The essay was published in the twentieth anniversary commemoration of the attacks, when a great deal of material about September 11 was being produced. Some of that material was excellent; some of it was indifferent; some of it served the commemorative industry that has developed around the anniversary. Buscemi’s essay sits in the first category: it is a specific account of a specific experience by the person who had it, written with evident care for the distinction between what he knows and what he is uncertain about.
The existence of the essay also answers a question that the years of circulating accounts had somewhat obscured: whether Buscemi was uncomfortable with the Ground Zero story being told. He had declined to make it a story in 2001, but by 2021 he was willing to give it the extended first-person treatment that TIME’s format provides. The change is consistent with a twenty-year arc of processing: the experience was too close in 2001 for the kind of reflective account the magazine format requires, and sufficient time had passed for him to tell it with the specific quality of honest reflection the essay contains.
## Wesley Williams and the History of Engine 55
Engine Company 55’s place in FDNY history extends beyond its service to the Little Italy neighborhood and beyond its September 11 losses. The company has a distinction that connects it to a broader story of American institutional history: it was the company where Wesley Williams served when he became, in 1927, the first African American to be promoted to supervisory rank in the New York City Fire Department.