The Pentagon
On the Pentagon’s burning first floor, working his way through the heat and smoke of the debris-filled Navy Command Center, Captain Dave Thomas shined his penlight at what looked like a rubber Halloween mask. He squinted through the gloom and saw that the squished face belonged to a man trapped in a chair, his head jammed against part of a wall and whatever else had fallen on him. It wasn’t his best friend, Bob Dolan, it was a stranger: retired Navy aviator Jerry Henson.
“Hey, there’s a guy in here!” Dave Thomas yelled. No one replied, so he screamed at the top of his lungs: “I’ve got a guy! Help!”
Dave Thomas moved closer. The tiny beam of light and his shouts sparked something in Jerry’s assistant, Petty Officer Charles Lewis, who’d been trapped nearby. He’d thought there was no way out, but now he saw possibility for deliverance.1 Lewis scrambled and squirmed through burning pieces of the wrecked office, past Dave Thomas.
In the semidarkness, Lewis bumped into Dave Tarantino and SEAL Craig Powell, who directed him out to AE Drive. On his way toward safety, Lewis told them that others remained trapped inside. Dave Tarantino and Craig Powell moved in and quickly freed Petty Officer Christine Williams from under a pile of rubble. She told them that her boss, Jerry Henson, remained stuck. As Powell led her outside, Dave Tarantino slogged deeper into the wreckage. He shined his flashlight toward movement and saw Dave Thomas struggling to raise the load of broken furniture and shelves to free Jerry from his desk entrapment. It wouldn’t budge.
On the second floor, civilian Pentagon worker Lois Stevens had given up. Exhausted, fighting for breath, she couldn’t crawl another foot. Every time she opened her mouth she thought she’d spit fire.2 She curled into a ball, prayed, and thought of her husband. Smoke filled the room, drawing closer to the carpet. Lois urged Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills to leave her behind, to let her die in the rubble of Dilbertville.
“Just get on my back!” Marilyn demanded. “Please. Get on my back. I’ll crawl, and I’ll carry you out of here!”
Lois remained in her fetal curl, but Marilyn refused to accept it. Even as she feared that they’d soon run out of air, Marilyn worried more about having to tell Lois’s husband and grown children that she’d left behind their beloved wife and mother. Burning bits of ceiling tiles melted from their frames and fell like tiny meteors around them.
Marilyn beseeched Lois: “Come on. Please. We’ve got to get out of here!”
Lois relented. She rose to her knees and hung on3 as Marilyn resumed crawling like a blind mole, burrowing through debris, feeling her way through the dark.
While Marilyn was encouraging Lois not to surrender, Major Regina Grant disappeared. She’d gone off on her own, generally following the route she had seen badly burned security officer John Yates take when he vanished into the smoke. Still on her hands and knees, Regina kept her head down, focusing on her fingernails, as she scrambled toward an exit. Several times she found herself underneath a sprinkler. Each time, the smoke cleared enough for her to see a man’s black shoes, moving slowly through piles of furniture and debris ahead of her. She assumed the shoes belonged to John Yates, so she kept crawling in that direction.
When the shoes disappeared, Regina Grant yelled, “Where are you?!”
Someone called back through the darkness: “Right here. Are you okay?”
It wasn’t Yates, but Sergeant Major Tony Rose, an Army career counselor who’d been in the service since he graduated from high school twenty-nine years earlier.
“Follow the light!” Rose told her.
Regina tried, but soon she stopped. From somewhere behind her, she heard Marilyn Wills encouraging Lois Stevens not to give up. Ahead, Regina saw a dim glow, but the smoke and heat became too much. Spent, she stopped and said her prayers. Regina thought about her husband and about the military life insurance policy she’d recently increased from $10,000 to $150,000, with portions dedicated to her brothers and sisters, nieces, and nephews. Knowing that she’d be leaving something to her whole family gave Regina comfort. “I have done everything that I can do,” she told herself.
As she prepared to die, Regina saw personnel administrator Tracy Webb trying to rise. The fireball that had torched John Yates as it blew through the room had badly burned Tracy’s head. Initially, Tracy followed Lieutenant Colonel Bob Grunewald, who’d crawled across the room with Martha Carden clenching his belt, but Tracy lost sight of them. Now, like Regina, Tracy felt she’d gone as far as she could. She stood up, intending to fully inhale the smoke and accept her fate.
