The talk that morning had been about the bodies that surely were buried beneath the earthen ramps built to accommodate heavy machinery moving in and out of the pit. Eventually, once the earthen ramps were removed, the digging would start and the bodies would be found–firefighters' bodies, mostly, but who knew what else. Since the chief and I talked, workers have been excavating near the ramps and, just as they suspected, more remains have been found. More very likely will follow.

Chief Hayden was in the North Tower on Sept. 11, manning the FDNY's command post. If you watched the remarkable CBS documentary 9/11 shown on March 10, you saw Chief Hayden, though he wasn't identified. He was in those riveting scenes of the command post, calmly handing out assignments to firefighters who, with their old-fashioned helmets and pike-like hooks, looked like so many medieval foot soldiers summoned to do battle with invading armies.

I made the mistake of forgetting my roots (firefighting runs in my family) and mentioned casually that it must have been chaotic in that lobby. It was clear that Chief Hayden didn't agree with the assessment of a rank amateur. "Maybe some would have found it chaotic," he said gently. "But we had control. We knew what we had to do." What they had to do was to get thousands of people out of mortally wounded buildings. And they did. The CBS documentary bore out the chief's assertion that there was no panic at that command post. Even as civilians were falling with sickening thumps in the plaza outside, the chiefs and firefighters were astonishingly calm and professional. Nothing could have prepared them for Sept. 11–and yet, in a sense, everything had.

Chief Hayden is one of the heroes–one of many–in Dennis Smith's new book, Report from Ground Zero. Mr. Smith, a friend of mine, is the firefighter who became a literary star 30 years ago with the publication of his memoir, Report from Engine Co. 82 . He was 30 years old at the time, and serving in the busiest firehouse in the world. His book came out just as fire was turning the South Bronx into a symbol of urban decay, and it remains one of the important texts of postwar New York: Report from Engine Co. 82 is, according to those who put such lists together, one of four books every New Yorker ought to read.

Report from Ground Zero is bound to become the definitive history of the FDNY's most terrible–and most heroic–day. Though he's been retired since the early 1980's, Mr. Smith jumped aboard a commandeered bus with dozens of firefighters and rode to the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, arriving just after the towers' collapse. He crossed paths with old friends of his, retired firefighters who rushed to the scene and were now looking for their firefighter sons. He heard the names of some of the missing, and immediately put a face and a story to each name: Paddy Brown, Terry Hatton and so many others. Mr. Smith knows these firefighters. He knows their fears and dreams; he knows what makes them run into burning buildings. And in Report from Ground Zero , he explains it as nobody else can.

"I just think that they are the best people you'd ever meet," Mr. Smith said of the firefighters. "They're honest, straightforward, tough, determined–the kind of people you'd want your own children to marry. They raise their children well, they care about America, and they care about each other."

Report from Ground Zero includes Mr. Smith's efforts, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, to raise money for the FDNY's grieving spouses and children. He was, and remains, relentless on the subject, in the FDNY's finest traditions: New York's firefighters have been providing for their disabled colleagues, or their survivors, since the 1790's. Mr. Smith's efforts led to millions of dollars in donations to the New York Police and Fire Widows' and Children's Benefit Fund, which turns over 100 percent of its proceeds to the beneficiaries.

"Every firefighter you meet will tell you it is an honor to be a part of the New York firefighting force," Mr. Smith said. "And when you go to a firefighter's funeral, and you see those thousands of firefighters lined up and saluting, it's an honor to realize that you're a part of that."

All these years later, Mr. Smith remains very much a part of the FDNY. And in Report from Ground Zero , it shows.

East 23rd Street. It is a modest affair, barely

visible from the sidewalk. Even the drugstore's customers don't see it, though

it's at eye level and to your right as you enter the store. Engraved on the

plaque are the names of 12 firefighters, victims of the New York Fire

Department's worst disaster-until Sept. 11.

At 9:36 p.m. on

the night of Oct. 17, 1966,

Engine Co. 18 and Ladder Co. 7 responded to the report of a fire at Wonder

Drugs on East 23rd Street,

adjacent to the Flatiron Building.

The fire was in the store's basement, but the firefighters didn't realize they

were standing right above the heart of the blaze because the five-inch concrete

floor insulated them from the heat below. The floor collapsed, sending 10 men

into the inferno below. They all died. Two more were killed when a ball of

flame exploded from the basement.

