The Pentagon: A History (61 page)

Rumsfeld stayed, but the smoke was getting worse.

That’s when I saw real fear

The first Arlington County firefighters were on the scene within two minutes of the crash. Many had not waited to be dispatched, but, hearing the radio calls, followed the plume of smoke to the Pentagon’s west wall. Arlington Fire Department Captain Mike Smith, a thirty-year-veteran, arrived with Engine Company 108 and was the first fire captain into the building. His crew hooked up a fire hose to a hydrant and raced into Corridor 5, brushing past workers escaping the building. They turned right into the C Ring, working their way to the impact zone.

Smith, who had responded to the Pentagon many times over the years for calls small and large, was astonished by the devastation. “There was a tremendous amount of fire all around us,” he later said. “I was actually totally unprepared for the physical destruction of the building.” Smith had a construction background and was immediately wary about a building collapse. He could see areas in the corridor where walls had shifted out into the hallways. Smith did not want to commit his firefighters too deeply until they had assessed the structure’s stability.

Outside, Arlington County Fire Captain Chuck Gibbs, directing search-and-rescue efforts from the front of the building, was uneasy as well. At 9:55
A.M.,
he spotted cracks spreading on the façade wall near where the plane hit. Gibbs immediately ordered all rescue workers out of the building. An evacuation tone, with a distinctive high-low pitch, sounded over all radios. Dozens of firefighters abandoned their hoses and rushed out. A team of paramedics came running out an emergency door carrying two injured survivors. Firefighters spotted a disoriented woman inside the building, rushed in, and pulled her out.

At 10:15
A.M.—
about forty minutes after the plane struck the building—the Pentagon collapsed around the impact point. Firefighters sprinted back as debris fell and the fire surged. The collapse of the E Ring started on the fifth floor and continued down, each floor falling on those below. It was over in a few seconds. An enormous cloud of dust and smoke shrouded the collapse zone. When it cleared, a great gash in the limestone was exposed, opening the Pentagon from top to bottom.

All the rescue workers escaped, including several dozen who had been in the collapse area. Gibbs’s quick and decisive action almost certainly saved them from death or serious injury. Ted Anderson, who had been kept out of the building minutes earlier, realized the firefighters had probably saved his life.

Fifteen minutes after rescue efforts resumed, FBI Special Agent Chris Combs, on the scene as a liaison between the FBI and the Arlington fire department, got alarming news from the bureau’s Washington Field Office headquarters. Combs was a former New York City firefighter—two of his cousins would die in the collapse of the twin towers—and on his own initiative had established a close working relationship with Washington-area fire departments. At 10:15, the FBI headquarters informed Combs that another hijacked plane was on its way, twenty minutes from Washington. Combs borrowed a radio from an airport firefighter and confirmed the information directly with the control tower at National Airport. Combs then told Arlington Assistant Fire Chief James Schwartz, the incident commander.

Schwartz immediately ordered the entire site—not just the building—evacuated. Firefighters and rescue workers in full gear ran the equivalent of five football fields for cover under a highway overpass. Word quickly spread that a plane was inbound. Though there was no information that it was headed for the Pentagon, everyone assumed it was; the towers had been hit by two jets. Police officers and FBI agents screamed at military officers and civilians to move away from the building. People sprinted in panic across the South parking lot. It was terrifying, the most hopeless moment of the day, recalled John Jester, chief of the Pentagon police: “That’s when I saw real fear in people’s eyes.”

The plane is five minutes out

Inside the Pentagon, Steve Carter heard the report of the inbound plane on his handheld radio. Carter was fighting his own battle to keep the Pentagon open. He had just learned that the building’s chilled water plant was out of commission because of low water pressure. A million gallons of water were flowing through the building from broken pipes. Without chilled water, the computer and communication systems would overheat and shut down. If that happened, the National Military Command Center and all the other Pentagon command centers would shut down—this on top of the Navy Command Center, which was already out of action.

