A heart broken for a hero lost trying to save others’ lives
His body has never been found and as the anniversary of his death approaches, it is breaking big Mike’s great heart.
Hand-in-hand with the heartbreak is an enormous pride in his brother’s last heroic efforts to save what lives he could.
“‘Let me out, I wanna see if I can make a difference here’, that was the last thing he said to his driver when they arrived at the south tower,” said firefighter Mike.
John Moran, the youngest fire department battalion commander in the history of the FDNY (Fire Department of New York), should have been off duty when all hell broke loose in New York.
He had just completed a night shift and under normal circumstances would have been going home to mind his two children, freeing up his air stewardess wife Kim to go to her job. But Kim wasn’t flying that day, so John, the son of Peggy Murphy from Armagh and Walter Moran from Leitrim, dallied in the firehouse attending to some paper work.
At 7am he called Mike up and told him to turn on the TV. “They were broadcasting a cooking show from our firehouse at Ladder 3, it was a sort of healthy firefighter’s cookbook effort. He called me and told me to turn on the TV. I watched that for a while and then fell back to sleep.”
The next call 38-year-old Mike got was from his then girlfriend, now wife, Dana.
“She asked me if I was watching TV and I thought she meant the cook show. She didn’t. She was talking about a plane hitting the Twin Towers.”
Mike’s next action was to ring John, four years his senior.
“I asked him if it was a big deal. He said it was ‘a f***ing catastrophe’.”
The second plane hit while Mike was getting dressed. He called John saying it must be a terrorist attack. John already knew and was winging his way to the crash scene in the command car with Chief Ray Downey, head of rescue operations. John himself was a member of the elite Special Operations Command.
Colleagues that knew the brothers told Mike of one of John’s last actions, larger-than-life, just like himself.
“When they arrived at the end of Battery Tunnel, in front of the tower, a cab was blocking their way. John jumped out and grabbed the cab-driver, he thought he was deliberately clogging up the tunnel. It turned out the guy had stopped because he was afraid, but in the meantime John had physically lifted the car off the road. He was a big guy, more than 18 stone.”
John and the chief drove on another 100 yards before John departed the scene, jumping out of the car, grabbing a bag and pledging to make a difference.
In the meantime, Mike was on his way to the nearest firehouse. Over the radio he heard a total recall. He was on the road getting ready to go when the first tower came down. The driver was switching between radio channels, trying to tune into their own borough (New York has five boroughs and the firehouses in each borough have different radio frequencies), when they heard a broadcast on Manhattan One.
“‘I don’t know if you guys want to hear this but things are bad,’ the voice said.
“We could hear one guy screaming that he was trapped in the firetruck, he was burning and screaming for help. Next thing the radio goes dead,” said Mike.
He was told then to report to his own firehouse in Lower Eastside Manhattan. They loaded up the firetruck with tools whatever they could lay their hands on, and commandeered a city bus. but before they could go anywhere, an order came through to hold themselves in reserve.
“They said there were already 5,000 guys down there and that they needed guys to rest up and come in later on. We wanted to go immediately but in the end, it was 10pm before we were allowed down.”
Mike had tried to contact John during the day and had talked to him twice on his cellphone early on.
“But later when I couldn’t get through, I kinda knew something was wrong.”
By the time Mike reached Ground Zero, it was a war zone.
“It looked like there’d been a snowstorm, everything pulverised into a fine powder and then this great heat coming up from underneath. You knew there weren’t going to be many survivors.”
Mike stayed on at Ground Zero until 7am the next morning.
“We were just wandering around, calling out. One guy was actually found alive. He had been on the 78th floor when the building came down and he was trapped in the rubble. It was a miracle.
We thought ‘there’s no way we can get this guy out’ and then all of a sudden tools were being passed up the line and we were digging and we got him out.
“He was totally conscious and talking on the stretcher. He was a Port Authority cop and he kept saying ‘I was on the 78th floor, why doesn’t anyone f***ing believe me?’
“His legs were broken and it took us eight hours to get him out, but he should have been dead, impacted in the building.”
In the morning, Mike’s brother-in-law Brendan arrived to give him a ride home.
“I was wrecked. I’d had no sleep. I went to my mom’s house, all my family were there. I was being realistic and knew that my brother was gone, that no one was walking out of that building, but some of my family were hoping for months that he would be found.”
HE never was. He left behind seven-year-old Brian and three-year-old Dylan and a brother so devastated he went on stage at a memorial concert for the city in Madison Square Garden and told Osama Bin Laden to “kiss my royal Irish ass”.
It made him a firefighters’ hero but others were not so kind. Big Mike lives in Rockaway and when American Airlines flight 587 crashed there last November, some said it was Osama’s revenge. Some were stupid enough and insensitive enough to say the same to Mike. “The first guy that said that, I was stunned. I thought he was joking. I said, ‘Repeat that, and I’ll rip your head off.’ People thought they were being funny.”
Mike doesn’t need the crass humour. He has enough to deal with. A dozen firefighters from his firehouse died as well as his brother John, his hero. “He was like a genius, he went to law school in his spare time, he was top of his class even though he was already a full-time firefighter.”
Brothers in arms. Mike Moran wants to be at work this September 11. It’s his way of coping.
