The Pentagon: A History (60 page)

Two women had jumped out of a window and were on the ground in front of the burning building, unable to move any farther. Anderson and Braman dragged them to the far side of the heliport, away from the blast and fire. They ran back to the building a few dozens yards north of where the plane had hit, broke jagged shards of glass from a blown-out window, and boosted themselves through. The two soldiers crawled blindly through a smoke-filled hallway. “Is there anybody in here?” Braman called. Sheila Mooney—an Army civilian employee on her second day on the job—lay on the floor, overcome by smoke and saying prayers. Mooney heard them calling but had sucked in so much smoke she was unable to call out. She clapped her burned hands together to get their attention. They dragged her out the emergency exit and passed her off to other rescuers.

Reentering the door, Anderson was stunned by nearby secondary explosions and instinctively dove to the floor. As he pushed himself back up, he saw a brilliant glow out of the corner of his eye. Anderson thought the ceiling was collapsing and threw himself back on the ground, covering his head. Then he realized the glow was moving. It was a man on fire. He was a human torch, trying to get out of the building, but he ran into a window and bounced back. Anderson had seen horrible sights in combat, but never anything like this. The man’s nose and lips had been burned off. Anderson could tell he was a civilian because the man’s suit coat was still affixed to his arms and a white shirt stuck out of his cuff. But everything else had burned away. Anderson and Braman grabbed him and smothered the flames. The whole time the man was screaming: “There are people behind me! You have to get the people behind me out of the corridor!”

Anderson and Braman carried him out and headed back. They paused for a moment outside the building to plan their search for the people in the corridor. Anderson figured he would crawl to the corridor with Braman holding his foot so they would not be separated in the smoke. As they readied themselves to go in, they were grabbed by firefighters. Arlington County fire commanders, arriving and taking charge of the scene, had ordered military rescuers to stay out of the building. The soldiers did not have the training or equipment, and it was too dangerous.

The soldiers and firemen angrily confronted one another. Anderson was incredulous:
Who are you to tell me I can’t go in to get my men out? You don’t leave anybody behind in combat. Ever. If you have to give your life, give your life.
Two firefighters physically restrained Anderson. He felt as if he were losing his mind.
Here we are at war—
he knew the country was at war
—and we’re not going to mount a rescue attempt?

I’m alive

Colonel Phil McNair felt as if he was trapped in a maze. For those still in the impact zone, the time for escape was rapidly vanishing. The area was getting hotter, the smoke thicker, and the floors in danger of collapse. Though he had no idea what had happened, the plane had hit the building one floor below, passing within twenty feet of the conference room—2E483—where McNair had been sitting at a table with ten members of his staff. McNair had heard a tremendous explosion and seen ripples of flame licking out from the ceiling. Then everything was inky-black. McNair leapt to his feet. “What the hell was that?” he called.

Smoke filled the room and everyone crawled out, separating into several groups in the darkness and confusion. McNair at first figured they should go out to the nearby E Ring and escape out the front of the building. But, coming to a corner, McNair felt the heat growing and saw flames under the door ahead. “If you open that door, we’ll get toasted,” McNair told his group. They crawled in the opposite direction. Two other officers from the conference room—Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Johnson and Major Steven Long, apparently unaware of the turn taken by their colleagues—went through the door into the E Ring and collapsed almost immediately, perishing in the furnace-like heat.

McNair’s group crawled through the enormous office bay toward the C Ring. There were few ways out of the thirty-thousand-square-foot space; the closest exits were blocked by fire, and others lay a hundred yards across the bay through an unfathomable darkness. They kept hitting dead ends beneath desks or at locked doors. They continued moving, holding onto one another’s shoes to stay together. The smoke dropped like a curtain to within a foot of the floor, and it was getting harder to breathe. Water from sprinklers soaked Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills’s black Army sweater; she breathed through the moist fabric to cool her mouth and throat, and then stripped off the sweater to share it with McNair and other gagging colleagues. Flaming pieces of ceiling fell around them. McNair figured they would probably die, and it struck him as a lousy way to go.

