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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
It seems incredible now that there was ever a time when you might have walked by a firehouse in New York City and not thought about the lives of the people who worked inside, even if your lack of attention was in some ways a form of respect, an acknowledgment that mere curiosity wasn't a good enough justification for looking too closely, for intruding on the privacy of people who lived with death, and faced death, every day. That privacy was blown apart on September 11, 2001, and it is not likely ever to be restored completely, although we started to hear, just a few weeks after three hundred and forty-three firefighters had died at the World Trade Center, and while hundreds of others were still recovering body parts from Ground Zero, that most of the men wanted only to return to their routines, to cook for themselves again instead of eating meals provided by grateful New Yorkers, and to stop bearing the burden of being treated as heroes every waking minute of their lives. Thousands of stories have been written about firefighters since that day, but to a great extent the thick red wall that separates these men from the rest of us remains, as it always...
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