Every Sept. 11, He Plays the Bagpipes for His Firefighter Father

Every Sept. 11, Patrick Dowdell, a former Army captain and the son of a New York City fire lieutenant killed in the attacks, goes back to Rescue 4 in Queens with his bagpipes.

He stands there with his mother and his brother, also a firefighter, for the same observance they have kept every year since 2001, except when he was deployed. In his words, "We go to Rescue 4, and we do a moment of silence for each of the events, when the planes hit, when the towers fell, the Pentagon, Shanksville." He added, "And now I play the bagpipes for each of those moments of silence."

Kevin Dowdell, his father, was a 46-year-old lieutenant with Rescue 4, an elite unit trained for difficult rescues, with one such company in each borough. The Queens company almost never answered calls in lower Manhattan, but it did that morning because of the scale of the disaster, arriving in about 15 to 20 minutes.

Patrick Dowdell was 18 then and in his first year of college. His father had driven him back to school on Sept. 9 after a weekend home for his younger brother's birthday. Dowdell recalled, "And he made me write in a notebook... All the things that we still had to do to start the reapplication process to West Point," where he had been waitlisted.

After the attacks, Dowdell said he was determined to see that plan through. He said young men and women were going to go to war, and he did not want them to shoulder that burden by themselves. He graduated from West Point in 2006, served overseas as an Army officer, and his brother became a city firefighter that same year.

Dowdell, now 43 and a father of two, says his children never met Grandpa Kevin but "they talk about him like they know him." He explained, "me and my brother and my mom still talk about him that way as well."

Patrick Dowdell said honoring those who made a sacrifice meant "living a life worthy of the sacrifice." For him, he said, that meant "being a good part of your community, being a good family man, being, you know, someone that you could be counted on."

So the day ends at his house, around a table. As Dowdell put it, "We pour a glass of red wine. We keep it at the head of the table for him." He added, "And after dinner, we pass it around and everyone says a memory or something that happened this year that we think he would have liked to be a part of."