The Pentagon: A History (59 page)

Despite the flurry of activity and the thousands of televisions and computers in the building, some in the Pentagon were entirely unaware of what was happening at the World Trade Center. In room 2E483, an Army conference room on the second floor in the newly renovated section, Colonel Phil McNair had been holed up with a dozen members of his staff since 9
A.M.
The lively staff meeting, held every second Tuesday, was the day the low-key Texan cracked the whip on behalf of his boss, Army personnel chief Lieutenant General Timothy Maude, making sure projects were on schedule.

In other offices, the news from New York caused a stir; if there were more attacks, the Pentagon was an obvious target. Workers in the Defense Intelligence Agency comptroller’s office in Room 1C535, across from the Navy Command Center, were uneasy. Office supervisor Paul Gonzales, a cheerful retired Navy commander, reassured his colleagues: The Pentagon is probably the safest building in the world. By 9:30, most people had settled back to business.

I didn’t want to get burnt again

Frank Probst—on the ground, surprised to be alive—felt the plane pass a few feet over his body and watched as it continued toward the Pentagon a hundred yards away. It seemed to be going in slow motion. First, he watched the right wingtip slice through a trailer holding a backup generator “like it was butter.” Almost simultaneously, Probst saw a cloud of dust exploding in the air as the plane’s left engine struck a concrete steam vent outside the building. The pilot seemed to be aiming for a window on the first floor, almost exactly where Probst had been checking the air-conditioning ten minutes earlier. “And then the fire—a big fireball, and the plane just disappearing into the fireball.” The burnt-orange fireball was enormous, rising high in the air and exploding out from the building. It seemed to be coming right at him.

“Well, the plane didn’t hit you,” Probst thought. “Now you’re going to roast.” Probst had a special fear of fire that went back to Vietnam, when the tunnel explosion in the Iron Triangle had badly burned his arms, neck, and ears. “I didn’t want to get burnt again,” Probst said. “So I wasn’t real brave. I didn’t run toward the fire. I ran the other damn way.” He stumbled and fell twice as he ran, tearing his pants and ripping the skin on his hands. Fine bits of metal and concrete floated around him like a gray confetti shower.

Alan Wallace, fifty-five, a firefighter manning the small fire station at the Pentagon heliport, had just finished adjusting a valve on a new red foam truck when the jet suddenly appeared, twenty-five feet off the ground. He sprinted until he heard the plane hit the building, and then dove underneath a big Ford van parked next to the station to escape the blast and burning metal. Wallace felt a terrible heat—“I got to get farther away than this,” he thought—but it was too late.

When he emerged, everything seemed to be on fire—the grass, the building, the firehouse. Two big magnolia trees were ablaze. Even the foam truck was burning. Wallace climbed in the cab anyway, thinking he could pull it to the building and use its 1,500 gallons of water and 200 gallons of liquid foam. He punched the ignition buttons and the engine fired up. “Oh, my Lord, thank you!” he exclaimed. Wallace took off the emergency brake and floored the accelerator, but the truck did not move; instead, the flames in the back of the truck flared up. Another fireman yelled at him to kill the engine and get out. Wallace grabbed a couple of breathing apparatuses and his helmet and jumped out. He heard someone calling from the Pentagon: “We need help over here.” People inside were at the windows, trying to get out.

A rapidly moving avalanche

Army Specialist Chin Sun “Sunny” Pak—her nickname matched her disposition—was chatting on the phone with a friend at 9:37
A.M.
when she glanced up and gasped. The twenty-four-year-old personnel specialist from Oklahoma sat at her desk facing the window on the second-floor E Ring, Room 2E462 in the newly renovated Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel. “Oh my God,” Pak said. She let out a long, terrified scream before the phone went dead.

The Boeing 757, weighing approximately 181,520 pounds, was traveling at 460 knots—about 780 feet per second—when its nose struck the first-floor west wall of the Pentagon. It crashed through the windows of rooms 1E462 and 1E466, right below Pak’s office, just north of Corridor 4. The front of the aircraft largely disintegrated on impact, but it blew open a hole in the limestone-faced exterior between the first- and second-floor slabs that allowed the rest of the fuselage to pass into the building. While the nose came to an almost immediate stop, the midsection of the plane was still moving at 775 feet per second. These portions, disintegrating as they pushed through the building, cleared a path for the trailing sections. “[T]he debris from the aircraft and building most likely resembled a rapidly moving avalanche through the first floor of the building,” an engineering study later said.