The sight of Tracy rising in the gloom gave Regina a burst of adrenaline. It felt like witnessing a child running toward traffic. Distracted from her own submission, Regina reached up and grabbed Tracy’s skirt. She yanked Tracy to the ground and resumed yelling for help.
“Where are you?” Regina called.
“Come on! We’re right here!” said Tony Rose.
Tony told Regina that she was close to a door. He urged her and Tracy to keep moving. She followed his voice, bringing Tracy with her. On the other side of the door was Rose, who’d crawled back to lead them through the Fourth Corridor. He guided them through the building to the interior A Ring and down into the courtyard.
Separately, Bob Grunewald, who’d helped to design Dilbertville’s technology layout, led Martha Carden on a serpentine crawling path.
“Don’t you leave me here,” Martha pleaded, even as she knew he wouldn’t.
“I’ve got you, Martha,” Bob said. “We’re going to make it.”
Until the sprinklers came on, Martha feared that her clothes would catch fire from the heat. Even after, she wondered how long it would take to die and how much it would hurt. Only when they reached the Fourth Corridor did she know she’d survive. After rescuing Martha, Bob Grunewald tried to return to search for other survivors, but the smoke drove him back, so he followed Martha to the A Ring and down into the courtyard.
Burned and disoriented, John Yates also somehow made it to the Fourth Corridor, where he collapsed. After a short time, he stirred and rose. He focused on the office space that he’d spent years helping to design, now ruined but still imprinted on his mind. Although still in shock, Yates realized he knew where he was. He started walking and ran into a lieutenant colonel, Victor Correa, who helped him to the courtyard to begin treatment for burns that covered nearly 40 percent of Yates’s body.
Meanwhile, Marilyn Wills grew frantic when she realized that she’d lost track of Regina Grant. She felt for the major in the dark and yelled her name. She heard nothing, so Marilyn crawled forward, with Lois Stevens still hanging on to her for dear life.
On the first floor, Dave Tarantino took a halting, zigzag route through the dark, on a narrow path lit by the glow of flames, half-crawling over and around debris. With fires closing in, he didn’t want to get closer to where Dave Thomas tried to help free Jerry Henson. Dave Tarantino could hear the damaged building creak with complaint about its broken pillars. The roar of flames grew louder. The smoke felt so dense it seemed to make a sound all its own, and he thought he’d soon be overcome.
Jerry Henson’s eyes were dull and glassy, but Dave Tarantino locked onto them.
“Come on, man. Get out of there!” Dave yelled.
Jerry said nothing.
Not realizing that Jerry was pinned, the Navy doctor issued a stream of orders familiar to anyone who’d been through basic training: “Get your ass out of there! Move your ass! Let’s go! C’mon, you’ve got to come to us!”
Pale and unresponsive, struggling for breath, Jerry seemed about to slip into shock. Nearly out of breath, he mouthed two words: “Help me.”
Dave Tarantino was out of options. A voice in his head screamed that he might never get out. But once they’d made eye contact, he knew he wouldn’t leave Jerry behind. Dave Tarantino went to his knees, then crawled on his belly into the small space between Jerry and Dave Thomas, who continued his exertions. Dave Tarantino placed a wet T-shirt over Jerry’s mouth to help him breathe.
“I’m a doctor, and I’m here to get you out,” Tarantino said. “You’re going to be okay.”
Jerry roused from his torpor. He thought Dave Tarantino’s promise was the sweetest thing he’d ever heard.
Then Dave Tarantino added a catch: “But you gotta fight. We can’t do this alone.”
“I’m pinned,” Jerry murmured. “I can’t move.”
Dave Tarantino stood and tried to help Dave Thomas lift the load off Jerry. They removed what they could from the desktop. But even with both rescuers straining against it, the weight wouldn’t give. Jerry was nearly a goner. If they didn’t get out soon, Dave Thomas and Dave Tarantino knew that they would be, too. Each breath grew more strenuous.
The same was true for SEAL Craig Powell and General Paul Carlton, who’d fought their way back into the burning remnants of Pentagon room 1C466 to help. Carlton and several others formed a line, standing in ankle-deep water, passing out pieces of wrecked furniture and computers to clear a path. When smoke overcame one man at the front of the line, Carlton stepped up4 and took his place.
