Keegan was seriously injured by the falling debris, receiving a concussion and second-degree burns; but it's clear he knows how much luckier he is than many of the men with whom he stood.

“I lay there with something heavy on top of me. I knew I was being burned, but I couldn't move. I thought, I'm going to die. But, okay, at least I'm on the Job, I'll die as a firefighter. That was okay, you know?”

Whether or not that would have been okay is a judgment the visitor is glad he does not have to make.

“Then I heard Uncle Jimmy calling me.”

Uncle Jimmy, of course, is Capt. James McCaffery, who stepped in and helped raise young Kevin Keegan after the death of his father. “There was smoke and dust everywhere, you couldn't see anything, but Uncle Jimmy told me to go left. He said it was my coat that was pinned, not me, and to take it off and stay low and head toward daylight on the left.

“So I did. I peeled out of the coat, and I could move. It was slow going, but Uncle Jimmy kept saying just a little further, he was right there waiting. I could see the daylight he meant. I got there, to a kind of hole, and saw guys up there, yelling and digging. I called to Uncle Jimmy. I figured that's where he was, that I'd made it to the right place. A couple of guys yelled back. One guy jumped down into the hole. A guy I didn't know.” Keegan shook his head, clearing out memories of smoke and dust, fire and darkness. “I asked where Uncle Jimmy was, but he just kept telling me I was okay, and they got me out.

“That's the last thing I remember until I woke up in the hospital the next day. Some of the guys were there sitting in the room, the guys I rode with. They told me about Dave”-firefighter David Schwartz, the second member of Engine 168 to die that day-“and Capt. Small. I asked about Uncle Jimmy. They told me about him, too.