Unlike Ted Anderson, McNair was no warrior in disguise. He had never jumped out of airplanes or been in combat. McNair had been an administrative officer for his entire twenty-five-year Army career and looked like one, with thinning hair and wire-rim glasses. He was stoic and even-tempered, the son of a newspaper man from Midland, Texas. McNair’s wife, Nancy, always said she had married the nicest man she had ever met. Yet he had an inner steel.

McNair heard a voice calling from inside an office at the back of the bay: “Come over here, there’s a window.” Through the smoke, Army Specialist Michael Petrovich had spotted a window overlooking the service road, AE Drive. The concussion had partially blown the window frame away from the wall but not far enough for anyone to escape. Petrovich threw a laser printer at the window, but it bounced off the industrial-strength glass. McNair joined him. Using their feet, the two pushed the window frame back far enough to create an opening. They dropped their co-workers out, one by one. Twenty feet below, sailors who had escaped from the Navy area on the first floor caught them. Petrovich leapt out and soon only McNair and Wills remained. Wills was distraught—people from the conference room were still missing. Without a word, McNair turned back and disappeared into the black smoke.

On the first floor, the DIA comptroller employees crawled toward the sound of Paul Gonzales’s voice. The hole that Gonzales had discovered was a tight tunnel running for six feet beneath a mountain of furniture and debris. Gonzales, a stocky fellow, had barely fit through, losing a shoe in the process. Coming up behind Gonzales, Kathy Cordero found the opening, but Chris Martinez was sure that the tiny tunnel could not be the right way out. “This isn’t the hole,” she said. “Paul couldn’t get through that hole.”

“Get your skinny ass through the hole now,” Cordero told her. They all made it through. Gonzales kept crawling—the others following—until he saw daylight. They had reached Corridor 5 and walked out to AE Drive.

In the adjacent Navy Command Center, Lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer kept moving, crawling over rubble piles. He slipped past frayed electrical cables dangling from the ceiling, fearing electrocution, and then found himself outside the command center, having unknowingly followed the plane’s path through the building. Toward the back of the C Ring, through the smoke, he caught glimpses of sunlight. A hole had been punched through the brick wall, reaching AE Drive. A surge of adrenaline carried him over a dozen desks to the opening.

Shaeffer staggered onto the service road, skin dangling from his outstretched arms. His hair was burned off, his khakis melted into his flesh. His left side was still burning. People looked at him in disbelief. Shaeffer called out: “I’m alive!”

It was just a smoking, burning mess

Rumsfeld had been in the midst of his CIA briefing on the opposite side of the Pentagon when he felt the building shake and the round antique table where he was sitting jump. Many Pentagon workers on the far side of the building—especially those far from windows—did not feel anything, and they ignored evacuation alarms until forced to leave by insistent guards. In parts of the building, no alarms even sounded. But in his office on the E Ring overlooking the river, Rumsfeld had no doubt something was wrong. The defense secretary rushed to the window. Unable to see anything, he hurried from his office and down the third-floor E Ring “to see what the hell had happened.”

Rumsfeld found his way blocked at Corridor 6 by smoke. He ran down the steps and out the Mall exit, chased by an anxious bodyguard. Outside, Rumsfeld spotted a cloud of black smoke and rushed toward it. “It was a funny thing for me to do, I suppose, and unusual, but I just felt I had to see what it was and what had happened, because no one knew,” Rumsfeld recalled. “There were no eyewitnesses running around the halls telling me. You couldn’t call up somebody and ask.”

Reaching the heliport, he saw pieces of metal sprayed across the grass and flames coming out of the building. “It was just a smoking, burning mess,” he recalled. “There were people struggling out of the building.” The first rescue workers—civilian as well as military personnel with medical training—were arriving. Rumsfeld helped lift several victims onto stretchers.

