Former New York Fire Department Commissioner Tom Von Essen, who was leading the department in its heroic rescue efforts after terrorists slammed two jets into the World Trade Center's twin towers on 9/11, told Newsmax that the hardest thing he has ever had to do was to give eulogies for his fellow firefighters who gave their lives that day — but "I was one of the lucky ones."
"I lived," Von Essen told Newsmax's "Saturday Report." "My family lived. I always put myself as a lucky person."
He said he knows his reaction may have been different if he hadn't been the department's commissioner, but it was all "very much more personal to me than it was for a typical political appointee or a lawyer or somebody that comes in to run the department.
"It was a lot of people that I had grown up with, in 30 years in the department: friends, sons of friends and just a tremendous amount of people," said Von Essen. "As the day went on, and the start of the focus on the amount of loss we're going to have, it just got harder and harder in the weeks after. It got worse and worse, because then you're attending those funerals and looking at the young mother with a couple of kids in the first row while you're giving the eulogies."
Von Essen, looking back 21 years later, said the reports he got at first were that a small plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center complex. But upon arriving, he and the other chiefs knew that it was a commercial jet, not a small plane.
"They knew the damage was so significant that they weren't going to be able to put the fire out," he said. "Then the mission was just to help as many people as they possibly could. We were not going to be able to stop any more damage because of the amount of heat and, you know, fuel that was up there. You couldn't use the elevators anymore because the chiefs are always worried about the fire getting into the elevator shafts."
But then, just 17 minutes after Flight 11 hit the north tower, Flight 175 crashed into the south tower and, Von Essen said, the firefighters knew that the catastrophe was more than just an accident.
"If two commercial jets hit both buildings on the same day — on a beautiful, clear day — we knew we were at war, basically," he said. "Being in New York, fire in a skyscraper or a large building collapse is a firefighter's worse nightmare. Now you had the two tallest buildings in the city that were on fire.
"The chiefs are as good as you get," said Von Essen. "They made those decisions right away to get as many of our guys up there to help the civilians as fast as many as they could. We're evacuating the south tower at the time. But then the south tower got hit [and it] came down much faster than the north because it was hit on the lower floors and hit on an angle ... we knew were in really bad shape because going to take us longer to evacuate the north tower."
The main mission was for evacuation, not putting out the fire, he said.
"This wasn't just a fire," said Von Essen. "Our guys can put out almost any fire, but you need water. And you need ... you need the ability to not be overcome by the massive heat and, you know, the danger of that fire."
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