Powell stood5 at the far end of the ruined workspace, tossing burning pieces of debris from their path. He felt the sting of burning metal and looked up to see melting slag from wires dripping from above. The little office shared by Jerry Henson and Jack Punches had been a secure facility, encased by a wire cage to prevent electronic eavesdropping. Powell held up the hot, twisted remains of the cage. He warned Dave Thomas and Dave Tarantino to hurry: “Hey, ceiling’s going6 to come down. Get out!”
Meanwhile, General Carlton7 tried using a fire extinguisher to knock down the flames all around them, but the water caused flare-ups, which he understood meant that they were fuel fires. The general saw smoke rising from Jerry Henson’s clothing, so he doused him instead.
From behind him in the darkness, Dave Tarantino heard Powell shouting: “You gotta get out—now! It’s going to go!”
With no time, little air, and no other way to free Jerry Henson, Dave Tarantino took one last shot. It was a throwback move, inspired by grueling days in his college weight room after his skydiving accident, when he rebuilt the atrophied muscles in his broken foot and leg. Stanford University’s “Most Inspirational Oarsman” scooted under the desk, into a coffin-like space next to Jerry. His lungs aching, his heart pounding, Dave Tarantino flipped onto his back. He pressed the half-melted soles of his dress shoes against the underside of the desktop stretched across Jerry’s chair.
With every last ounce of strength, Dave Tarantino pushed.
On the fiery second floor, Marilyn Wills continued her crawl through the darkness toward the AE Drive windows with Lois Stevens, not knowing that Major Regina Grant had already found another way out. Even as she reassured Lois, Marilyn doubted herself.
“God,” Marilyn thought, “I hope I’m going the right way.”
She sensed that they were getting close, but she expected to see bright sunlight shining through the windows. Instead she saw more smoke. Marilyn began to pray: “God, please help me. I cannot see anything in here.” Marilyn and Lois kept crawling, and Marilyn saw a dim glow, illuminating the outline of a young soldier banging on a window frame. She focused and saw that he was flanked by several other survivors from the conference room and nearby cubicles who had crawled in the same general direction, with the same escape plan. Marilyn had delivered Lois to the windows, as promised. But they still weren’t safe.
Fighting to break open the window was Specialist Michael Petrovich. He ignored the pain of second-degree flash burns that had melted the skin on his nose and forehead and swelled his ears to twice their normal size. Despite his injuries, he’d led his friend and colleague, civilian Dalisay Olaes, from their cubicles through the wreckage of Dilbertville. Also at the windows were Lieutenant Colonel Marion Ward, who’d been in the conference room, and demographer Betty Maxfield, who’d been talking with Tracy Webb about her Avon scarf when their world exploded. For a short time after the blast, Betty had clung to Bob Grunewald’s heel as he crawled ahead with Martha Carden. She’d lost her grip and become disoriented but bumped into Colonel Phil McNair, who led her to the windows.
To no one’s surprise, Wedge One’s new blast-resistant windows worked as designed: they hadn’t shattered and become flying shrapnel. But they also wouldn’t open. Michael Petrovich found one window bowed outward by the explosion, its metal frame bent a few inches out of whack. He grabbed a laser printer from a nearby desk and beat it against the window, to no avail. He threw it against the bent frame, only to have it bounce back into Marilyn’s lap. Phil McNair joined Michael on the windowsill and stomped and kicked at the frame. The window held fast.
Marilyn feared they’d all die from smoke inhalation or the encroaching flames. Half in alarm and half in rage, she set Lois aside and climbed on a chair to reach the window. She slammed the frame with her hands and feet. With Marilyn and the two men beating it, the window frame pushed open about a foot and a half, the safety glass inside bowed but still intact.
As smoke poured out, the three stuck out their heads to gulp fresh air from AE Drive. Michael Petrovich tossed out the printer to attract help from other service members farther down AE Drive, who came running.
Marilyn turned to Lois: “Come on—you’re going first.”
Phil McNair and Michael Petrovich held Lois’s wrists as they lowered her as far as they could from the window, a nearly twenty-foot drop. They released her safely into the arms of fellow Pentagon workers below. While they waited, Marilyn shared her moist sweater with rasping Betty Maxfield. Next out was Dalisay Olaes, who clung to the window sill, afraid, until Marilyn commanded: “Jump!” Dalisay broke her leg in the fall, but she understood that her choice was “jump or get toasted”8 and remained grateful to Marilyn. Next came Betty Maxfield. The commotion drew the attention of more sailors and soldiers in AE Drive who were helping with rescue efforts in the Navy Command Center. Several rushed over yelling “Come on down! We’ll catch you!”
