![]() ![]() On the way, he sees smoke from one of the buildings. Marine-turned-firefighter who hops on a fire truck headed toward the trade center. “Don’t Look Back” tells of a fictional officer-in-training named Peter Murphy, a U.S. In the end, he believes he’s been successful “in getting inside the heads of the firefighters.” He devote hours each night and nearly every weekend to the project. “It took many re-writes and drafts,” and endless rejections. One day I would be interviewing the mayor, and the next a homeless man.”Ĭalderone honed in on his book over the next decade, while holding down his public relations job at the hospital. “I made the fire department a part of my beat” after that, he said. Calderone arrived at what came to be known as “the pile” the day after the attacks. But getting from there to the trade center site wasn’t easy, since just about every mode of transportation had ground to a halt. “I got into the city that night,” he said, by jumping on a train to Long Island City. But he knows with certainty there were some. No one will ever know how many of those lives could have been saved if firefighters had been able to communicate with one another, Calderone says. “Sometimes the radios worked, and sometimes they didn’t,” Thomas Von Essen, New York City’s fire commissioner at the time, said soon after the attacks. That was something addressed at length by the 9/11 Commission in the months following the attacks, as it examined unclear protocols on how transmissions were to be acknowledged, and questioned whether some firefighters even received those messages at all. The grim memories have never left Calderone, so though so many books have been written about the tragedy, he felt it was necessary to write yet another as its anniversary approached.īut unlike those other stories, Calderone focused on why so many firefighters were lost that day: inadequate - and in some cases, non-functioning - radio communications. His fictional characters in “Don’t Look Back” are based on the people he met before, during, and after the destruction of the towers. “I took that chapter to bring that part of the story to life,” Calderone said. “Congress’s 9/11 Commission did a good job looking at the situation nationally and internationally.”īut he pointed out that the commission also discussed in detail New York City’s oft-failed emergency response due to poor radio transmissions. ![]() “I felt what had happened to the firefighters and their families has never fully been told,” said Calderone, who is now slightly graying at 56, but still filled with the thrill of writing. ![]() In the years since, he had developed many sources among firefighters, getting to know their families as well. “Don’t Look Back” focuses on the firefighters who rushed into the burning towers, their lives, and their sacrifices.Ĭalderone didn’t make it to what would eventually be called ground zero until the day after, since that part of Manhattan was locked down in the attacks’ aftermath. “I covered the family organizations that were formed,” Calderone said. In all, 2,977 people were killed there, along with 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, and 40 on a hijacked commercial jetliner that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Before that Tuesday ended, an unimaginable 343 firefighters would be lost as two hijacked commercial airliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers in downtown Manhattan, eventually toppling them in clouds of dust and debris. ![]()
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