Editor's note: This account was written by Brian Gordon, FDNY EMS (Ret.), and reaches the Department through Officer Glick's collection of September 11 stories. His words run below exactly as he wrote them. The watch is the Casio G-Shock GW6600 he bought at the PX in Okinawa in 1996, his first big boy watch by his own description. He still has it; it is the one in the photographs.
My name is Brian Gordon and I worked for FDNY EMS on September 11th, 2001. The watch I was wearing that day was a Casio G Shock gw6600 which I purchased at the PX in Okinawa in 1996. It was my very first “big boy watch” which didn’t leave my wrist for a lot of years.
On the morning of September 11th, I was just getting ready to go home after working a shift. I was going to have a few days off. I lived upstate, and my partner, Brian Smith, was going to drop me off at Penn Station on his way home. We were walking through the parking lot, and you could see the towers from there. All of a sudden, I saw a huge fireball come out of the side of the North Tower.
My station was located in Brooklyn, just across the bridge from Manhattan. So close, that we could see the Towers standing tall every single day. After the first plane struck, we immediately responded to Manhattan and got lost on our way to the staging area. We ended up getting flagged down by a police officer who told us there were people who needed our help at the FDNY Ten House ( Engine 10/ Ladder 10 ) on Liberty Street, essentially at the base of the World Trade Center. Ten House is literally across the street from the South Tower. We set up triage in the bay and began assessing injuries. There were folks badly injured in there. Burns from the jet fuel, people hit with falling debris, it was chaos. We heard the second plane come in and hit the South Tower. Right before the plane struck, you could actually hear it power up before impact. It was basically a scene out of a disaster movie at that point. There were plane pieces and parts and body parts all over the place. It was truly awful.
We were doing our best to help the people who were there, a few in very bad shape. You could hear the radio from the firehouse radio room, Firefighters calling maydays and requesting EMS in the building. I remember hearing someone come over the radio saying they needed EMS forthwith on the 50th floor. I wanted to haul ass over and get up there, but Smitty (my partner) reminded me that we could not leave the folks in the firehouse until they were transported out to hospitals. It’s at that point that the South Tower collapsed. It was so loud. I thought the whole world was shaking apart. We were blown to the back of the firehouse, along with everyone else and parts of the building. It was hell.
I’m so thankful for Smitty. I was so scared. He really helped center me, and keep me on mission. There was another guy helping us out, a volunteer firefighter from Long Island named Rob Wiesburg. Very solid guy. He got most of the folks out of the firehouse and was leading them to safety. Smitty and I were doing a search of the firehouse to make sure no one was left behind. That’s when the North Tower came down, so we dove into the bathroom just off the truck bay. It was at that moment that I knew we were going to die. I remember laying there on the floor next to Smitty looking at my watch and praying for God to make it quick. Obviously, we weren’t killed, but there seemed like there was no reason for us to be alive. It was just awful. Death was everywhere. Everything was destroyed, crushed, including my ambulance. I remember it was so quiet for a few minutes. All you could hear were PASS alarms coming from the rubble. We made it out the back of the firehouse, where we met up with Ladder 124. Man, they showed up like angels out of the darkness. We updated them on what we knew and headed out.
Needless to say, we survived that day when so many others didn’t. Smitty’s father, Firefighter Kevin Smith was killed, as was his whole firehouse. Hazmat Company 1 and Squad Company 288, from Queens were all lost that day. The hardest hit house in the city. They lost 19 guys.
This G Shock is just a cheap watch, but for me, it’s a bit of good luck. It was on my wrist through so many moments in my life. I hope it gets passed down through the generations, so 50 or even 100 years from now, someone can look at that cheap little watch, and say “man…. that thing has seen some shit.”
Brian Gordon FDNY EMS (Ret.)