His facial burns festering, his lungs scarred by smoke, Michael Petrovich’s throat began to close. Struggling to breathe, he went next. Marion Ward jumped out on his own, breaking his leg in the fall.
The last two, both of whom had saved others, were Colonel Phil McNair and Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills. He told her to go, but Marilyn refused. She worried that Major Regina Grant was lost in the smoke, and she feared that Marian Serva and others were trapped inside. She told her boss that she wanted to return to Dilbertville.
“We have to go,” Phil McNair said.
“Sir, we can’t go,” Marilyn answered. “Why don’t we just stay here and let’s yell and scream and people will come to the window. And we can get them out of here.”
Ignoring the pain of their smoke-ravaged throats, both let loose:
“Come this way!”
“Come over here if you can hear us!”
“We can get you out of here!”
No one answered. No one came.
“You’ve got to go,” the colonel told Marilyn.
“Sir,” Marilyn said, her mind fixed on Regina Grant. “I’m trying to buy time because I’m thinking she’s got to be right there. . . . Sir, let’s be quiet. If you and I just be quiet right here, maybe we’ll hear somebody crying or wailing and we can go back and get them.”
Again, they heard nothing. McNair told Marilyn to wait while he looked for others. But the smoke was too thick, and the colonel quickly returned to the window. He shook his head, “No.” As Marilyn broke down in tears, McNair gave her a direct order.
“You’ll get out of the window—now!”
By then, the helpers in AE Drive had placed a painter’s ladder atop a garbage bin outside the window, and two men had climbed atop the rickety pyramid. With Phil McNair right behind, Marilyn climbed out the window and scrambled onto the backs of the men who’d turned themselves into extension ladders.
“Just jump,” someone called from below. “I’ll catch you.”
Marilyn followed the sound of the voice. Standing in AE Drive was the biggest man she’d ever seen: Commander Craig Powell, his muscular arms outstretched. He encouraged her again to jump. The slender Army lieutenant colonel looked down at the big Navy SEAL and let go.
Flat on his back in the stifling heat, feet against the desktop, Dave Tarantino pushed. His leg press raised the load of debris that trapped Jerry Henson by an inch, then two, then an inch more. Dave Thomas helped by squatting low like a weightlifter and pushing upward with all his might.
As Dave Tarantino gritted his teeth and held the weight aloft with his legs, he thought, “Well, now you’ve shifted this debris. What’s going to happen when you let it down? Is it just going to keep coming and coming?” He’d worry about that soon enough. First, he needed to get Jerry free. He reached up, grabbed Jerry, and pulled him out of the chair, dragging the older man across his body. Jerry clawed at Dave Tarantino’s arm, then his neck, reaching toward Dave Thomas, who pulled him the rest of the way out.
“Are you it?” Dave Tarantino asked, still holding the load with his legs. “Is there anyone else in here?”
“My buddy,” Jerry rasped. “Jack Punches.”
As Dave Thomas dragged Jerry out, Jerry’s foot caught on a thick printer cable.
“Get your ass out!” Dave Tarantino yelled, his legs shaking as he still supported the desktop. “This thing’s going to go. I can’t hold it.”
Dave Thomas pulled off Jerry’s shoe and hauled him out toward AE Drive. They moved past SEAL Craig Powell, who’d entered the ruined Navy Command Center after catching several people from the second floor, including Marilyn Wills. He braced open the melting wire mesh in the ceiling to preserve their escape route.
Dave Tarantino eased down the load. He said a silent prayer of thanks when it held steady atop Jerry’s empty chair. People were still calling for him and Powell to hurry out, but Dave Tarantino yelled back, “Be quiet! Shut up out there!”
General Carlton repeated the doctor’s orders for silence, even as he grew anxious at the sight of flames spreading across the desktop above Dave Tarantino’s head.
When the voices silenced, Dave Tarantino listened carefully. He heard nothing, so he shouted again for Jerry’s friend Jack Punches: “Is there anyone else in here? Anyone else?”
More silence, except for the crackle of fire, the sparks and pops of live electrical wires, and the ominous creaks of a building losing its integrity. Sapped by the intense heat, Dave Tarantino rolled over and crawled out from under Jerry’s desk. He moved past Powell, a tower of strength still holding up the passageway. General Carlton heard someone yell, “Come on, Big John!” The general chuckled at the reference to the old Jimmy Dean song, about a mountain of a man who held up the timbers of a collapsing mine to save his friends.
