Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (24 page)

“She was next to last,” Marshall said. “And the last one I pulled out was Aki Muto, a nineteen-year-old Japanese girl.” Marshall said that he used to have vivid memories of the faces of those people he and Sheldon rescued from United Flight 232. They came before him frequently, floating up like spirits in the night or while he daydreamed. He could picture them with great clarity up until the 1990s. Even after that, he saw a few of them from time to time, but then those ghostly yet living companions began to grow dim, and by the time I talked to Marshall in 2012, they had faded into mist. As he put it, “That brain cell is dead.” And he laughed about it.

Once Skaanes and Muto were beside him, Marshall reached down for the next person, but only Ron Sheldon remained, too far below to reach. Sheldon had no one to boost him up and no one else to boost. “You go ahead,” Sheldon called. “I’ll find a way out.” Those rescues had taken place in the first speedy seconds after the crash. Vetter had seen one of the pairs of feet going up through the hole. Now as Sheldon watched Marshall’s face disappear from view, he looked around the smoky cabin and noticed a human face between his feet. He paused to make sense of the odd apparition. It was the face of a Catholic nun.

“Oh, my gosh, Sister!” Sheldon said. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” said Sister Mary. “But you’re standing on me.”

“I jumped out of the way and started to pick her up,” Sheldon said. “But she was pretty heavy.” He had seen her board the plane in a wheelchair, so he knew that moving her would not be easy. He asked if she could walk, and she said she could not. Bruce Benham, Garry Priest, and Rod Vetter saw Sheldon struggling and joined him in helping Sister Mary out.

On top of the fuselage, Marshall said, “My thought was that everyone had died of smoke inhalation, and being the coward that I am, I wasn’t going back in there and gettin’ ’em.” Marshall now turned to Muto and Skaanes, and he had the John Wayne moment of his life. “All right, sweethearts,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” They slid off the fuselage, ran across the wing, and jumped into the corn.

Marshall led the girls toward the terminal buildings that he had seen from their elevated position on the fuselage. But in doing so, he had to cross the debris field. As he put it, “There was shit all over the place. Parts and pieces and bodies.” Yet Marshall was somehow able to put it from his mind and prevent it from affecting him. “I did not focus on it, because I knew it would be kind of grim, and I just didn’t want to keep that in my head.” He kept his eyes on the distant terminal, even as he marched past his dismembered fellow passengers. He saw a place where people had gathered—the triage area—and he steered the girls toward it.
Muto and Skaanes sat on the ground
, and Marshall knelt between them with a hand placed protectively on Muto’s shoulder and Skaanes’s back, as she held her blonde hair out of her eyes against the wind. They were eventually taken to the mess hall. He called his wife, who thought he was dead. She had seen the crash on television. Like so many others, she could not believe that anyone had survived.

Marshall spent two nights in the hospital for smoke inhalation and a bruised heart. It took until Friday morning before his pulse would drop below 100. He returned home by way of flights from Sioux City to St. Louis and Ostrander, Ohio, northwest of Columbus. While we talked, he sometimes choked up, as the powerful emotions that he had held in check for nearly a quarter of a century surged through him again. “This is pulling out emotions from me,” he said at one point. And “you’re pulling stuff out of my brain that’s been sitting back in the back for a while.” Yet once he reached home, he found that he was able to put the disaster in its place in his life. “I don’t dwell on it much,” he said. “[I have] too many other more important things to deal with.”

Marshall’s colleague Ron Rohde, in the seat behind him, survived as well, but his other colleague, Robert Boese, had been seated on the other side of the plane from Jay Ramsdell. The fuselage fractured across those rows.
Boese’s neck was broken
and his brainstem cut in half. His aorta was lacerated by a piece of debris that went through his chest. He could not have survived his injuries.

On balance, Marshall felt that he had been through the worst that life could possibly offer him. Everything else was gravy. Why not enjoy it?

At the time of the crash, Aki Muto had been an exchange student living with an American family in Fort Collins and studying English at Colorado State University. At first, she wouldn’t write to me in English, saying that her English was too poor. The first letter I received from her was in Japanese. However, it quickly became apparent that her English was just fine, and we enjoyed a long correspondence.

