New York Fire Department firefighter Robert Reeg of Stony Point was seriously injured while responding to the Sept. 11 attack.
Images of mass-murder on the nightly news send Reeg’s mind racing. He invariably recalls that fateful September morning in 2001 when he looked up into a clear blue sky just in time to see the South Tower crumbling to the ground.
“It’s the nature of the world that most people have moved on, but the people directly involved with 9/11, for them, twice a day, it’s 9/11,” he said, explaining he thinks about that day at least two times every day. “We try not to dwell on it too much but, when the anniversary is coming up, you have to reflect a little bit, and it seems like it’s hard to believe that it’s been 15 years.”
Terrorism seems timeless to the retired firefighter despite 15 years of healing since the 9/11 attacks. He was based at FDNY Engine 44 on the Upper East Side that day.
Saved from the rubble after two hijacked planes struck the towers, the 64-year-old father of two sat in his Stony Point home and shared his story with The Journal News/lohud.com. Occasionally, he walked to a nearby bookshelf to grab photos of friends killed on 9/11.
What follows is one of a series of conversations with those in the Lower Hudson Valley whose lives forever changed on 9/11. The discussion has been edited for space and clarity.
A: I think about how I have so much gratitude for all the people who came to help us, and gratitude that the good lord spared me when everybody around me was killed. I’ve had my issues with the injuries, but I’m still here, and I was here to be a father while many kids grew up without fathers and mothers.
Q: How did that Sept. 11 morning unfold for you?
A: We had initially been assigned and went down to a staging area opposite the North Tower. Right across the street is where all the numerous jumpers came down a hundred stories, and some of those firefighters you could tell had just graduated from the fire academy. Some of them were getting pretty upset and Danny Williams from Ladder 16 (on the Upper East Side) said, ‘We can’t help those people and we gotta stay focused on our task at hand.’
He told us to turn around and so we all turn around, and the jumpers would hit and they’d explode. You’d hear this tremendous horrible explosion and that bothered me for a long time, and certain sounds in industry sound like it, so…
Q: How did you get hurt?
A: I just went to get a piece of equipment out of the fire engine, it has like a roll up gate on it, like a soda truck, and I picked it up and I was looking straight up and I saw the top coming off the South Tower and so I just started running. As I was running, you could start hearing the rumble and then that big gust of wind, a tremendous gust of wind, they said it was hundreds of miles an hour. All that dust picked me up off my feet, and that’s when I got hit, a scary moment for sure, and you couldn’t breath and couldn’t see anything.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my ribs got hit so hard they were pulverized and shoved into my lungs and that’s how I got injured.
Q: What was it like at the hospital?
A: Most people don’t know it, but we were told a third plane was coming and they didn’t know what happened to the other plane that was hijacked, and that ended up being the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
The FBI agents grabbed us and said, ‘Be careful, the Pentagon’s been hit and a third plane’s inbound.’ Then we hear a plane coming and we thought it was the third plane, but it was fighter jets. I was glad to see them, but it scared the hell out of me.
It was a scary few days. My wife couldn’t get down until the next day, and Manhattan was on lock down, and eventually she got to see me at St. Vincent’s Hospital.
Q: When did you learn of the scope of the attacks?
A: I didn’t really know how bad it was until a few days later, and a nurse in recovery brought in a newspaper. That’s how I found out because the headline was about a good friend of mine, Tim Stackpole, that he was lost. It broke my heart to hear that. He was a very courageous guy and had just recovered from a burn injury and was promoted to captain. It was a picture and his family, and I knew his family and that was tough.
Q: How was the recovery?
A: My chest was crushed and I had smoke inhalation and (a) collapsed lung and had a staph infection, and that was the focus, initially. Then, later on, it turned out both my meniscus were torn.
When I came home, they had all the neighborhood kids in the Stony Point Elementary band, and they played “When the Saints Go Marching In” and it was nice. I went back to work for a few months but, every time I threw the mask on, it was hitting where there were holes in my chest and I couldn’t take any smoke, so they finally eventually retired me medically.
Q: Why did you go back to work?
A: I had to go back and face it, like falling off the horse. I was better mentally going back than if I had sat here watching it, and it was good to be back in the firehouse with my old crew. They needed me.
Some of the new guys were there and they didn’t know what to make of it, and they were just in the firehouse a couple of days and 343 men lost. It was hard for them. It was hard for everybody.
Q: What happened when the whole experience started to sink in; after the band stopped playing?
A: Time kind of dragged on after I was out of the job. I liked being a fireman. Some people don’t like their jobs, and I never hated going to work. I was on the job 21 years, and I was a paramedic with EMS when they were separate agencies for five years before that.
Q: What did you like most about the job?
A: The camaraderie in the firehouse was probably the best thing, and it was exciting. Every day was different. Sometimes you had your slow periods and sometimes you had your tragedy.
My grandfather was a fireman, in FDNY, and did 31 years … and it’s the pride and tradition that played a big part in it. That’s what kept people together when your normal instinct would be let’s get out of here, but our pride and tradition is to try to rescue people and save lives and property. It’s ingrained in everybody and you start ingraining the new guys.
Q: What keeps you busy nowadays?
A: I had seen therapy dogs when I was active with the Red Cross. I would see them on certain missions, and everyone says I had an epiphany. I got the standard poodle, his name is Hunter, and I started training him from day one … and then I was visiting a special needs school in Orange County … and then we started to go to West Point, and now I go there almost every Tuesday, and cadets’ ‘de-stress’ days.
Q: Do you have some stories about the visits?
A: One boy, they had never heard him speak. After working with the dog and the boy, I was playing that Irish Rovers song about the unicorn, and cats and rats and elephants, and I actually got him to start saying the chorus to it. I feel like I got through to him a little bit, and maybe some neurons will start connecting properly.
I was blessed. Both my girls have master’s degrees, and they’re smart, athletic kids, and I see other parents have to deal with kids who will never achieve that highly. So if I can do a little bit to help, that it’s part of my mission, and there is a reason I survived maybe.
Q: How do your visits with the veterans go?
A: It helps like a reality check with me. I have my pains and still need my surgeries from the injuries, and you see Marines with no knees and you see a young woman disfigured from an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan. My situation isn’t so bad, I’m lucky.
You’ve gotta put yourself in, relative to the rest of the world, and know you have it pretty good. You have to count your blessings. It’s not like there haven’t been tough days, and I try to move on and you do what you can for the rest of the world.
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