Officers Rescue 9 From Burning Building : Heroes: The five brave thick smoke during a search. ‘You couldn’t see in front of your face--it was crazy in there for a couple of moments,’ one says.

All in a night’s work.

It was drizzling lightly when Officers Dori Wolfenstein and Kulin Patel got the call and made their way to an apartment building filled with black smoke.

“I don’t have a fear of fire, but I do have a fear of smoke,” Wolfenstein said. “When I first opened the door, I thought, ‘How am I going to get in there?’ But you could see the cleaner air on the bottom, so we got down and crawled on our stomachs. . . . As long as I could hear my friends, I was all right.”

Her friends--Patel and three of their fellow officers from the LAPD’s Rampart Division--early Friday morning rescued seven adults and two children from a smoke-filled apartment building at 847 S. Alvarado St. They even put out the fire, although the Fire Department arrived and finished the job.

The officers did it all in a matter of 15 or 20 minutes, and to recognize their unusual night of work, their bosses have recommended Wolfenstein, Patel, Michael Seguin, Michael Montoya and James DeVito for Medals of Valor.

Yesterday, three of the group met briefly with reporters in the hallway of the station across from a vending machine filled with Cheez-Its and M & Ms. DeVito, who works undercover, did not want to appear on camera. Patel had not made it in yet. On the front desk of the station house sat a gift basket of goodies for the heroes, courtesy of Michael Seguin’s wife and sister. The officers spoke for the television cameras and then strolled into the parking lot, still musing over the events of the last 24 hours.

“You couldn’t see in front of your face--it was crazy in there for a couple of moments,” Montoya said.

DeVito, the vice cop, was a little more than an hour away from getting off his shift when he saw smoke coming from the MacArthur Park apartment building about 1:30 a.m. Friday.

He notified the Fire Department and called for backup. The officers found the fire in a second-floor apartment. The carpeting was ablaze and a dazed woman was standing in the room. (She is being held in connection with an arson investigation.)

The officers got her out, then crawled from apartment to apartment, yelling for people to come out, and finally kicking in doors and guiding people to safety.

Seguin found a fire hose mounted on a wall, broke the glass, and carried it into the apartment that was on fire.

“I was spraying the fire; I couldn’t see anything,” said Seguin, unaware that in the midst of the thick smoke, his fellow officers were still in the apartment. “They were in there yelling, ‘Stop spraying! Stop spraying!’ ”

Later at the hospital emergency room where the officers were treated for smoke inhalation, “the first thing I thought was, ‘Boy, a beer sounds good about now,’ ” Wolfenstein recalled.

After they were released, they all went home to shower off layers of soot and catch some sleep before returning to another night of police work. The smoke will still linger in their pores and throats for 72 hours.

All in a night’s work. Training, they say.

“It was so systematic for us, we never even discussed who was going to do what,” Wolfenstein said.