The culture of the department also includes a particular attitude toward emotional expression that is part of a broader pattern in occupations involving regular exposure to physical danger and death. Firefighters, like soldiers and police officers, are expected to handle difficult situations without visible emotional distress — to be competent, effective, and contained under conditions that would distress any ordinarily sensitive person. This expectation is functional in the sense that visible distress in the middle of an emergency is counterproductive. It is problematic in the sense that it can make it difficult for people to acknowledge and process their emotional responses to the things they experience on the job.
The September 11 attacks brought this tension to an acute point. The FDNY had lost 343 members in a single event. Companies that had known their people for years had lost those people. The grief was collective and particular — not the generalized sorrow that affects people who watch a disaster from a distance, but the specific, named grief of people who had eaten meals with and trusted their lives to the people who were gone.
Buscemi, as a former member of one of those companies, inhabited this culture. He had eaten meals with the people at Engine 55. He had trusted his life to them in the way that firefighters trust their company. The bonds the culture creates do not require active maintenance to persist; they are, in the FDNY’s cultural logic, permanent. When five of his former company’s members died on September 11, he was not responding to an abstraction. He was responding to the loss of people he had known and worked with, from a company he had belonged to.