Carter made a quick decision. He would stay with five other building mechanics—half his team—and rebuild water pressure by shutting off valves to isolate pipes in the damaged areas. The rest of his team would evacuate the building. That way, if a second plane hit and Carter and the others were lost, there would still be mechanics left to save the building. Carter assigned engineers to close valves in various basement tunnels. One of the men was an electrical engineer who knew little about water pipes. “All the big valves that are colored green, close,” Carter told him.

Carter climbed down into his tunnel. The smoke was so thick it felt like a sponge in his mouth. All the while he heard updates on his radio.
The plane is fifteen minutes out…. The plane is ten minutes out…. The plane is five minutes out.
Carter struggled to close the valves, breathing through the sleeve of his suit jacket. One by one, the valves were shut off. Water pressure soon built up to fifty pounds per square inch, enough to support firefighters. Carter then got a call that the chillers were back up. He figured he had just enough time to make it to the center courtyard before the next plane hit.

Let me know in case I picked the wrong side

Colonel Phil McNair made it fifty feet back into the black smoke on the second floor Army personnel office and realized he would likely die if he went any farther. Unable to find anyone else in the office bay, he retraced his steps and escaped out the second-floor window to AE Drive, the service road. McNair landed on the ground near a smoking hole in the C Ring wall. It led to what had been the Navy Command Center. He and Sergeant Major Tony Rose, a career counselor from the Army personnel office, could hear voices from behind the rubble calling for help. McNair, Rose, and others formed a chain, tossing computers, desks and ceiling tiles aside, the debris growing hotter and the smoke thicker the further they tunneled. Then an arm appeared through the rubble. It was a female sailor, trying to dig her way out. The rescuers pulled her out, and six other sailors behind her.

They were still digging when a fireman yelled for them to leave: “There’s another one coming in!”

McNair was puzzled: “What do you mean, there’s another one coming in?” he asked.

“Another airplane,” the fireman told him. McNair was dumbfounded. All this time he thought it had been a bomb. McNair followed others to the center courtyard.

Some three hundred employees and rescue workers had gathered in the courtyard, and the scene was chaotic. Doctors and nurses from the Pentagon medical clinic had set up two triage stations and were treating patients on the grass, Paul Gonzales among them. After leading his band of DIA employees out of the building, Gonzales had collapsed and gone into shock—hot, chemicals-laden air had damaged his lungs.

Arlington Fire Battalion Chief Jerome Smith, commanding fire units in the courtyard, ignored the evacuation order, fearing the sight of fleeing rescuers would add to the victims’ trauma. But word spread and much of the crowd streamed out, heading through the undamaged portions of the building to the parking lots. Gonzales, on his back sucking in oxygen through a mask, heard people around him yelling: “A plane is coming! We’ve got to get him out.” Gonzales was put on a cart and driven to the North parking lot.

McNair saw doctors kneeling over a badly burned victim lying beneath a courtyard tree and overheard the man give his name—it was John Yates, the security manager from his office. McNair would never have recognized him—Yates had been directly in the path of a fireball and now had burns over 38 percent of his body, his hair burned off and his skin raw. “I walked over and knelt down and put my face next to his, let him know there was a friendly face there, and tried to hold his hand,” McNair recalled. Yates screamed in pain. McNair looked and realized Yates’ skin was coming off his hand. They took Yates away on a gurney, leaving McNair standing alone. Then someone yelled for him to leave before the plane hit.

Steve Carter, reaching the courtyard, decided to stay, breaking up his maintenance team into three groups of two. Each headed to different parts of the five-acre courtyard. Carter radioed his team members outside: “If anybody sees what side the plane is coming from, let me know, in case I picked the wrong side.”

I guess that will be us doing the shooting

At Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, Brigadier General David F. Wherley, Jr., commander of the D.C. Air National Guard, learned the Pentagon had been hit when one of his officers screamed while watching the news on the office television. Wherley took a moment to calm the woman, whose husband worked at the Pentagon. “You’ve got to be strong,” he told her. Then he raced out of his office and ran several hundred yards to the headquarters of the D.C. Guard’s 121st Fighter Squadron.