“There was a queue [of people] who wanted to get out from the airplane. I know [Clif Marshall] pulled out all of them, because I was the last one. He made sure that there was no one else there, and then he evacuated himself with me. I was 19 years old at that time and was very skinny. But there was a quite big lady in front of me, and it was amazing how he could pull her out. I really respect Clif for what he did on that day. He saved many people’s lives. Without him, I am not here today.”

Although all the hotel rooms near Sioux City had been booked, the dormitories at Briar Cliff College, high up in the hills in a bucolic setting, were empty for the summer. Margaret Wick, the president of the school, opened the rooms to the survivors, as well as to the families that would soon arrive in search of the living or the dead.

“I was taken to the dormitory,” said Muto, “after some medical checking at the hospital. They provided me the room and the Norwegian girl was there too.” Both being about the same age, Muto and Skaanes were given a room together, but “somehow she was away from the room and I was there alone. I felt very lonely and scared. So I went out from the room and found the space where many of survivors were gathering. I spent rest of time there. There was a boy who was eight or nine years old. I spent most of time talking and playing with him. He was with his younger sister. . . . I was very happy to be with them.” I wrote back and reminded Muto that Lawrence Hjermstad was traveling with his two children, Alisa and Eric. They had been seated next to Terri Hardman.

Muto wrote back, saying, “I now remember it was Eric!! He was much, much younger than I, but he was very gentle. I received several calls from Japanese media. One Japanese TV company visited for the interview. I did not want to appear on TV but they strived to do it and I finally accepted. [Eric] saw that I had a trouble to refuse the TV interview. When I finally accepted the interview, which was taking place on the first floor of the dormitory, he came downstairs with me, saying ‘I will protect you. If they do what you don’t want, I will punch them!’ When I accepted the interview, they promise that they were not going to film me. I was not comfortable to been filmed, because I looked very miserable, you know. They were filming after all without me and Eric knowing. They filmed me and Eric from our back and it was on TV news all over Japan.”

In describing her night in the dorm, she wrote, “Both of my physical and mental condition were not normal. I could not have the sense of time or hunger or sleep. I did not eat much. I did not sleep almost at all. What I thought there [in the dorm] was [that] I wanted to go back to Colorado as soon as possible.” On the other hand, she was well cared for by the staff and by the volunteers at Briar Cliff. “There were many volunteer people there and they provided me the food and clothes. I could take the shower there too.”

Meanwhile, back in Japan, reporters were mobbing her parents’ home. “My parents did not know I was on that flight. They learned it from the media people. They were very quick, and they were waiting for my parents in front of their house. My parents had a very hard time to handle the media people. There are so many arrived in my parents’ house and it was totally a mess. My photo was stolen. Next morning, they learned it had been stolen because it was on the front page of the newspaper! I was lucky that I was not in Japan, but I feel so sorry for my mom and dad.” She could have called her family, but in her state of confusion she thought it would be too expensive. “I did not have any money with me.”

Alisa Hjermstad had a ball of yarn, and the three of them made string figures, such as a cat’s cradle and a Jacob’s ladder, to keep their racing minds occupied. Muto became a child again and allowed herself to be comforted by Alisa and Eric.

During the flight, Muto had been seated next to a kindly woman, Velma Wright, and during that first night, Velma’s brother drove from Denver straight through to Sioux City. In the morning, Muto accepted a ride with them so that she could reunite with her “American parents” in Colorado. Her mother and brother flew in from Japan. Muto continued studying English in Fort Collins and returned to Japan in March of 1990. She took up the study of English linguistics and graduated from Sophia Junior College in 1991.

As the clock struck midnight
in the dormitory at Briar Cliff College, Gitte Skaanes turned eighteen. Once she reached home, she did not get on an airplane again for another seventeen years.