I visit the plaque whenever I'm in the neighborhood. I

didn't know the men or their children, but my connection is personal all the

same: My father's friend (and, as these things go, my friend's father), a newly

minted lieutenant in the NYFD, was due to work the 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. shift on

Oct. 17, 1966, but he worked a mutual-that is, he traded shifts-with another

lieutenant so he could celebrate his daughter's First Communion. His

replacement's name is written on that plaque. I don't think my father's friend

ever got over the pain.

Someday there will be a plaque at the World

Trade Center

site, and, terribly, it will be neither modest nor easily ignored. It will bear

not 12 names, but 12 times 12 and dozens more. Perhaps then we will realize, if we don't now, that we need not search the past for

heroes, for they are in our midst, disguised as our neighbors, our friends, our

children.

"These men-I would put my own children into the arms of any

of these men, and you would, too," said author Dennis Smith. Mr. Smith gained

literary fame when his first-person account of firefighting in the Bronx, Report from Engine Co. 82, was

published in the late 1970's. He has been off the job for years, but he still

stays in touch, and even served as a volunteer with Ladder Co. 16 at the Trade

Center on Sept. 11.

When, finally, the awful list of the Fire Department's dead

and missing was released on Sept. 17, Mr. Smith knew the stories behind the

names. "Paddy Brown," he said, referring to Patrick Brown of Ladder Co. 3 in Manhattan,

officially listed as missing. "Paddy Brown-you know, around the firehouse, it's

enough to say about somebody, 'He's a good fireman.' But 'good' is not enough

for Paddy Brown. He came back from Vietnam

with all kinds of medals. He got his picture in the newspapers back in the mid-1990's, when he lowered one of his men on a rope to pick

up a victim of a fire in Times Square. When he wasn't

working, he taught karate to blind people.

"And Brian Hickey, who was the captain of

Rescue 4 in Queens. Last month, he got blown out of the building in Astoria

where three firemen were killed. He could have gotten three-quarters

[disability pension] easy. But he wanted to come back to the job." Capt. Hickey

is still missing.

Mr. Smith noted that because the first alarms came in just

before 9 o'clock, which marks the end

of the overnight shift and the beginning of the day shift, some engine, ladder

and rescue companies responded with double their normal personnel. Firefighters

arriving early for the day shift jumped on board their rigs, joining colleagues

minutes away from being relieved. And, in some cases, they all died.

"When I was at the site, a

deputy chief came over to me," Mr. Smith said. "I don't know his name. He tried

to encourage me, saying, 'We'll get through this.' And I asked him if anybody

had word about Terry Hatton, the captain of Rescue 1. He broke down. He said,

'When I think about the big numbers, I can handle it and do the job. But as

each name gets attached to a figure, it just hurts deeper and deeper.'" Capt.

Hatton is still missing.

Mr. Smith helps raise money for the New York Police &

Fire Widows' and Children's Benefit Fund. One hundred percent of the money it

raises-$7.3 million since it was founded in 1985 by ex-Met Rusty Staub-goes to

the survivors of this city's heroes.

In this terrible hour for the New York Fire Department,

please consider sending a donation to the fund at the following address:

PFWCBF, P.O. Box 3713, Grand Central Station, New York, N.Y. 10163.

Dennis Smith's name figured prominently in my family's house in the mid-1970's. Mr. Smith was the young firefighter who made it big with a book, Report From Engine Co. 82 , that told of the everyday heroics in a single firehouse in the South Bronx at a time when the Bronx was burning. The book sold 2 million copies; it was the Angela's Ashes of its day, a stunning work of art written by somebody nobody had ever heard of.

At the time, my firefighting father, he of Engine Company 162 on Staten Island, was gently urging me to at least consider following in his footsteps. I can still hear his arguments: "You'll never be out of work," he'd say–need I note that he was a child of the Great Depression?–"and you'll get a pension after 20 years. You retire at 45 and you can start a new job. Look at Dennis Smith. He'll retire and write." It was an enticing proposal (the bit about retiring at 45 looks awfully good at 43) but Report From Engine Co. 82 persuaded me that private-sector employment, while risky, was considerably less dangerous than running into burning buildings looking for people who may or may not be there. Then again, after more than 20 years in the private sector, I still don't have an employer-funded pension plan.

Dennis Smith eventually did retire from firefighting, and in the nearly quarter-century since Report From Engine Co. 82 , he has written several books of nonfiction and fiction. They have done well, but with the release of A Song for Mary , Mr. Smith reminds us why William F. Buckley Jr. called Report "a masterpiece" in New York magazine in 1972. (Quoting one particularly brilliant passage from Report , Mr. Buckley wrote: "You have here Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Charles Dickens, Will Herberg, Oscar Lewis and Ring Lardner.")

