Lt. Gen. Timothy Maude could not have felt more secure. The Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel was leading a meeting in his newly renovated Pentagon office at 9:38 a.m., Sept. 11, when war tore through the walls.
As American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, a ball of fire soared perhaps 150 feet over the building’s slate roof, and Maude and several others were consumed.
Two floors above and a few offices to the north, Peter Murphy, the Marine Corps Commandant’s general counsel, and his staff were watching the World Trade Center burn on TV. Suddenly, Murphy was blown from one end of his expansive office to the other. A fireball lit up his office windows, the floor buckled beneath him and the ceiling collapsed overhead.
Cpl. Tim Garofola, Murphy’s administrative clerk, wrenched the door open and the group waded out into darkness. They had a choice: Smoke or fire. Choosing smoke, they ran to the voice of a Navy officer begging them to move quickly.
Twenty minutes later, the offices adjacent to Murphy’s collapsed, exposing his desk and Marine Corps flag, still standing, to the world.
Hitting the Pentagon at several hundred miles per hour, the Boeing 757 carved a hole about 50 feet wide and five stories high in the Pentagon’s western façade, slicing through 24-inch-thick walls half-way between Corridors 4 and 5.
The impact propelled the jet through the Pentagon’s “E-ring” — its outermost hallway, where senior officers and civilians get windowed offices. In its wake, it left at least 126 military and civilian Pentagon personnel dead or missing and killed everyone aboard the airliner — 64 passengers and crew, including the terrorists responsible.
Thousands of gallons of jet fuel, aboard for what was supposed to be a transcontinental flight from Washington Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles, spewed out of the wreckage, igniting on impact a fire that would rage for more than 26 hours.
The attack came less than an hour after the first of two other hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center in Manhattan and only 35 minutes after the second jet slammed into the Trade Center’s Tower 2.
Throughout the Pentagon, many were watching the New York drama unfold on TV, as Murphy was, oblivious to the airliner that was already circling back over Washington and barreling toward Virginia with the military’s nerve center as its ultimate target.
Low air traffic over the Pentagon grounds is not unusual; Reagan National Airport is 1½ miles away, and standard takeoff and landing plans take jets past the building up to 100 times an hour. But witnesses said they knew instantly something was amiss when this silver aircraft veered out of the sky so low that details of its fuselage were visible from the highway below.
“It felt like a bomb going off,” said Col. Scott Forster, who was at work in the program directorate division of the office of the chief of Army program analysis and evaluation. “You could feel the building shudder and shake. People’s eyes got real wide.”
Yet so vast is the Pentagon — it covers 29 acres — that across the massive building, many were unaware anything had happened. Air Force Maj. Alan Davis thought the alarm was simply a precaution.
“I just thought they were evacuating the building because it was a good idea,” said Davis, military aide to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space. “Then I walked out and saw the smoke and realized it was definitely something else.”
Troops in the highly classified National Military Command Center in the Pentagon’s basement never left their posts. The center remained operational all day, according to an officer who works there, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set up shop there after evacuating his office.
Descent into chaos
Pandemonium reigned outside.
Traffic snarled as Washington-bound cars tried to turn and flee. Drivers gaped at the explosion. People streamed out of the Pentagon and on to local streets. More poured out of the Navy Annex, up a hill west of the Pentagon.
A squad of about 10 Marines organized by a staff sergeant established a series of observation points. Fearing that, as in New York, a second jet would strike at any moment, they looked warily skyward for incoming aircraft.
A priest pulled his car off Washington Boulevard, adjacent to the impact site, donned his purple ecclesiastical stole, and prayed beside a gravely wounded man.
Flames and smoke billowed from a gaping hole in the Pentagon’s stone, brick and concrete walls.
Inside, the rush to the exits was swift and orderly, witnesses said. “I didn’t see any major panic,” said Army Lt. Col. Steven Geise.
But things were far from calm.
The smell of burning plastic permeated the halls and people were crying, said Marine Capt. Stewart Upton, a public affairs officer. “People were running through the corridors. Some were getting emotional. I heard people saying ‘I can’t take this, I can’t take this.’ ”
A Navy lieutenant commander looked aghast. “It’s a 21st-century Pearl Harbor,” he said. “I guess we’re at war. But with who?”
To the rescue
Once outside, the scale of the attack started to become clear to the knots of confused service members and civilians gathering at the sides of the roads surrounding the building. Some talked into cell phones. Others just walked around with bewildered looks on their faces. Sirens wailed as emergency vehicles converged on the Pentagon.
On the west lawn, small pieces of aircraft wreckage — none larger than a few feet across — were strewn on the grass and highway.
Military medical crews and civilian volunteers tended to the wounded. Others, without regard to rank, helped set up triage stations, and FBI agents arrived to begin combing the area.
Geise, followed by an Army one-star general he didn’t know, headed to the third floor. They picked their way through debris, finding no one. “Smoke was just starting to pour out of there,” Geise said.