Dave Tarantino hustled outside with Carlton, Powell, and several others. They huffed like three-pack smokers, trying to catch their breath on AE Drive. Even before he reached safety, Dave Tarantino planned to go back inside to look for Jack Punches and other possible survivors. But just after he and the other searchers exited through the jagged hole in the C Ring wall, a boom sounded. Fire and smoke spouted through the hole like a geyser shooting sideways onto AE Drive. What remained of the first-floor supports collapsed, bringing down the upper floors and preventing further rescue efforts.
Jerry Henson was the last person rescued from inside the Pentagon.
After catching Marilyn Wills, Craig Powell handed off the lieutenant colonel to another military first responder, who carried her to the Center Court. Her ordeal caught up with her. Even in the bright sunlight and clean air, Marilyn’s smoke-filled lungs wouldn’t work. She couldn’t speak and could barely breathe. Scrapes and burns blistered the skin on her cheek, shoulder blades, knees, and shins. Her biceps muscles refused to relax. Her left shoulder locked into its socket.
Through the haze of pain, she heard the voices of people attending to her:
“Oh my God, she is not going to make it.”
“Get some water.”
“We don’t have any water.”
“Get some oxygen.”
“We don’t have any oxygen.”
“We have to do something! She’s dying.”
Even as she neared losing consciousness, Marilyn refused to believe that. It might take a while, but she knew that somehow, she’d get home to Kirk, Portia, and Percilla.
Through her haze, Marilyn understood that she was being moved to a triage station in the north parking lot where she’d left her car only hours earlier, its CD player ready to resume blasting its gospel plea for divine protection. Then came a bumpy ride to Arlington Hospital in the back of an SUV. As they pulled away, Marilyn opened her bloodshot eyes long enough to see smoke pouring from where her office had been. At the hospital, she wrote Kirk’s phone number on a doctor’s sleeve. Then she passed out.
While Marilyn was being taken to the hospital, civilian survivors Lois Stevens and Martha Carden fell into each other’s arms in the Pentagon courtyard. Trying to wring humor out of tragedy, Martha grumbled that her lifesaving crawl with Lieutenant Colonel Bob Grunewald had ruined an especially good pair of pumps.
“Lois,” Martha joked, “I want reimbursement9 for my damn shoes.”
Lois answered: “Well, I’d like some damn shoes.”
Martha looked down and saw Lois’s stockinged feet.
“Okay,” she said, “never mind.”
Soon Bob Grunewald joined Martha and several others from their office. They huddled close on a bench in the courtyard, grateful to be together.
After helping to rescue colleagues including Major Regina Grant, Tracy Webb, and Betty Maxfield, in separate escape routes from the Army personnel office, Sergeant Major Tony Rose and Colonel Phil McNair joined other military first responders in AE Drive, pulling several survivors through the punched-out holes on the first floor. From there, McNair went to the courtyard, where he saw a group of medics huddled over a soot-covered figure on the ground. He overheard someone say a name: “Yates.”
John Yates, the Army personnel office security chief, lay on the courtyard grass as medics cut off his pants. His face was charred, his hair burned off. John looked down at his ghostly white hands and saw skin hanging off them like shrouds. Phil McNair walked over with words of encouragement. John heard a female doctor say, “He needs to get out of here10—and needs to get out of here now.”
Back in AE Drive, Dave Tarantino found his crumpled uniform shirt on the ground and tugged it over his blackened T-shirt. Coughing from smoke inhalation, his eyes burning, his back and leg muscles aching, he walked to the Pentagon’s Center Court. He found Dave Thomas standing by a stretcher that bore the bloody, battered, but very much alive Jerry Henson, waiting for an ambulance out.
It was shortly after ten. About a half hour had passed since Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. In that brief time, the South Tower had crumbled, the evacuation of the North Tower continued, the horror of people falling or jumping to the World Trade Center plaza had worsened, and the heroes of Flight 93 had fought their final battle.
Dave Tarantino watched as a nervous medic tried to start an intravenous line in Jerry Henson’s arm. Dave thought about taking over, then decided to give the young man a chance. “You got this,” Dave gently told the medic. “Just focus and get this done.” On the next try, the IV line hit its mark.
