The instant icon

After the 11 September attack on New York, Mike Kehoe is the world's most famous firefighter - but being called hero is not the same as feeling like one

In the winter of 2000, Mike Kehoe was called to a fire at an apartment in Brooklyn, New York. No one was in, but he scaled the roof to break a skylight and release the explosive gases building up inside. A photo of Mike perched atop a row of Brooklyn brownstone houses appeared in New York's Daily News the following morning. The guys at the fire station joked for a few minutes that he was almost famous. His mother cut out the photo for her scrapbook.

Mike didn't notice the second time he was photographed on the job. It happened on a crowded stairwell of the burning 1 World Trade Centre. A Port Authority contractor had grabbed his digital camera as he rushed down from the 71st floor, and released the shutter just as Mike was climbing to the scene of the blaze.

On the Friday after that Tuesday, the photo hit the Daily News. More than any other, Mike's picture gave a face and a name to the horrors of that sweaty stampede out of the towers. Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of him. There were 40 messages a day from reporters; well-wishers sent cheques, whiskey, prayers, cigars...

The photograph quickly became part of the redemptive fairy tale spun by Americans to make sense of 11 September. But to those who lived that story, resolution is nothing more than a mass-marketed myth. For them, the reality is raw and unending. Firefighters and police have brawled at ground zero. Tales of divorces spawned by 11 September circle around the fire department. Widows squabble with one another over money; one has taken her own life.

For Mike, myth and reality collide at nearly every juncture. People who see his compact frame in person insist he is shorter than the beefy man in the photo. The guys at work grumble that all the attention is going to him instead of the six men missing from his station. His wife, EJ, demands to know why they have had only a 30-second conversation about 11 September. Everyone wants to know how many people the superhero pulled from the towers. The answer never changes: "I saved one person that day, and that was me, and it was by running for my life."

ON THE morning of 11 September, Mike and EJ drove into Manhattan together from their Staten Island home. Shortly after 7am, he dropped her off at the downtown Manhattan radiologist's where she works.

The first and second alarms sounded in unison at 8.47am at fire stations across lower Manhattan. The third was transmitted at 8.48 as a 10-60, code for a major emergency. No fourth alarm was necessary; at 8.56 the blaze was upgraded to a five-alarm fire. Because the night shift was just then being relieved, two teams of men were milling around most fire stations, bantering about the previous evening's calls. That meant double the men were on hand to respond.

The noise of the first crash travelled two miles north to the Alphabet City fire station shared by Mike's unit, Engine 28, and their colleagues in Ladder 11. Mike was in the office when the computer spat out the slip of paper summoning Engine 28. The six men of Ladder 11 suited up and waited for their slip. Lieutenant Michael Quilty, the senior officer called his wife to say a quick, "Hello, I love you". Then he called the dispatcher to say his unit didn't want to wait any longer. Ladder 11 was assigned to the second tower.

Mike remembers what followed only in spurts. The engine, which typically charges straight to the scene, was doing a strange, slow zigzag as it approached the twin towers. When he climbed out, he saw why: the street was already littered with bodies that had fallen from the sky. The firefighters entered the lobby of 1 World Trade through blown-out windows and awaited orders.

The sole job of an engine company such as Mike's is to lay the hose to douse the flames. The members of Engine 28, each hauling more than 100lb of gear, were dispatched directly to the scene of the blaze. Mike was charged with carrying a spare canister of oxygen and a leather pouch of tools to connect the hose to the skyscraper's internal water pipes.

An eerie order presided in the stairwell. People were perspiring from the heat, but they were filing down calmly. "I have no idea how much time had passed," Mike says, "but we were up around floor 28 when it seemed like someone had grabbed hold of the towers, like King Kong was shaking them." Within seconds, the call to evacuate came over the loud-hailer. The members of Engine 28 turned and charged down the stairs. They lingered, breathless, in the lobby for an instant as some companies, ignoring the order, continued to run into the building. Then King Kong returned.

Mike dived under a battalion chief's cherry-red car. "The only way to describe it was like a blizzard where everything was black," he says. When he finally stood up, he found a bottle of water to wash the grime from his throat. He looked for the other men of Engine 28 and then, for the first time, thought of his wife. He ran the five blocks north to her office. Like everything else in the dead zone, it had been evacuated.

That morning, EJ was on the phone to a patient when she heard a loud thud. There was a gasp and then, "Oh my God! A plane hit the Trade Centre!" on the other end of the line. EJ's first thought was of Mike, and she ran outside to see if she could catch a glimpse of his fire engine. What seemed like hundreds of trucks screeched by, but not the one with No 28 painted on the side. She ran back and forth for more than an hour, then suddenly heard a "very loud crackling". The first tower was falling. She and four co-workers ran a few blocks, then turned back and stared. Strangers came together in spontaneous clusters, as they did all over the city.

But EJ heard only one thing they were saying. "Everyone was talking about the firemen. We saw one guy in his suit, covered in ash, sitting on a park bench, and asked if we could help him. All he said was, 'Those poor firemen. They were coming up when we were going down'."

She eventually walked the two miles to Mike's fire station. Neither the engine nor the ladder had been heard from, and wives were beginning, like EJ, to show up at the station. The officers led her into the kitchen. Finally, the phone rang, and EJ heard an officer mutter a crisp: "All right, Mike." She screamed for the phone, to hear Mike's voice for herself. "He said, 'Oh my God, I love you, you're safe', over and over again," she recalls. "But I wasn't sure it was Mike. It just didn't sound like him."

