Chief Vincent Dunn - My First Fire

When I got appointed to the Fire Department on February 1, 1957,1 didn't know anything about the fire service. I had never been in a firehouse. I never knew any firemen. My father had signed me up for the Fire Department test while I was in the navy. At first I didn't want to be a fireman, but after I'd been on the job about six months I knew that I was born for the fire service.

Like most teenagers, I had difficulty believing that everything wasn't some sort of sham. There wasn't anything to look up to. I figured when I came on the Fire Department that these guys were going to figure some way to get out of fighting fires.

On Saint Paddy's Day night, six weeks after I started, we had a fire in Harlem. We stretched a line up to this tenement and started charging the line. The firemen opened the door, and I saw this black smoke come out. I figured something was going to happen and they wouldn't go in. Then they started jumping over each other to get at this hand line, and they moved it. They went into this dark hallway. The black smoke was coming out. Then they went right through this apartment extinguishing the fire.

You never could see the flames, but you could hear the dishes crashing and the hose stream striking the walls and the ceiling. There was a terrible racket in there as they pushed out of the hallway and extinguished about three or four rooms of fire.

I was out in the hallway because I was the probie. When I went in after them I didn't realize that you have to crouch down. I got hit by the heat and the smoke that was on the top part of the doorway, and I was forced out.

I couldn't believe that they had gone into that apartment. I think I was twenty-one at the time.

That was my first fire, and that was the first thing I met in life that was for real: I saw men do exactly what they said they were going to do. (Deputy Chief Vincent Dunn (retired) from the Peter Micheels book "Braving the Flames").