As the medic cared for Jerry, Dave Thomas introduced himself to Dave Tarantino. During their rescue efforts, there hadn’t been time for the niceties of names. As they shook hands, Dave Thomas looked at Dave Tarantino with something approaching awe. Dave Thomas knew that he entered the burned-out Navy Command Center to find his best friend, Bob Dolan. He wondered what drove Dave Tarantino into that brick oven to crawl through jagged rubble, flip onto his back, and leg-press a load of burning debris, knowing that it might crash down on top of him. Dave Thomas decided that he’d never seen a more courageous act. But it worried him—he feared that Dave Tarantino might be selfless enough to return to the burning building, and the next time he might not get out.
Almost without thinking, Dave Thomas broke from their handshake and reached toward his new friend’s chest. Before Dave Tarantino knew what was happening, Dave Thomas snatched the name tag—tarantino, staff physician—off his tattered shirt. Dave Thomas stashed the tag deep in his pocket for safekeeping. If Dave Tarantino didn’t survive the day, Dave Thomas wanted to be certain that he remembered the man’s name. He’d tell Dave Tarantino’s family and anyone else who’d listen about the young Navy doctor’s heroism.
As medics carried away Jerry’s stretcher, Dave Thomas called out to the wounded old flier: “Remember this name—Tarantino. That’s who saved you!”
During the first half hour after Flight 77 smashed through the Pentagon, scores of life-and-death events and countless acts of heroism, sacrifice, and kindness played out simultaneously on the fire-scorched floors of Wedge One and nearby. Some ended in triumph, some in heartache, some in both.
In an Army office on the first floor, the blast threw Captain Darrell Oliver11 against a wall, opening a gash above his left eye and briefly knocking him unconscious. When he awoke, Oliver felt certain he wouldn’t make it out alive. He felt enraged that he hadn’t yet taught his two young daughters all they needed to know about life. Walls crumpled, furniture lay strewn about, and pieces of ceiling rained down on him. Partitions tilted at 45-degree angles, separating him and others in his office from a possible path to safety. A secretary who’d been blown from one office into the next grew frantic. Oliver and another officer dug her out from under debris.
“We’re not going to get out of here!” the secretary yelled. “We’re going to die in here!” Oliver tried to reassure her, but she wouldn’t listen, so he stopped arguing and ordered her to climb onto his back. He scrambled over one collapsed wall, then another. Rather than go outside with the secretary, Oliver handed her off to another officer. He returned to help a janitor who’d curled into the fetal position and sobbed in fear. Oliver knew the man had a severe hearing impairment; every day when the janitor came to empty the trash, Oliver rose from his chair, shook his hand, and chatted with him. Days earlier, the man told Oliver that he’d lost a hearing aid. Now he was confused and frightened, unable to follow shouted instructions from other officers.
As the office filled with smoke, Oliver put the man on his back and again climbed over the two fallen partitions, inches below live electrical wires that hung from the torn-open ceiling. Once outside, Oliver joined a team of volunteers who carried a severely burned woman from the building. The secretary, the janitor, and the burned woman all survived, as did Oliver.
On the first floor, Navy Lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer rolled on the floor12 and ran his hands over his face to extinguish flames from the fireball that had blown through the Navy Command Center and killed most of his officemates. Surprised to be alive, he yelled encouragement to himself: “Keep moving, Kevin! Keep moving!” He clawed through rubble and under dangling electrical wires as burned skin sloughed off his hands and arms.
Shaeffer rose when he saw a dim light obscured by smoke, then followed it to one of the punched-out holes leading to AE Drive. He told himself that he looked like the naked child burned by napalm in an iconic Vietnam War photograph: “You’re as helpless as that little girl, Kevin.” He made it outside and into the care of Army Sergeant First Class Steve Workman, who shepherded him to a hospital. As doctors prepared to cut off his wedding and Annapolis class rings, Kevin pried them off, then passed out.
After the plane flew past, Father Stephen McGraw abandoned his car in the traffic jam next to the Pentagon. The newly ordained priest ran toward the carnage13 with his prayer book, his purple stole, and his blessed olive oil. He vaulted over a guardrail and sprinted to the grass that flanked the building’s ruined west face. At first, Father McGraw remained away from the action, scared by explosions, worried about trespassing on military property, unsure if he’d know what to do if he encountered anyone who needed help.
Within minutes, Father McGraw saw medics and military volunteers carrying injured people to the soft green grass surrounding the Pentagon. To his surprise, everyone treated him like a frontline chaplain, as though it would have been odd if a priest hadn’t been waiting for them. Responders pointed and shouted: “Father, there’s someone over there who needs you!”