The avalanche burst through Army accounting offices on the first floor of the E Ring, continued through the Navy Command Center on the D Ring, and slammed into a Defense Intelligence Agency office in the C Ring. The plane was flying east-northeast at a forty-degree angle to the face of the building when it struck. The destruction followed the same path, traveling diagonally through the building for 310 feet toward the fifth corridor, out of the renovated Wedge 1 and into the non-renovated Wedge 2. The concussion broke a nine-foot-diameter hole through the back wall of the C Ring, and debris spilled out onto AE Drive, the service road that circles the Pentagon between the B and C rings. The blast force escaped out AE Drive into the air, leaving the B and A rings virtually untouched.

The outer three rings were utterly devastated, both by the force of the impact and the resulting fuel explosion. The plane was carrying 36,200 pounds of jet fuel in three tanks on both wings and the fuselage. A relatively small portion of the fuel—less than five thousand pounds—exploded against the façade, feeding the huge fireball Frank Probst witnessed. But an enormous amount—more than thirty thousand pounds—passed into the Pentagon. Some of the fuel detonated seconds after impact, sending fireballs through the interior and blowing a hole through the second-floor slab. More fuel cascaded through the area, soaking occupants and offices.

The wings of the plane were most likely severed as it burst into the façade. Likewise, much of the plane’s forty-five-foot-high tail appears to have been destroyed by the fireball before hitting the building; damage from the impact went only twenty-five feet up the outer wall.

The fuselage in essence turned inside out as it passed through the Pentagon. The bodies of the hijackers, who were in the front of the plane, were deposited near the front of the building. Almost all the remains of the passengers, who had been in the back, ended up deep in the C Ring. Such was the brutal force of the impact and the intensity of the fire that no identifiable remains would ever be found of five of those on board, including the tiniest passenger, three-year-old Dana Falkenberg.

Hail Mary full of grace. Help me out of this place

In the Navy Command Center, Lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer was slammed to the floor by a thunderous shock wave, and the room around him exploded in orange. He had been standing by his desk, peering over the shoulder-high cubicles at the burning towers on the television screens. Commanders Dunn, Donovan, and Williams had been seated at their desks a few feet away. Now they were gone.

The room was pitch-black, and for a few seconds the silence was absolute. Lying on the ground, Shaeffer felt his head and back on fire. He ran his fingers through his hair and face and rolled his body on the floor, trying to put out the flames. He managed to stand and tried to get his bearings. He could see little but could tell the ceiling had collapsed and that he was surrounded by rubble. The space—1D535 was no longer a room—was rapidly filling with thick, caustic smoke, and through it he caught glimpses of carnage. He called for help but no one answered. His mouth and throat were burning and he struggled to breathe. He thought of his wife Blanca and was sickened at the thought of never seeing her again. Shaeffer began crawling through the darkness, climbing over piles of rubble. He yelled out: “Keep moving, Kevin! Keep moving!”

In the adjacent DIA comptroller’s office, Paul Gonzales had just dropped a memo on the desk of Patty Mickley, one of his budget analysts, when he heard a rushing sound: “Things started to go flying by me, there was a wind, and I started to fly with it.” The room felt like an oven. Coworker Aaron Cooper, facing the explosion, saw two streams of fire roaring through the room, as if from a fire-breathing dragon.