Hundreds of employees were running from the building, some panicked, most confused. Alan Wallace, the heliport firefighter, was catching office workers as they came out a first-floor window headfirst. People collapsed on the grass, crying. Rumsfeld saw people standing and watching from a distance, and he impatiently gestured for them to come help. Others sprang into action. People adopted roles irrespective of rank—some took charge, setting up triage areas; others ran for supplies or carried stretchers. Army colonels, Marines, Navy petty officers, and civilian contractors joined in. Generals took orders from nurses. Rumsfeld’s eyes fixed on a young woman sitting in the grass, bleeding, disheveled. “If I can help, bring someone here,” she said. “I can hold an IV or something.”

Carl Mahnken, an Army public affairs specialist who had been blown through a wall and narrowly escaped with his life, cared for victims despite a welt the size of a baseball on his forehead where his computer had struck him. Mahnken was holding an IV bag for a burn victim when he looked up and saw Rumsfeld helping other injured workers, a sight he found reassuring.

Rumsfeld was stunned when a colonel told him that a plane had flown into the building. After a few minutes at the scene, the secretary realized he needed to get back to his office and the command center. “I decided I had done what I could, there were enough people there, and came in,” he later said.

Rumsfeld’s instinctive rush to the scene was courageous, an inspiring act for Pentagon employees at a dark hour. Vice President Cheney later said the act remade Rumsfeld in the eyes of the military. But it also took the secretary out of the chain of command while critical decisions were being made about shooting down passenger jets to prevent further terrorist strikes.

Rumsfeld made it back to his office by about 10
A.M.
and hurriedly conferred by telephone with President George W. Bush, but the two did not discuss the possibility of military jets taking out hijacked planes. At 10:15
A.M.,
Rumsfeld walked into Executive Support Center—informally known as “Cables”—a secure communications hub with a video teleconference facility near his third-floor office. Rumsfeld smelled of smoke, and he had sweat and ashes on his face and clothes. His aides were still uncertain what had happened to the Pentagon. “Rumsfeld was our first eyewitness,” his spokeswoman, Torie Clarke, later wrote.

“I’m quite sure it was a plane and I’m pretty sure it’s a large plane,” the secretary said.

Fifteen minutes later, Rumsfeld moved downstairs to the National Military Command Center. The maze of offices, cubicles, and conference rooms was crowded and hectic. More than a hundred people were in the command center, seemingly all of them talking on telephones and radios or bustling about with papers. The staff had not even felt the plane’s impact but saw the aftermath on television screens. Captain Leidig, the senior watch commander, had convened an “air threat” conference with the White House and NORAD two minutes after the plane hit; they wanted to include Rumsfeld but he had been out of the building. Operators were also frantically trying to get the FAA on the secure connection; the lapse was causing serious confusion on the critical question of whether more hijacked planes were in the air.

At 10:39, Rumsfeld used a secure red telephone in a corner to speak with Cheney, learning for the first time that the vice president had more than twenty minutes earlier authorized fighter aircraft to shoot down hijacked civilian airliners. Rumsfeld later said his absence from the command center during the first minutes after the attack made little difference. “I don’t think so—who knows?” he said. “My deputy was here. The chain of command was complete.”

As Rumsfeld conferred with the vice president and gained “situational awareness,” William J. Haynes, II, the Defense Department counsel, noticed smoke infiltrating the command center. He was surprised—he had been under the impression that it would be protected against such hazards. It was getting hazy and people were coughing, and somebody worried aloud that the smoke could be poisonous. Aides suggested Rumsfeld get out of the building, but the secretary paid little attention. They tried again about ten minutes later, warning the smoke might be toxic, but he again ignored them. Finally, after another ten minutes, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz approached Rumsfeld and told him he ought to leave. To his deputy’s chagrin, Rumsfeld responded by ordering Wolfowitz to fly to Site R, the alternate command center in Pennsylvania. That was contrary to the established continuity of government plan, which called for the secretary of defense to relocate to the alternate command center. “That’s life,” Rumsfeld later said. “That’s what deputies are for.” The secretary figured the forty-five minutes to an hour it would take to evacuate to Site R would leave him out of touch for too long.