Over lunch of salmon cakes and macaroni-and-cheese, they finished each others' sentences.

        The way brothers do.

        But twice during lunch Monday, the men of Cincinnati Fire Department's Engine 17-Ladder 17 in Lower Price Hill fell silent.

        The first came as a New York City firefighter on TV spoke of surviving the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that ended his career and the lives of 343 firefighters.

        The second came minutes later, when an alarm blared for a fire just two blocks away. Out the window, smoke billowed. The only sound was of forks hitting plates. Within 30 seconds, Fox News was playing to an empty station house.

        Those two “moments of silence” personify why firefighters consider their job a calling, and why they welcomed the lessons from Sunday night's CBS documentary on one of the first units inside the World Trade Center.

        “Their worst hour and their best hour,” said Lt. Joe Arnold. “All rolled into one.”

        Throughout the Tristate, the documentary made firefighters stop and watch, even those on-call who couldn't see its entirety.

        One such firefighter, Kevin Stave, is a volunteer firefighter in Crescent Springs. His first day was Sept. 9. He said he was moved by “just the chaos” of it, quickly adding that “I've always wanted to do this.”

        For Lt. Rick Prinz, a 12-year veteran of the West Chester Fire Department in Butler County, watching was hard, but not watching was impossible.

        “It was a little difficult to watch, all the fallen brothers,” he said, “actually being able to see videotape from the inside, the expressions on their faces.

        “They knew.”

        Back at Cincinnati's Engine 17 Monday, they did what they do every day: Sat, ate, talked, joked and lived as one — Lt. Arnold, a 13-year veteran; Bob Parker, who has two years in; Joe Knue Jr., 15 years; Michael Carlisle, eight years; Jon Thompson, four years.

        Lt. Arnold shook his head as he recalled Cincinnati's annual firefighter's memorial walk in October, and of strangers coming up to simply say thank you.

        “I had chills,” Lt. Arnold said. “The public support is overwhelming.”

        Before he finished his thought, firefighter Michael Boerschig added, “The flip side is, we haven't done anything different.”

        Nods of agreement, throughout the room.

        The documentary by French brothers Jules and Gedeon Naudet drew 39 million viewers Sunday night.

        As people inside the trade center are shown running out the lobby, New York City firefighters were shown running up a disabled escalator, only to disappear in black smoke.

        Amid the controlled chaos, the words of those who stayed in the lobby were split by the horrific thump of unseen bodies hitting the sidewalk.

        “How overwhelmed they were,” Mr. Knue Jr., said of the footage inside Tower One.

        The firefighters of Engine 17 taped the show and watched it again Monday morning as part of their regularly scheduled drills training.

        The topic, planned months ago, was high-rise rescue. The tallest building in their area is 16 stories, but the unit would be among the first backup units called to any fire at the 574-foot-high Carew Tower downtown.

        The documentary focused in large part on the tedium of the job, seen through the experience of a young recruit: Morning equipment checks, making dinner for dozens, the humor and camaraderie that lift down-time.

        The guys of Engine 17 found that refreshing. Their first three calls Monday were for a 2-year-old with Mace in his eyes, a container fire of illegally burned wood pallets, and a 79-year-old woman who fell.

        For most of the firefighters who could recall, their first runs ever was a car crash, a drug overdose in a bathtub or an arson fire of a home.

        Those kind of runs are far more common than what happened Sept. 11 — the one that changed everything.

        “It's obviously affected everybody,” said firefighter Bob Johnson, “but for people of New York, and for firefighters, it's super personal. Funeral after funeral.”

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