A Decade of Hope (22 page)

And we did find him. For me, it was—I hate to use the word “bittersweet,” but it was a good ending to a horrible, horrible story.

It was close to midnight, and I was very restless. I was getting agitated and thought,
I'm going to go to Great Neck, to the volunteer firehouse. Just have a cup of coffee and get my mind away from things
. So I got in the car and starting driving. At a point in the road where I could either take a left and go to the firehouse or make a right and go to my parents' house, for some reason I just said,
Let me go past my parents' house
.

It was almost midnight when I got there, and all the lights were on. I was thinking,
What are they doing up?
So I parked the car and walked inside. My dad was on the phone, and as he hung up. he said to me, “Oh, it's you already. How the hell did you get here so fast?” And I said, “What the hell are you talking about? I just didn't feel right.... I just needed to get out of the house.” He told me that he had just been calling me because they had found Jonathan.

So I guess Jonathan had been urging me to hurry up and come get him.

My father and I drove into the city. One of the rituals that they always did at Ground Zero was to salute the casket as it came up, with the guys lined up on both sides of the ramp or the trail. But this time they had all the guys lined up before we even got there. So as we were walking down we passed between these two lines of men saluting. It was the only time I saw them do this, and it was done for my father. It was very impressive, and it was a heck of a way for the guys to thank my father and to show how much they appreciated everything that he had been doing down there.

We got down to the bottom of the hill, and there was Jon. They had him all packaged up in the American flag. My father knelt and had a short conversation with Jonathan, and then we picked him up, and they saluted us all the way back up the hill.

We found him three months to the day, on December 11. We had been at the site two nights earlier, when they found a couple of other guys from 288, and we knew he was there. I've said a few times that besides the birth of my son, December 11, 2001, was probably the greatest day of my life. It makes no sense that that could be a good day; it makes no sense at all. But I really mean it. I just remember feeling that the weight of the world had been taken off of our shoulders. We got him. We finally got the son of a bitch.

So we went to the morgue at the hospital, and they asked me and my father if we wanted to go in. My father said, “No way, I'm not going in.” We knew what the bodies looked like after three months. We saw them every day; it wasn't a pretty sight. It's the worst thing you can possibly think of. All of a sudden I just felt that somebody needed to see him, someone from the family. So I went in there. They undid everything and took his coat off, and his back was facing me, so I didn't see anything. I just saw the small of his back, and the boxers he had on, and I remembered that he had a similar pair. And so I got to look at him real quick, and then they took from his pocket the Swiss Army knife that my father had given us both for camping when we were little kids, and that was the real . . . This was him. Finally something was over, and we had some type of closure, at least to this part of the story.

They put whatever Jonathan had in his pockets in a bag, and they gave my father the bag. I'm sure he still has it. The next day we had to pick Jon up to drive him to Great Neck. We had the whole police escort and everything.

The week of Jon's funeral, that Monday through Friday, there were six or seven others, so getting proper funerals and proper burials with ten thousand guys standing in line saluting the coffins as they went by was not possible. You were lucky if you got a couple hundred. Jon's funeral, fortunately, had a very good turnout. They had to turn plenty of people down at the church, and they were flowing out onto the street, with guys from the FDNY and also from the Great Neck volunteer fire department. It was gratifying to see the number of people who showed up. . . . How touching it was, and how Jon touched so many people. I saw that beforehand, but I guess I experienced it at a more personal level because it was at his funeral. There are lots of better words to use, but it was definitely a bittersweet ending to finally bring him home.

As my father gave Jonathan's eulogy, I remember thinking,
How can he possibly be up there right now?
Growing up, we were always in awe of him: Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. I felt the same after seeing everything he had done at the site for those three months, and what an impact he was making at Ground Zero. And to have seen the praise that he got from everybody: the mayor, the chiefs, the Fire Department, the governor. When I saw him up at the pulpit, I just thought,
Dad, you never cease to amaze me. How the hell are you up there doing this?
I know he'd been debating with himself whether he'd be able to do it, and he did it with such strength. It was just another day of my father being my father.

 

I didn't start thinking about the cause of 9/11 until later on. I think my head was in the mind-set of trying to help, and to bring as many people home as possible. I definitely cried for a long time, but I don't recall for the first month or two really focusing on the reasons for the attack. I had the mind-set at the site of
If we can just find somebody or something to have a little closure for one family every day, then it's a good day.

When I started to think about the reasons behind it all, I felt a lot of hatred. Some people turn the hatred into a positive, and for others it remains a negative. I don't think I had hatred in a good way, unfortunately. But how can you blame someone for having that kind of hatred after something like 9/11? You can't.

Maybe one of the reasons why I get so angry is that we haven't come up with a solution to the issues. To me most of those issues stem from religion. And I don't really know if there is a solution. It doesn't make any sense to me that because you believe in a different God you have so much hatred for us. And because of your beliefs you kill thousands and thousands of innocent people. I have major issues with religion in general, because in my opinion, it's the reason for the majority of everything bad going on in this world. And it just makes no sense.

Growing up, we went to church every Sunday, and I was an altar boy. I went to Catholic school. I never minded going to mass then. But now it's different to me, very different.

Where was God on 9/11?

How do you let that happen? I know that it might not be the proper way to think, but how do you let something like 9/11 happen? If people pray and say it has meaning and consequence, and that everything will work out.... Well, it didn't work out on 9/11. So why? Why didn't it work out that day?

One morning, at around 3:00, I was on the pile with my father, just the two of us, and a priest came over with some woman pastor. He started talking to us, and you could tell right off the bat that he had a good frame of mind. He wanted to be positive. He basically was saying that we had to work with Muslims to end terrorism, and when were we going to do something about this?

