Absent Friends

Kevin Keegan was a probationary firefighter with three months' experience under his belt when the bell at Engine 168 rang on September 11. His shift was over; he didn't need to be there. But Keegan could often be found in the firehouse after his shift was over. Or before it began. Or on off-duty days. He liked the place: the kidding around, the stories, even the food.

“Kevin grew up here,” Owen McCardle told the Tribune. The gray-mustached Pleasant Hills resident spent his entire career at Engine 168. Though he left the job over a decade ago, McCardle is still a part of the firehouse family; in the FDNY, that's how it works. “Jimmy McCaffery was here then,” McCardle said. “He used to bring Kevin around to the firehouse after his father was gone. When Jimmy transferred out, he asked us to look after the kid.”

“We made him like the prince of the firehouse,” confirmed Peter Connell, recently promoted to captain and given the command of Engine 168. 168's former commander, Bill Small, is one of the men this company lost. “Kevin was two when his father died. We sort of adopted him. No kid should have to grow up without a father.” Captain Connell looked back through the open firehouse door to the apparatus floor. Engine 168, damaged in the maelstrom that was September 11, has been repaired and repainted. The captain said, “I guess there are going to be a lot of kids to adopt now.”

When the call came in to Engine 168 on September 11, off-duty firefighter Kevin Keegan asked Captain Small for permission to ride along. By then the extraordinary nature of the event was clear, though not yet its true and terrible extent. With the other members of the company, Keegan rode the engine into a cataclysm for which no level of experience could have prepared anyone.

“They had the bridge open for emergency vehicles, but it was slow going.” In an interview last week, Keegan sat with a visitor at a picnic table on the rolling grounds of the Burke Rehabilitation Center in White Plains. “By the time we got there, the second plane had hit. The fires were burning pretty bad.”

Keegan is a cheerful red-haired, freckled young man. But when he speaks of the events of that day, he turns his gaze away. He peers across the distant hills like a man hoping for the first glimpse of travelers returning home.

“Everything was chaos,” Keegan said. “Girders crashing down, glass breaking. People on fire falling from the sky. It was unbelievable.” Here in the green serenity of the hospital grounds, it did seem almost unbelievable that such horrors had ever been real.

“They sent us to the north tower,” Keegan went on. “We were massing to go in—there was a chief there, I don't know which chief, but my captain reported to him. And there were, I think, four other companies. And we were getting set when part of the building just came twisting out of the sky. Someone shouted, and some guys ran, but some guys didn't have a chance to run.”

Keegan was seriously injured by the falling debris, receiving a concussion and second-degree burns; but it's clear he knows how much luckier he is than many of the men with whom he stood.

“I lay there with something heavy on top of me. I knew I was being burned, but I couldn't move. I thought, I'm going to die. But, okay, at least I'm on the Job, I'll die as a firefighter. That was okay, you know?”

Whether or not that would have been okay is a judgment the visitor is glad he does not have to make.

“Then I heard Uncle Jimmy calling me.”

Uncle Jimmy, of course, is Capt. James McCaffery, who stepped in and helped raise young Kevin Keegan after the death of his father. “There was smoke and dust everywhere, you couldn't see anything, but Uncle Jimmy told me to go left. He said it was my coat that was pinned, not me, and to take it off and stay low and head toward daylight on the left.

“So I did. I peeled out of the coat, and I could move. It was slow going, but Uncle Jimmy kept saying just a little further, he was right there waiting. I could see the daylight he meant. I got there, to a kind of hole, and saw guys up there, yelling and digging. I called to Uncle Jimmy. I figured that's where he was, that I'd made it to the right place. A couple of guys yelled back. One guy jumped down into the hole. A guy I didn't know.” Keegan shook his head, clearing out memories of smoke and dust, fire and darkness. “I asked where Uncle Jimmy was, but he just kept telling me I was okay, and they got me out.

“That's the last thing I remember until I woke up in the hospital the next day. Some of the guys were there sitting in the room, the guys I rode with. They told me about Dave”—firefighter David Schwartz, the second member of Engine 168 to die that day—“and Capt. Small. I asked about Uncle Jimmy. They told me about him, too.