For the first couple of days, like firemen across the city, Mike worked 24-hour shifts, much of the time on the "pile". "We'd be working in one place for a bit, and they'd blow the horn and tell us to run because another building might collapse on us, and then they'd bring us back to the same place two hours later," he recalls.

The grim labour consisted of scooping handfuls of debris into white buckets. Mike picked through body parts and shoes and paperwork, but to him the most disturbing finds were the countless tools stamped: "FDNY". He and his Engine 28 colleagues were on a special mission as they dug: to find their six workmates from Ladder 11 who were among the missing.

What downtime there was, Mike spent at the fire station, catnapping on the sofa. On days off,

the men brought food and reassurance to the homes of their missing co-workers. EJ felt guilty calling the fire station during that time – after all, her husband was still alive – and Mike rarely checked in with her.

Two days after his first afternoon off, Mike was in the Daily News. TV news anchors flashed the picture and said he was among the missing; one headline read: "Stairwell to hell". EJ was a widow for a day. Relatives who were sure Mike was alive called again to ask if they were hallucinating.

Then reporters tracked him down at the fire station, and a correction was made.

A man of few words with even his closest friends, Mike did just a handful of brusque interviews, assuring reporters that he wasn't the real hero. But the picture had taken on a life of its own. A relative of a missing person in the photo called to say he'd heard that Mike had miraculously saved people by leading them into the subcellar of the towers. The fan letters began piling up.

The days were crowded with the parade of memorials and ritual embrace. In the first week of October, all six of the men from Ladder 11 were buried. At the solemn, stilted receptions after the memorials, the men and women took to opposite corners of the room. "We'd huddle together and ask how each other's husbands were taking everything," explains EJ. "Some couldn't sleep or were having nightmares."

Mike seemed numb, detached. In curt monosyllables, he assured everyone that he was fine. EJ couldn't do a thing to bring him back to life. The two had known each other since she was 13; but he had yet to tell her a single detail of that terrifying day. "I know what my wife can take and what she can't," Mike told me one afternoon. "The firehouse is my therapy." Unfortunately, he couldn't take his usual refuge there. The attention heaped on him was starting to grate on some colleagues. They joked about his celebrity, dubbing him "Worldwide", but privately grimaced that he had become the poster boy for the attacks.

Things became so tense that Lieutenant Jimmy Rallis began pulling the men aside. "I told them that they should stop giving him crap, because these photographs have a long history. The guy in the Baby Jessica picture killed himself," says Rallis, referring to a Texas fireman who pulled a baby from a well in 1987 and committed suicide eight years later. "Mike didn't ask for his picture to be taken."

In November, on the day after Thanksgiving, Mike woke up and told EJ he couldn't face going to work. He had often scoffed at the emotional help the department had been offering, but he scheduled an appointment with a counsellor to request medical leave. His best friend, Rob Borrazzo, drove him to the session. Mike answered the counsellor's questions – "Are you having trouble eating?" "No." "Sleeping?" "Sometimes" – but he didn't volunteer any information. Still, he left feeling a little lighter and carrying explicit instructions to take a holiday with his wife.

On the 78th day after the attacks, Mike broached the topic of 11 September with EJ. He was still on medical leave, but they drove into Manhattan for a dinner for the families of Ladder 11. The two were sitting in a bar in Alphabet City when Mike leant in. "I just don't know what I'm supposed to be feeling about all of this," he told her. "I think I'm supposed to be feeling guilty, but I actually am thankful to be alive." And then he abruptly stopped talking.

The discussion resumed a week later, when he finally spoke to Rob about that day."I feel guilty," he said, "like I should be having nightmares or I should be feeling more. I mean, how come I'm happy about surviving?" EJ broke in: "You know, you haven't said a thing to me about that day." "Yes, I have," he replied. "I told you about the blown-out windows, how we entered the lobby through the blown-out windows."

"No, you didn't tell me about the windows or about anything. You didn't say a thing to me about 11 September until the other night."

Those are the last words the two have shared on the topic. EJ says she has stopped trying to prod. "Maybe he's just trying to spare me," she says of his silence. "But I do ask myself if one day, all of a sudden, it's going to hit him."

Mike has returned to work but he still wears his hero's mantle awkwardly. On a stormy morning in December, he, EJ and his elder brother Robert drove to Dingman-Delaware Elementary School, in the Pocono mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. The school's students welcomed him with a medley of patriotic standards. Two TV stations and the local newspaper were in tow to cover the event.

When Rosanne Cacciarelli Wise, the third-grade teacher, sees Mike, she bursts into tears. "Before 11 September, a hero to these children was Superman on TV," she tells him. "After everything awful that happened, they need some good to come out of it, and you've been that for them the past few months. They need a hero they can see and touch."

Her pupils all want his autograph, and they take turns standing next to Mike and reading aloud Christmas cards they have made for him to take back to the station.

The last student to come to the front lost a relative in the towers. He asks Mike to read his card. "I like you because you saved so many people in the twin towers," Mike reads, tripping over the little boy's handwriting. "Thank you for trying to save everybody's life. You are very brave. Too bad you didn't save more people. I wish you could have saved Kris."

Mike hugs the boy and then turns away from the photographers. He is weeping, but this time, he won't look into the camera.