LAWRENCE -- With his wife rubbing his arm and assuring him, "You did everything you could," Firefighter William J. Cunningham lowered his head as his eyes welled up. He had just heard the words he feared the most -- "all four are dead."

Less than six hours earlier, Cunningham was neck-high in frigid water when he pulled out the first two of four young children who fell through the ice and were submerged in the Merrimack River yesterday. Three others were pulled to safety.

"The worst tragedies are the ones that involve young children, multiple deaths or people who are related to you," said Cunningham, 53, of Methuen. "In this one, you got two of the three."

Using a 6-foot rod with a hook, Cunningham crawled across the ice, reaching in to hoist up what he thought was one victim -- a mid-teen, he assumed. But the hook caught something lighter -- the leg of a much younger boy, caught just behind the knee.

"Initially, I was told there was only one," he said. "When I found the first child I pulled him up and went to shore. By the time I got back to shore, I was told there were actually four."

He got back on his hands and knees and crawled out 25 feet to the hole in the ice. Wearing a yellow, nylon suit with a thermal lining, he slid back into the water. Within several minutes he hooked the second boy, also behind the knee cap, and pulled him to the surface.

Tired after having spent about 15 minutes in the 36 degree to 38 degree water, Cunningham was ordered out of the water.

"The adrenaline was pumping," he said back at the Central Fire Station, wearing black sweat pants and a navy blue Fire Department golf shirt. "You have to keep the adrenaline under wraps so you can keep control of yourself. If you get too tired and too cold, hypothermia sets in and you start making irrational decisions."

As he climbed out, Firefighter Edward Burke continued searching below the surface, and pulled out the third boy. Cunningham remembered just hours earlier, when he saw Burke cuddling up with his two young children at the Christmas party thrown by the relief association.

Cunningham and his wife stood on the main floor of the Central Fire Station talking last night, a few hours after the incident. Other firefighters were upstairs eating Chinese food, but not Cunningham -- "I lost my appetite."

On the table before him was a sheet of white paper which listed the Chinese food orders. Next to Cunningham's name, a firefighter penciled in the words "hero man."

"You do your job, whether it's a fire, an accident or a water rescue. You do the best you can and do what you're supposed to do," said Cunningham.

As he reflected on yesterday's incident, Cunningham said he knew all too well what drew the seven boys onto the Merrimack River.

In his childhood, Cunningham said he and his buddies regularly played down at the Spicket River in Methuen -- venturing across the ice in the winter and playing on the "Tarzan swing" in the summer. He was 11 when his best friend's little brother followed the boys down to the river, went into the water and drowned.

"We didn't even know he went in," Cunningham said.

Cunningham, a member of the Merrimack Valley Dive Team, figures he's participated in more than 100 rescues over 20 years.

In 1988, he was named Firefighter of the Year after he dove into the North Canal to free a Haverhill woman whose car was submerged. Cunningham knocked out the windshield and got the woman out, but she died later that day.

A member of the Greater Lowell Stress Debriefing Team, Cunningham is an expert when it comes to helping firefighters, police officers or paramedics deal with tragedy. He spent two weeks in New York City last year counseling FDNY firefighters following Sept. 11. He was in Worcester in 1999 helping firefighters who lost six of their own in an abandoned warehouse fire.

Cunningham figures he and several other people involved in yesterday's ice rescue will meet over the next few days to talk openly about what happened, working to get past the sorrow which accompanies such a tragedy.

As he spoke, his head again tilted down, chin against his chest. Just a half-hour earlier, his head was cropped up higher, knowing at the time that only one boy was dead. He spoke with optimism then, praying the three other boys would pull through.

"This is so gratifying this time because we were able to make a rescue instead of recovering bodies," he said. "To actually recover four kids within an hour is pretty amazing. ... The sad thing is, this didn't have to happen."

Having worked 24 hours straight, Cunningham figures he will have a good cry over the tragedy after getting off work at 7 this morning.

"Firefighters are very macho; the same with cops," he said. "Things aren't supposed to bother you, but it does -- big time."