Landing on the ground, Gonzales looked at his hands. The skin was peeled back from his palms, curled like carrot peels from a vegetable scraper. He heard someone screaming. It was Kathy Cordero, one of the office workers, swatting helplessly at a burning ceiling tile that had fallen on her head like a hat. Gonzales crawled to her and batted the tile off with the back of his hand. Smoke filled the room, lowering the ceiling of breathable air closer to the ground. He and Cordero found three office mates—Dave Lanagan, Patty Pague, and Christine Morrison—clustered on the floor. The room was unrecognizable, its fire exits blocked by furniture and rubble. Gonzales did a roll call and realized a half-dozen workers were missing. They called back to Gonzales’s office, where Mickley and others had been. There was no answer. Gonzales climbed on a desk, feeling the temperature soar as his head rose, and looked over a seven-foot partition. “I saw what I believe was hell,” he said. Black smoke billowed around the space, illuminated by eerie islands of fire.

Gonzales crawled back to the others. The room was baking hot. Lanagan had taken off his shirt and the women their blouses, trying to cool off. They lapped up water that had collected on the floor from broken pipes. “This doesn’t look real good,” Lanagan told Gonzales. “I don’t know if we’re going to get out of here.”

His words sparked new desperation in Gonzales, and he crawled off again to the back of the room, trying to find a way out. He kicked at partitions and tossed furniture, pulling on anything that could move. The others could no longer see him and were losing hope. Lanagan prayed aloud:
Hail Mary, full of grace. Help me out of this place.

Then they heard Gonzales’s voice, coming through the thick smoke like a foghorn: “There’s a hole!”

There are people behind me

In the Building Operations Center on the first-floor A Ring, Steve Carter heard a big boom and felt his knees buckling. A strange crinkling sound rippled through the ceiling tiles overhead. He looked at the command-system computers and saw all the screens going red, the signal for an emergency. The fire-system screen showed how many alarms had been triggered, and the numbers were spinning like a gasoline pump. After a few seconds it had reached 352 and showed no signs of slowing. “I think we just got hit by a bomb,” Carter told his assistant. “I’m going to grab my radio and go check it out.”

Out in the corridor, Carter saw drywall dust and smoke rolling down the hallways like tumbleweeds. He rounded a corner and ran into several military officers who screamed that they needed fire extinguishers. Carter calmly told them they should evacuate the building and let the fire department respond. One of the officers looked at Carter: “You don’t understand,” he said.

Carter followed them out to AE Drive, the service road that circled the Pentagon between the B and C rings. The double doors to an electrical vault on the service road had been blown off, and the back wall inside it had been blown out too. Looking through the vault into the building, Carter could see a deep red inferno; the vault had become the escape route. Pentagon employees stood in ankle-deep water in the electrical vault—braving electrocution—and had formed a chain to pull survivors out. Carter understood now. He joined the rescuers.

Nearby, confusion reigned in the corridors close to the impact but spared a direct hit. Some thought a bomb had exploded; almost no one understood the building had been hit by a plane. Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul “Ted” Anderson boomed out instructions and took command of stragglers milling in the hallways; he led dozens of employees down Corridor 6 to the Mall entrance. “People, we are moving!” he barked. The guards refused to open the doors, saying the building was under attack from outside. The crowd in the corridor was growing, two hundred people or more; some turned back, looking for another way out. Anderson ignored the guards and kicked open an emergency door with his dress shoes. He looked around the Mall entrance, saw no threat, and directed people to follow him out. Most of them streamed toward the North parking lot, away from the smoke. Running down the Mall steps, Anderson looked in the opposite direction, to his left toward the heliport, and sprinted toward the smoke.

Wearing civilian clothes—suspenders, striped shirt, and tie—and with his wire-rim glasses, the forty-two-year-old Anderson looked like an unlikely warrior; yet he was, to the core. After sixteen years in the field as a paratrooper and with combat experience in the Gulf War, the Ohio native had been mortified when he was assigned to a cushy staff job in the Army congressional liaison office at the Pentagon. He did not want his peers to find out. Now, approaching the west wall, he found a battleground.

Anderson saw flames coming from blown-out windows and tremendous flash explosions inside. Victims were staggering out of the building, some terribly injured, and people inside were screaming. As he ran through the grass, Anderson saw gray debris strewn about, pieces of a disintegrated aircraft. Army Staff Sergeant Christopher D. Braman fell in stride with Anderson. Braman, a chef for the general officers’ mess, was a strapping Army Ranger of the same pedigree as Anderson. The two formed an ad hoc rescue team.