I was a first responder on 9/11 and saw both Towers come down.  A day or so later, I contacted a friend who told me that Police Officer Steve Driscoll was missing (See ABOUT for more details).  As most of us in the life saving business will recall, the days ran into each other for quite some time after 9/11.  You worked long tours, and went home to watch the planes hit the Towers over and over on TV, then went back to work, never really tired, just there to do what you could, waiting to hear that hundreds of survivors have been found in some pocket below the rubble.

As I worked, the words to this song came to me and I repeated them over and over until I got home and wrote them down.  I emailed them to a couple people who could write a melody, but nobody could seem to put the words to music.

Several years later, I befriended a man named Charlie Pellegrini at the local grocery store while I was out of work, rehabilitating from a bad accident where I almost lost my left leg.  He told me one day that he writes songs.  I gave him the words, and he and his co-writer, Lou Fortunate, created a beautiful melody for them.

We all met at my friend Chazz Menendez's studio, and the first cut with melody and vocals was completed, ironically enough, on 09/11/06.

From there, we brought in Tom Foley to add his talent and ideas with a guitar track.  World class bagpipe player Bobby Corcoran added the pipes, and Chazz's friend Keith Anthony Fluitt added the vocals going into the bagpipe track.  The topper was when Sgt Hal Stroud from Raleigh NC's SWAT team flew in to sing the song.  I finished it with the harmonica track.

So many people came from all walks of life to add their talents to this project.  I hope that it makes it around the world.  I hope people see that those who made the ultimate sacrifice to save innocent lives, are not robots, but are loving people with caring families.  This song is about all those brave souls, portrayed through Steve's final hours.