This culture extends beyond active service. Former firefighters maintain relationships with their old companies. Retired firefighters show up to events, stay in contact, consider the department a permanent part of their identity even decades after their last shift. When something happens to the department — a major fire, a tragedy, a political threat to the institutions they built their careers in — former members respond with the same sense of obligation they felt when they were on the job.
Buscemi had been on the job for four years. Four years at a busy Manhattan company, long enough to know the work, long enough to have formed the bonds that the culture forged, long enough for Engine 55 to be, in some permanent sense, his company. When five of Engine 55’s members died on September 11, they were not abstract victims; they were members of the institution he had belonged to, working from the building he had worked from, dying in the neighborhood where he had answered calls.
The extraordinary element of his response was not the motivation — which was perfectly ordinary within the FDNY’s cultural logic — but the contrast with his public identity. He was one of the most recognizable character actors in American cinema. He could have done nothing, or done what most celebrities do in the aftermath of national tragedies: donated money, appeared at a benefit, made a statement. Any of these responses would have been entirely defensible. He did none of them in the first instance. He put on his old gear and showed up.