Father McGraw rushed to Juan Cruz-Santiago, a civilian accounting worker for the Army who was burned over more than 60 percent of his body. Survival seemed doubtful. Juan couldn’t see and was in no condition to confess his sins, but he told Father McGraw he was Catholic. The priest anointed Juan with oil and granted him a battlefield absolution, whispering, “May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.”
Father McGraw rushed to a woman and fell to his knees—to pray, but also because he buckled at the sight of her injuries. Caught in a fireball, the woman’s clothes had melted to her skin. She told him her name was Antoinette. Placed facedown on the ground, to avoid aggravating the angry burns on her back, she said her one remaining shoe was causing her great pain. Gently, Father McGraw pulled it off. She made one more request before being placed on a helicopter: “Tell my mother and father I love them.”
On the second floor, initial news of the New York attacks sent research officer Major John Thurman14 to the website of the Washington Post. Thurman was thirty-four, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War who’d been a military police platoon leader. As he watched a replay of United Flight 175 hitting the South Tower, he felt a whoosh and heard a crunch.
The shock wave tossed his chair backward against his cubicle partition. He dived under his desk as the ceiling collapsed and the fluorescent lights went dark and then crashed to the floor. Flames shot overhead, then raced down the wall of the windowless office. Lockers and filing cabinets crashed down. As smoke filled the room, Thurman suspected that a treasonous construction worker had detonated a bomb in sync with the World Trade Center crashes.
“Who else is here?” he yelled as he crawled under the smoke.
Thurman heard muffled yells nearby. He pushed a fallen file cabinet out of the way and clambered toward the voices. Ten feet away, he found Lieutenant Colonel Karen Wagner, a forty-year-old medical personnel officer who had played basketball at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A third-generation soldier, Karen Wagner had an effervescent energy and an unquenchable appetite for hard work. Nearby lay fifty-seven-year-old Chief Warrant Officer William Ruth, who flew helicopters to evacuate the dead and wounded in Vietnam, and who returned to battle in the Persian Gulf War. Both were hurt, Bill Ruth worse than Karen Wagner.
John Thurman pulled each from under debris into what remained of his cubicle. As they huddled on the carpet, the room heated up and the smoke thickened. Overhead sprinklers trickled a weak stream of water onto them. Bill Ruth mumbled incoherently. In the dark, Thurman couldn’t see the extent of their injuries, but he knew they needed to move.
“Okay,” Thurman said, “we’ve got to stay down. We have to get out of here now!”
John Thurman crawled toward a door with Karen Wagner hanging on to his belt. When he reached the door, tilted off its frame with a broken hinge, Thurman thought back to schoolboy fire drills. He tested the hallway by sticking his hand through an opening at the bottom, then snatched it back from the searing heat. They retreated to Thurman’s desk. Bill Ruth stopped speaking. Karen Wagner began to hyperventilate.
John Thurman concluded he was going to die. Lying face-down on the carpet, he felt an overwhelming need for a nap. Then, gripped by fury, he thought of his parents—his father had emailed him that morning to say that John’s pregnant younger sister had gone into labor. He realized that his parents might lose their eldest child on the same day they became first-time grandparents. With that, he pushed up from the carpet.
“We’ve got to get to the back door!” Thurman yelled.
He pulled Karen Wagner along with him, his head inches off the carpet, feeling his way through the dark. He rose to his knees, but the heat drove him back down. He pushed overturned furniture out of the way.
“Karen, come on,” he called. “Karen, follow me.”
She didn’t answer. He hoped she was somewhere close behind him, following his voice. Thurman crawled to the opposite side of the smoky room. He looked up and saw the faint red glow of an Exit sign. He pushed through the door to a corridor that led to a stairwell where the lights still worked. Choking and gasping, Thurman removed a shoe and used it to prop open the door for Karen Wagner and, he hoped, Bill Ruth.
Thurman hobbled down the stairs and ran into his boss, Colonel Karl Knoblauch, along with Lieutenant Colonel William McKinnon and a half dozen other rescuers scouring the building for stragglers. The impromptu team had already rescued several people, including a man they found badly burned and bleeding in the Fourth Corridor. Only after they began carrying the soot-caked man did McKinnon notice his name tag; he hadn’t recognized15 his classmate and friend, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Birdwell.
Thurman told them about the others still trapped in the office, so they helped him back upstairs to the propped-open door. Black smoke poured out, thick and hot.
