Newsday.com - Firefighters Protest New Book

Chanting “liar, liar,” more than 100 city firefighters showed up at a Manhattan book-signing Monday night to denounce an author who wrote that firefighters engaged in looting at the World Trade Center.

The demonstrators said the book by William Langewiesche — “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center” — wrongly accuses fire officers and firefighters of stealing jeans from a Gap store in the underground shopping concourse during the tragedy.

Battalion Chief Joseph Nardone, who was among the demonstrators outside the South Street Seaport Museum, said the Sept. 11 scene was so chaotic that “there was no time for anybody to do anything like that.”

“We are pained, we are hurting,” Nardone said. “We’re beyond understanding this.”

Referring to the 343 firefighters killed on Sept. 11, Peter Gorman, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, told the crowd:: “The firefighters he accuses are not here to defend themselves. We are. ‘American Ground’ is a piece of trash that belongs in the Fresh Kills dump.”

Langewiesche, in a telephone interview before the 20-minute protest, defended his work, saying it accurately reflected the emotions of rescue workers at the time.

He conceded that he had not checked out many of the stories he heard while he working on the book.

“I’m not a truth squad as far as 9/11 goes,” he said.. “I am a reporter. I was interested about what people really believed. My readers understand that and have understood it for years.”

Langewiesche, who was granted full access to the cleanup site for several months, described in the book a war zone that brought out the best “and sometimes the worst” of workers who removed bodies and debris.

In one passage, he said construction workers found a fire truck filled with jeans and began jeering firefighters at the scene after concluding that “while hundreds of doomed firefighters had climbed through the wounded buildings, this particular crew had engaged in something else entirely.”

The Atlantic Monthly, which first serialized the book before reprinting it in book form, said its editors “proudly” stand behind the author’s observations.

“’American Ground’ is a clear-eyed view of a time of great sadness and stress, and a piece of reporting remarkable for its depth and its integrity,” the magazine said in a statement. Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.