Each room they found was empty, showing every sign that the occupants had left in a hurry. “When I went in, there were phones off the hook,” Geise said. “I yelled, but got no response.”
Geise and the general searched further, but thickening smoke finally drove them back out.
Mike Cahill, a paramedic with the Alexandria, Va., fire department and a medic in the Army National Guard, saw the smoke plume while he was in his car. Dressed in his BDUs for a meeting that night, he pulled off the road, grabbed his medic’s “aid bag” and ran to help.
“I saw people coming out of the hole in the building, some of them still smoldering,” he said. He broke open an IV bag and started to pour the fluid on the worst burns.
“I was running around trying to get them cool,” he said. “I only had three IVs in my bag and had to conserve supplies, but I had to do something.” Cahill said all the people staggering out of the wreckage were burned. Some had burned their throats, which threatened to swell up and suffocate them.
Close call
One officer standing on the eastern side of the Pentagon had a lucky escape. Army Lt. Col. Lugo, who declined to give his first name, said he worked in Maude’s organization “in the area that was smashed.” But Lugo had left his office to attend a biweekly meeting at the Total Army Personnel Command headquarters in Alexandria.
“If it had happened at 9 o’clock, I would have been in the middle of my office,” he said.
Near the River entrance to the Pentagon, on the building’s eastern side, about 100 medical personnel gathered a few hundred yards away, on the banks of Boundary Channel. Suddenly one of them, a young woman, stood on a car and shouted to the crowd to move toward the Pentagon.
“They need blood! They need blood!” Medics and others surged back toward the building, many pushing trolleys full of medical supplies. Entering beneath the River entrance, each volunteer was handed a face mask.
Inside, the vacated Pentagon felt like some science fiction netherworld. Smoke swirled through the corridors. Red lights flashed, and alarms sounded constantly, including one with a recorded voice message, repeating over and over a warning to evacuate the building.
“You wonder how people felt at Pearl Harbor,” said Maj. Ryan Yantis, an Army public affairs officer walking through the darkened halls. “This is our version.”
Coming out into the Pentagon’s central courtyard, the scene there was surprisingly tranquil. Sunshine filtered through the trees in the courtyard, and people gathered in groups, talking or sitting on blankets spread out on the ground. It looked like a picnic, but the tables were piled high with surgical gloves and sponges, not food. Firemen manned three pumpers.
Litter teams were formed, with troops of all ranks and services joining together. But because no casualties had been brought out, almost everyone simply waited. Firemen made repeated sorties into the building only to retreat a few minutes later, faces darkened by smoke.
An exhausted Lt. Robert Webster of the Washington, D.C., fire department said he and his colleagues could penetrate only 40 or 50 feet into the building before the heat and flames forced them back. “Everywhere I went in, we’d knock [the fire] down, and it’d just light up again behind us,” he said.
“All the dividers are falling, the ceilings are falling,” he said. “There’s so much stuff piled up in there, if you’d see someone, it’d be pure luck finding them.”
It was unlike anything he’d ever seen, he said. “And I hope to God I never see it again.”
Meanwhile, on the western side of the building at the crash site, at least eight fire trucks were on the scene. Flames danced along the Pentagon roof. Trucks sprayed water on the fire as thick plumes of dark smoke rose into the midafternoon sky. At least two firefighters were carried to nearby ambulances on stretchers.
Later, a firefighter found a singed American flag in the wreckage and raised it on a short pole near the flames and debris. Rescuers burst into applause.
Slow burn
The fire would burn in fits and starts well into the next day. The slate roof held up to the firemen’s water hoses and the wooden structure beneath kept burning.
About half the building returned to work, but at least twice more, sections or the whole building were evacuated, as the fire burned and others feared additional attacks.
With the fire extinguished, rescue workers returned to the charred spaces, knowing that finding survivors was highly unlikely. Marine Sgt. Michael Farrington might have died if the attack had come a week earlier. Among the offices destroyed were some the Marines vacated to make way for renovations.
“We had just moved out of those spaces this weekend,” Farrington said. Now two days after the attack, he had spent the previous 24 hours as part of the casualty removal team, separating the dead from the rubble.
“We pulled bodies all day yesterday, until they couldn’t say it was stable,” he said. “You had to go slow because it was broken up in there — you had to crawl over things. But you just wanted to hurry up and get the hell out.”
Rummaging through black water that was knee-deep in places, the crews brought out bodies, most burned beyond recognition. “You couldn’t tell who was who or what was what,” Farrington said. “It was awful.”
Pentagon officials said it’s too early to tell how long it will take to clean things up and return the building to normalcy.
Bloodied, but unbowed, troops and firefighters unfurled a huge American flag Sept. 12 from the roof. As its broad stripes fluttered down two stories not far to the right of the gaping hole cut by the jet, troops silently saluted.
Staff writers Jim Tice, Mark D. Faram, David Brown, C. Mark Brinkley, Gordon Lubold and Vince Crawley contributed to this report.
