.
*A 30-year veteran of chronicling sports, Dave
Kindred is one of its most 
decorated
writers. Kindred has been named State Sportswriter of the Year
15 times (in three states), and in 1998 was named National Sportswriter
of the Year by the National Association of Sportswriters and
Sportscasters. He has also earned the Red Smith Award for lifetime
achievement in sports journalism. In 1995, he was inducted into
the United States Basketball Writers Hall of Fame.Kindred has
been a weekly columnist for The Sporting News since 1991. His
print column appears weekly and he contributes regularly to The
Sporting News’ web site. Dave has also written six sports
books, including Around the World in Eighteen Holes.