Unlike other National Guard units, the D.C. Guard reported to the president, not a state governor. Squadron officers—who had a close relationship with the Secret Service agents who worked across the runway in the Air Force One hangar—had already heard from their contacts that the White House wanted fighters in the air. Wherley wanted more explicit authorization. “We have to get instructions,” he told the squadron officers. “We can’t just fly off half-cocked.”

Wherley called the Secret Service. An agent got the White House bunker on another line and began relaying instructions that Wherley was told were coming from the vice president. Within a half-hour, Wherley had received oral instructions giving his pilots extraordinary discretion. The White House authorized them to shoot down any aircraft—including passenger airliners—threatening Washington. “They said challenge them, try to turn them away; if they don’t turn away, use whatever force is necessary to keep them from hitting buildings downtown,” Wherley recalled.

Three of the squadron’s F-16 jets had just returned from a training mission to North Carolina. Only one of the aircraft had enough fuel to keep flying. Major Billy Hutchison, who had just landed and was still in his cockpit, was told to take off again. He launched at 10:38, carrying no ammunition and with little idea of his mission. His F-16 roared up and down the Potomac and over the Pentagon. Two other pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Marc Sasseville and Lieutenant Heather Penney, were given a cursory briefing at the headquarters. “There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to talk about, because we didn’t know what was going on,” Sasseville recalled.

They ran to the tarmac, but their jets had not yet been armed with missiles. “Just give me an airplane,” Sasseville demanded. They took off at 10:42, carrying 20-mm training rounds for their Gatling guns. On the radio, the squadron relayed instructions to look for a hijacked aircraft approaching from the northwest, in the direction of Georgetown. “We didn’t know what we were looking for—how high he was coming, or low, or where he was going,” Sasseville recalled. He wondered how to take down a passenger jet with training rounds and thought he might be able to saw off a wing. Penney—whose call sign was “Lucky”—planned to fly her F-16 into the passenger plane to bring it down, calculating she might have time to eject before the collision.

Two more jets were launched ten minutes later carrying AIM-9 air-to-air missiles. Monitoring radios in the operations room, Wherley heard the FAA broadcast orders closing airspace across the country and directing all planes to land, concluding with a warning that violators would be shot down. The words chilled the general. “I guess that will be us doing the shooting,” he thought.

Well, a little too late

In the Pentagon courtyard, Steve Carter heard the roar of a jet growing louder, echoing around the walls. Carter anxiously scanned the sky. Then Hutchison’s F-16 soared over the Pentagon, less than a thousand feet over the building. “That’s the point when I felt nothing else bad was going to happen,” Carter recalled. In front of the building, through a break in the smoke, Ted Anderson saw F-16s orbiting low over the city and was shocked. He had never thought he would be looking up through a burning Pentagon at jets flying fighter protection over the nation’s capital. Arlington Police Lieutenant Bruce Hackert, who served with the Army in Vietnam, had a different reaction when he saw the jets: “Well, a little too late,” he thought.

It was too late, on several counts. United Airlines Flight 93 had crashed in a field at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03
A.M.,
thirty-five minutes before the first F-16 was launched from Andrews. Moreover, the hijacked plane had gone down twelve minutes before fire and rescue workers were ordered to evacuate the Pentagon.

The false information reporting the plane’s continued approach to Washington apparently came from FAA displays showing the plane’s projected path to Washington, not its actual radar track. The information was relayed to the Secret Service and the FBI. Combs, the FBI special agent at the Pentagon, had stayed at Chief Schwartz’s side, giving him updates on the plane’s supposed path, all of which were broadcast on the emergency network, spreading great alarm. At 10:37, Combs reported to Schwartz that the hijacked plane had crashed, supposedly at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the mountains of Maryland—one more bad piece of information.