CHAPTER TWELVE

R
obert MacIntosh left his office at NTSB
headquarters and drove to his home in suburban Virginia. Some time during that ride, November 1819 Uniform crashed. MacIntosh arrived home to find that his wife and their two daughters, eight and three, had already seen it on TV. His wife entertained the girls while MacIntosh quickly packed in the bedroom. Anticipating being in hot July cornfields, he tucked in hat, gloves, and sunblock among his blue shirts with the NTSB logo on them and his other items of clothing. He kissed his wife and daughters and in minutes was making the five-mile run down Old Keene Mill Road to the interstate. By the time he reached the big Department of Transportation hangar, known as Hangar Six at Washington National Airport,
*
about two hours had elapsed since he left his office.

Inside the hangar, he walked between the two parallel lines painted on the gleaming gray floor. “You can eat off the floor in Hangar Six,” Robert Benzon said.

A couple of other Go Team members had beat MacIntosh there. They sat on a couch watching television. “And sure enough,” said MacIntosh, “we were able to see the aircraft come down and do that famous pirouette. . . . And that was sobering, because it appeared to us that, indeed, there would be no survivors.” As they watched CNN, the magnitude of the crash began to sink in. MacIntosh said, “Wow. This is gonna be tough.”

The waiting was tough too, as the administrative staff back at headquarters on Independence Avenue discovered that the FAA had no airplanes available to take the Go Team to Sioux City. They had to scrounge up a Coast Guard Grumman Gulfstream Turboprop, which would be slower than an FAA jet. They also had to locate a fresh crew. The crew then had to generate a flight plan and obtain weather briefings, and stragglers on the Go Team had to get to the airport. Some would make a quick stop at McDonald’s or the 7-Eleven for a meal to eat on the flight. “To its credit,” Benzon said, “the FAA runs Hangar Six like an executive VIP passenger operation for obvious reasons. They fly cabinet secretaries, congressmen, the FAA administrator, and the like around as their main job. Passengers deposit their bags at the entry door for handling by the FAA staff. The pilots always wear white shirts and ties. Airplane interiors are immaculate, and the service is really first class. With one exception: no food. Not even a stale pretzel. Ok . . . coffee, but that was about it.” And while members of the Go Team traveled first class to the crash, they returned home by whatever means they could find. Theirs was the Go Team, not the Go Home Team.

Theirs was not the only Go Team
in action that day either. General Electric had no trouble finding a Lear jet to accommodate the flight safety engineer, William H. Thompson, and a flight safety investigator, along with the CF6 systems manager, and a representative of GE Products Support Engineering Department. The Lear jet left Cincinnati Lunken Airport and landed in Sioux City at about 9:30 that night, almost before the NTSB Go Team had left Washington.

United Airlines sent a Go Team as well, and an investigator from the NTSB was on board. As soon as his plane arrived that night, he approached Gary Brown at the Woodbury County command post, which by then operated out of the hangar at Graham Aviation. “He was a big boy,” Gary Brown recalled. “And he wanted to go out and collect the flight data recorder.” Gary was reluctant to let him do it because he didn’t know the man. “And he unfolded a badge. It was the biggest badge I’d ever seen. It was impressive.” The big boy went out onto the field with a flashlight and found the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, and Gary put them in the back of his big Woodbury County rescue truck and assigned guards to stay with it overnight.

United Airlines also activated its crisis room, which was set up like Mission Control at NASA. The manager of external communications at United Airlines, Rob Doughty, described the facility at the headquarters. “It was high-tech. There were two or three tiers of tables, all facing the front of the room. There would be a center section, and the two sections on the side were angled a little bit. And then there were two, maybe three, huge screens where we could display all kinds of things. One of them had data about the aircraft, another we could throw up video, we could have a live television feed from CNN. And then we all had our own individual computers. Everybody had a station and there were phones at each station with multiple lines.” No one would have ever suspected that, in the bland and anonymous industrial complex in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, this United mission control was in full operation day and night in the days after the crash.

By the time the NTSB Go Team departed, the mood was fairly grim, as the craft rolled down the runway and angled into the encroaching darkness. The Gulfstream was luxurious, with leather captain’s chairs that could swivel into the aisle for more leg room. A table for each pair of facing seats could be folded out of the wall. Two people could sit comfortably on a couch in back near the small galley and toilet. A phone hung beside one of the seats.