Twenty five years ago today, two men made it higher into the burning South Tower than anyone else, and one of them was a Green Beret. Fire Marshal Ronald Paul Bucca was 47 years old and 22 years into the FDNY. Before that he had been a Special Forces soldier, and he never really stopped being one. He stayed in the Army Reserve as a warrant officer with Special Forces and worked as an intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Two careers at once, and both of them were about the same thing. In 1986 he fell five stories off a fire escape at a job in the Bronx and broke his back. He was not supposed to work again. He fought his way back to full duty, and the department started calling him the Flying Fireman. He made fire marshal in 1992. When the truck bomb went off under the World Trade Center in 1993, he worked that investigation, and it stuck to him. He became the FDNY's representative to the Joint Terrorism Task Force and spent years telling anyone who would listen that the people who did 1993 were coming back for those buildings. In 2000 his position on the task force was eliminated. Battalion Chief Orio Palmer was 45, a rising star in the department, and a serious distance runner. He was in phenomenal shape and it is the reason this story exists at all. On September 11, United 175 hit the South Tower at 9:03 between the 77th and 85th floors. Everything above it was cut off. Nobody below had any idea what the impact zone actually looked like, whether there was anyone alive up there, or whether the fire could be fought. Palmer found an elevator that could be made to run and took it to the 40th floor. From there he went up the stairs. Bucca went with him. Thirty eight floors, in bunker gear, carrying tools, through smoke, past thousands of people coming the other way, in a building that had a fuel fire burning above them. At 9:52 a.m. Orio Palmer reached the 78th floor sky lobby of the South Tower. Ron Bucca got there with him. As far as anyone has ever been able to determine, they were the highest any first responder reached in either tower that day. And then Palmer got on the radio and did his job. He reported what he saw, and his voice on that tape is flat and professional. He reported numerous dead civilians in the sky lobby. He reported that there were two isolated pockets of fire and that he thought they could knock them down with two lines. He called for more companies and asked about water. He was standing in the wreckage of a 767 impact, on the 78th floor, having just climbed 38 flights, calmly requesting hose lines so he could start putting it out and get to the people trapped above. His last transmission was at 9:58 a.m. At 9:59 a.m. the South Tower came down. Ron Bucca's body was recovered on October 23. He is the only fire marshal in the history of the New York City Fire Department killed in the line of duty. The Defense Intelligence Agency gives an award in his name every year to a reservist working counterterrorism. In 2003 the Army named a base in Iraq Camp Bucca after him. The FDNY named its physical fitness award after Orio Palmer, because the reason he got to the 78th floor is that he had spent his life running. A Green Beret turned fire marshal who had been warning about those buildings for eight years, and a marathon runner in a white helmet. They climbed to the worst place in America and started working the problem.