“We have to go back in!” Thurman pleaded. “I know where they’re at—we can get them.”
“We can’t go in,” Knoblauch said.
The colonel and his rescue crew brought Thurman to the courtyard. Shivering, struggling to breathe, he repeated to anyone who’d listen, “Karen and Bill are in the room. Karen and Bill are in the room. We’ve got to go in and get them.” As Thurman spiraled into shock, medics took him to the north parking lot, then to a hospital.
From across the street at Arlington National Cemetery, facilities manager George Aman surveyed the scene16 as the Pentagon burned. When he heard rumors of another inbound plane, he and several coworkers piled into a pickup truck. The old soldier in George took over. He sped up Patton Drive to higher ground, a hillside in Section Eight of the cemetery, to stand guard for an unseen enemy.
Another hijacked plane never came, but multiple reports of incoming aircraft sent Pentagon survivors scurrying for cover under nearby overpasses and slowed efforts by firefighters. The exodus sent thousands of people from the Pentagon and other nearby buildings rushing toward George Aman and his crew. After leaving the Pentagon and the nearby Navy Annex, men and women, some in uniform, some not, cut through the cemetery on their way toward safety, or home, or wherever they needed to be.
George watched as the evacuees marched stone-faced among the tombstones of the nation’s war dead, where in the days and months ahead some of the victims of the Flight 77 hijacking would be laid to rest.
The first firefighters from the Arlington County Fire Department arrived at the Pentagon less than five minutes after the crash of Flight 77. With reinforcements, and without pause, they fought the blaze for the next thirty-six hours. Arlington ambulance teams treated the wounded on the Pentagon lawn. Several crews of Arlington firefighters rushed into the flames and led Pentagon workers to safety. Inside, rescue workers found a scene they described as “huge heaps of rubble17 and burning debris littered with the bodies and body parts of . . . victims [that] covered an area the size of a modern shopping mall.”
From the moment they began blasting the blaze with water and foam, firefighters heard the building creak and moan. Around 10:15 a.m., the second through fifth floors of the E Ring of Wedge One collapsed. The crumpled area extended about ninety-five feet18 in width and fifty feet in depth, a small fraction of the enormous building physically, but a huge blow symbolically.
Determined to demonstrate that the assault on the American military’s headquarters was by no means fatal, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld invited reporters to a dinnertime press briefing in an unaffected area of the still burning building.
“The Pentagon is functioning,”19 Rumsfeld told them. “It will be in business tomorrow.” Standing alongside him were General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the top Democrat and ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Shelton called the attacks “barbaric terrorism carried out by fanatics” and vowed that they would be answered with overwhelming force: “[M]ake no mistake about it, your armed forces are ready.”
After the ambulance drove off with Jerry Henson, Dave Tarantino hoped20 to help more survivors. But when the affected portion of Wedge One collapsed, it became clear that no one else would be brought out alive. He returned to the central courtyard to treat injured survivors awaiting transport.
More than once, Dave Tarantino thrilled at the sight of F-16s flying overhead, each fighter jet reassuring everyone there that there’d be no more inbound hijacked aircraft that day.
When he felt certain that there’d be no more need for his medical skills, Dave Tarantino called his wife and parents to say he was okay. He walked around to the building’s west face, weaving through fellow service men and women, firefighters, emergency officials, and the occasional priest, to get his first look at the crumpled walls where Flight 77 terminated.
Dave’s mind flashed to the moment he first saw Jerry Henson, trapped and helpless. A thought formed, one he’d refine and rephrase but never forget: “Someone tried to kill us, to kill me. Someone tried to kill all of us, out of blind ideological hatred, in the most brutal way. They tried to kill us by hurtling Americans at us.”
A day earlier, busy with Pentagon team soccer practice and routine emails and reports, Dave Tarantino had felt torn over whether to leave the Navy and settle into a family medical practice. Now he knew: he’d continue to serve.
As smoke swirled into the sky, he turned away from the burning Pentagon. Lieutenant Commander David Tarantino, MD, hurt, sore, pungent as an ashcan, limped several blocks to a Metro rail station. He paid the fare and boarded a train toward home. As he reflected on all that he’d seen and done, Dave noticed a woman staring at him from a few seats away. She studied his scrapes and bruises, the burns on his hands. Her gaze worked its way down his torn, stained uniform to his ruined shoes.
The woman looked up, into Dave’s bloodshot eyes, and burst into tears.