Mr. Smith's memoir is a story of Irish-Catholic poverty (on East 56th Street, no less–yes, ye wizards of the information age, poor people once lived on the Upper East Side) and the redemption he found through his mother's love and through the support and guidance of priests and nuns. The story of Mary Smith's determination to overcome tragedy and despair is inspiring; the tales of decent and humane Catholic clergy are positively startling. Mr. Smith dares to be stunningly counterintuitive: Writers who touch on their Irish-American Catholic childhoods are supposed to wallow in the repression and guilt imposed upon them by parental prudes, stern priests and sadistic nuns. A Catholic upbringing is supposed to be a nightmare; its tenets are reserved for the simple-minded.

Irish-Americanism and/or Catholicism are, in short, something to be escaped, to be left behind in the cultural ghetto. And that is no easy task, for the sharp-eyed among the cultural elite have ways of detecting latent Catholic qualities. Jay McInerney's mini-memoir of his Irish-Catholic mother, published in the Jan. 18 edition of The New Yorker , notes that while his father was a Catholic, "he could have passed for a WASP." Well, lucky for him, and what a relief for his son! Imagine the sheer terror of trying to fit in with New York's vapid and vacuous, knowing all the time that your father was so, so Catholic ! Like, yuck!

Mr. McInerney's complaints about what he termed, in his elegant way, the "bullshit of Catholicism," are what New York's literary and intellectual types expect, and perhaps even demand, from books about Irish-Catholic childhoods. Interestingly, Mr. McInerney does not enumerate the offenses that make up Catholicism's "bullshit"–no doubt he anticipated the Pope's recent condemnation of drug abuse–but he probably figured there was no need. Readers of The New Yorker would, of course, understand.

In A Song for Mary , Dennis Smith provides an antidote to the Irish-Catholic self-loathing that New York's smart set seems to demand. (The wonderful Frank McCourt does not disguise his bitterness toward Catholicism–the memorable first paragraph in Angela's Ashes says it all–but he deserves a dispensation not only because he is my friend, but because the Church so clearly let him down when he was poor and hungry.)

Mr. Smith presents himself as a street-smart city kid, circa 1950, desperate for direction and yet posing as though he couldn't care less. "I am so tired of all of it, everyone telling me what I should be doing," he complains after a worried Sister Alphonsus threatens to block his grammar-school graduation because of his low grades. (Behold the nuns' famous tyranny!) His mother's lonely struggle to make sure the family never again has to turn to welfare resonates only as it gives young Dennis a chance to be cool. "In the living room, I lit the cigarette and leaned far back into the pillow of the couch. I knew that my mother was cleaning some apartment down on Sutton Place, and so I just relaxed," he writes.

Eventually, he starts hanging out with the wrong crowd, drops out of high school, takes the Second Avenue bus to Harlem to score heroin with his buddies and gets beaten up in street fights. All the while, his brother Billy is thriving. He's a basketball star at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, and he's attentive to his studies. Smart-ass Dennis doesn't see the point. "I realized that I didn't really care about … Sister Alphonsus or the Regents exam. I just cared about what I was going to do next."

But plenty of people cared about Dennis Smith. Monsignor Ford helped him get into Cardinal Hayes High School, and even when Dennis disappointed him by dropping out, the priest helps him get a job at Catholic Charities. When Father O'Rourke hears that Dennis has quit school, he says, simply, "Keep reading books, and being interested in what's going on in the world around you. No matter what's going on in your life, always care about what you are putting inside your mind." Betty Fallon, the librarian at the Kips Bay Boys Club, gives him big books to read every week. And his very Catholic, very Irish mother fights him, cajoles him, shouts at him and loves him. "My mother loves to read to us … She has a real New York accent, and when she wants to say bottle , she says ba-ull . The nuns are always harping about the New York accent … and that the bosses at the insurance companies will never give us jobs if we have New York accents. But I love to hear my mother read, and especially when she says ba-ull ."

It all paid off in the end–the lectures, the threats, the reading, the love. And Dennis Smith, a wise man, understands that the path from street kid to the Fire Department of New York–never mind to literary fame–was no solitary journey. He cried for help, and help he received, from his Church, from his heritage, from the City of New York and from the woman he sings of in this moving book, his mother.

Given modern literary conventions, this is daring stuff, wonderful stuff.