I turned to him and said, “Father, no disrespect, but please go and tell all those Muslims, every last one of them, women, children, that I don't give a shit.”

He looked at me then, and right in front of the woman he said, “Fucking right.”

I was not shocked. Look, enough is enough. We need to do something about this, the Muslims and the murder that grows out of their thinking. There are lots of religious fights in history—the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, and the Jews and Arabs in Palestine—but you don't see the Catholics and the Jews running around the world from New York to Spain to England to India killing people wholesale.

This priest meant it. So I said to myself,
People can think outside of the box a little bit.
He had feelings, and he was not going to patronize me and try to talk me in circles around the issues. But that poor woman pastor's face—she was shocked.

We can't forget about 9/11. . . . But we're getting complacent. All these tragic stories, and everyone's crying so they could try and feel what we've gone through—it's all going by the wayside. We're changing as a country. All of a sudden we want to back down the road of our history, to not be the tough guy we used to be. We were tough but fair. Americans were a decent people, but you did not want to mess with us. And now, for example, Iran has nuclear energy. If that is not a sign of America's weakness, I don't know what is.

We have to be careful about the Muslims. We don't want them teaching hate and separatism in their mosque schools. We have to stop homegrown Muslim terrorists. It's a shame for all the Muslims out there who are good-natured, hardworking people who mean no harm. But they brought it upon themselves. They're docile, afraid of their own religion and coreligionists. Where is their movement to stop terrorism, or to see women with equality, or to renounce jihad or Sharia law? The polls show that fully half of the people in the United States have unfavorable feelings toward Muslims. Why?

For me you're the enemy; I can't separate you. I don't know who's good and who's bad. Again, that might not be the right way of thinking, but how do I know? You can't tell if your cab driver hates you. So how do you categorize if your cab driver is in a terrorist group? You can't blame me or anyone else who experienced this murder in his family for thinking that way. You might say it's wrong, but if you were in my shoes, you'd do the same thing. I'm not saying it's right, but I think it is human nature to [want to] make people accountable—a brother I loved was killed by their thinking.

I am definitely not the same person I was before 9/11. I grew up a lot faster than I wanted to. I think that innocence was taken away from a lot of people. The things we saw, the things we did down there on those piles, the body parts, the carnage—you never imagined ever doing or seeing. It changed all of us. It was unimaginable. You couldn't in your worst nightmare realize what we did. And we were expected to get up every day knowing that we just had to keep on going as if it were just the next day. Well, it wasn't that easy.

And so religion has become a very big issue for me, especially since 9/11. Maybe it's also because when a firefighter goes about the job, he makes no such judgment. When someone calls for help it doesn't matter if he is black, white, Muslim, Jew, atheist, Spanish, Italian, Irish—we come and help. You're not given the right to judge who this person is.

All it really does is get me aggravated. You can sit around the kitchen table at the firehouse and talk about this all day long and get aggravated. But is there anything we can do to change it? Probably not, and so I try not to get myself too aggravated. I just try to help others, and do my best to raise my family, and that's it.

 

During the first three or four years after 9/11, I was not in a good place. I was pissed off at everybody. I really didn't care about anybody but myself, and if you didn't like it, tough. And it took a few years for me to start realizing that that's not what it was all about:
It's not about you, you can't keep doing this. You need to start growing up a little bit.

People are going to move on in one way or another. But you go through different periods. As a family, I think we've done pretty well. Like any family, especially 9/11 families, we have our good and our bad, our ups and our downs. You do hear some real horror stories about families that have just been completely torn apart, or drifted apart, or don't talk to each other. So we're pretty blessed. The whole family is pretty tight. My sister had two kids, so that brought more closeness into the family, and she named her first son Jonathan. My sisters and I and the kids all see each other, and my mom babysits all the time. So in the last couple of years, I think I've been getting better.

When we're at the firehouse we can sit at that kitchen table and talk for hours. And we talk about religion, and someone says, “Well, who do you pray to?” And I tell them I pray to my family and friends. That's my religion. My family and friends. I pray to my brother. My uncle, my grandparents. My friends, my godfather. Those are the people I pray to and ask to watch over me. If I can hold them tight and treat them right, then I think at the end of everything I'm going to be on the right side of the street.

Sometimes it's tough being the Ielpi kid. I will never be able to shine my dad's shoes—it's just never going to happen. I do my best to carry the name, but I am who I am, and I hope that one day I won't be just the Ielpi kid, but Brendan Ielpi. Even though it's not easy, it is very satisfying that people respect you just because of your father's name. I had a lieutenant not too long ago say to me, “You're the Ielpi kid, right?” And then he congratulated me. I thought,
Are you kidding me? Get out of here
. And he shook my hand. I will carry on the Ielpi tradition as best I can. I definitely won't let my father down, and more important, I won't let my brother, Jonathan, down. That's for sure.

For me the memory of my brother is with me every time I go to work, every time I get on that rig. I have a few hundred buttons with a picture of my brother on them, and I always have one on my helmet, and I've gone through a few, but he's always there. And after every fire I clean him off, just wash the button real quick. He loved our job more than anything; it's all he ever wanted to do since he was a little kid.

People joke with me and say, “You know he's always going to watch over you when you're in the fire.” Watch over me? He's right next to me. Jon wants to be going down the hallway with me, not watching over me. I caught myself staring at the button with his picture on the way to a fire the other day, and I was just talking to him in my head. That's the best way that I can remember him. I'm the only Ielpi left in the Fire Department. There are big shoes to fill here. I try to carry on the name and the tradition in a good manner, because it's pretty obvious that the bar's set pretty high.