It soon became clear that a third plane had in fact been hijacked a half hour earlier. But the hijackers weren’t headed for New York.
Chapter 16
“They Done Blowed Up the Pentagon”
The Pentagon
Conceived during the run-up to U.S. entry into World War II, the Pentagon was designed in a rush to house what was then called the War Department. Its groundbreaking took place on September 11, 1941, sixty years to the day1 before 9/11.
Built atop thirty-four acres across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., the Pentagon was a stone, brick, and steel monument to military strength, unadorned by decoration except for a layer of Indiana limestone as its outer skin. Only 71 feet tall,2 each of its five sides stretched 921 feet, or longer than three football fields. Among the world’s largest office buildings, it boasted 6.6 million square feet3 of floor space and more than seventeen miles of polished corridors.
To passersby, the long, low outer walls gave the impression of a fortress-like monolith, serious and solid to the core. But when viewed from above, the Pentagon revealed a hidden grace, like a geometric flower. The five-story building consisted of five concentric pentagonal rings that surrounded a verdant five-and-a-half-acre courtyard of grass and trees. According to Pentagon lore,4 Russian war planners used the coordinates of the courtyard’s hotdog stand as a potential target for nuclear missiles during the Cold War. Less dramatically, the courtyard, known as the Center Court, served as an outdoor respite for the twenty thousand people who worked in the Pentagon, half of them members of the military and the rest civilians and Defense Department contractors. As a bonus, the courtyard was among the largest areas in the world where U.S. military members weren’t required to salute their superiors.5
Each of the building’s five rings had an alphabetic label: the A Ring was closest to the Center Court, then the B, C, and D rings, and finally the E Ring at the outer edge. An open-air breezeway between the B and C rings, confusingly called AE Drive, served as a utility road that allowed vehicles to move equipment or supplies around the building. The Pentagon’s five rings were connected by ten long corridors, predictably designated One through Ten, arranged at equal intervals, like spokes of a giant wheel. The corridors contributed to the Pentagon’s hyperefficient design: despite the building’s immense size, an able-bodied person could walk between any two points in under ten minutes. Office labels followed a simple alphanumeric code that made them easy to locate: floor, ring, corridor, then room. So, 2D491 was an office on the second floor of the D Ring, near corridor Four, room 91. Another way to think of the building was as five connected wedges, each one a slice of a pentagonal pie.
Navy doctor Dave Tarantino spent the first hours of September 11 puttering around6 his makeshift Pentagon office, a temporary assortment of desks squeezed into a hallway on the fourth floor of Wedge One, in the innermost A Ring, near the Fifth Corridor. Tarantino had already picked out a desk in a newly renovated area of Wedge One, on the building’s outermost E Ring. But the planned August move for him and a half dozen workmates had been delayed.
At thirty-five, still the slender athlete who’d survived a crushing fall beneath a twisted parachute as a college freshman, Dave had spent the previous year working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The Pentagon job was a highlight of a career that sent him around the world into crisis situations caused by natural and human-made disasters in Africa, Turkey, and elsewhere. Now he worked for a program whose name struck some as oxymoronic in a building synonymous with war: Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Affairs. In fact, modern military doctrine included a “you-break-it-you-bought-it” attitude toward armed conflict; after bombs and bullets came relief and rebuilding, overseen by men and women focused on healing. People like Dave.
During the first hours of the workday, Dave checked emails, made calls, and worked on reports about migrant refugee issues in Haiti and Cuba. Shortly before nine, Dave heard a colleague say something strange was happening in New York. They turned on a television and watched the burning North Tower. When Dave saw the strike on the South Tower, two thoughts sprang to mind: “I’m surprised they haven’t hit a military target” and “This has to be Osama bin Laden.” Then Dave jumped ahead two moves to what he expected would come next: a U.S. military response in bin Laden’s adopted homeland of Afghanistan, followed by a humanitarian crisis and years of cleanup.
As Dave watched the burning towers on CNN and considered the work ahead, the Pentagon shuddered beneath his feet.
Shortly after nine o’clock on the first floor of Wedge One in the Pentagon’s D Ring, a distracted Jerry Henson7 walked past men and women clustered around large television screens bolted to a wall of the new Navy Command Center, whose staffers managed daily naval operations around the clock, around the globe.
Jerry was a few months shy of sixty-five, but he looked a decade younger: square-jawed and graying at the temples, trim enough to fit into the commander’s uniform he’d hung up more than two decades earlier. As a Navy flier during the Vietnam War, Jerry had flown seventy-two combat missions. Back then, a normal day might involve photographing enemy positions in a reconnaissance plane, avoiding antiaircraft fire, and landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in high seas with his fuel gauge on E. Retirement from active service gave Jerry more time with his family and less dangerous work: now he piloted a Pentagon desk as the civilian chief of a seven-person staff that oversaw Navy antidrug efforts and relief operations.
As he reached his office, Pentagon room 1C466, a cubbyhole adjacent to the Command Center, Jerry carried bad news from a meeting he’d just attended in the office of the Secretary of Defense. Budget cuts meant he needed to cancel a planned task force gathering the next day at a Hampton Inn in Norfolk, Virginia. Jerry entered the cramped six-by-ten-foot room he shared with a jovial retired Navy captain: Jack Punches, the nine-fingered former submarine hunter who’d received the Order of the Palm medal upon his retirement. Jack had been up late the previous night, watching Monday Night Football with his son, Jeremy, after celebrating his daughter Jennifer’s birthday.
Jack and Jerry had worked together for more than six years. Jerry came from a generation of men more comfortable rebuilding engines than expressing emotions, but he considered Jack to be “one of those guys you loved immediately.” As he entered the office, Jerry saw Jack staring stone-faced at a wall-mounted TV.
“What’s happening?” Jerry said.
Jack gave him a rundown of the terror in New York, but the images spoke louder.
“That was no accident,” Jack said.
An aide arrived with a pile of paperwork, then dropped an offhand remark on his way out: “I guess we’ll be next on their list.”
Jerry and Jack watched multiple replays of the South Tower crash, two retired Navy aviators bearing witness to the start of a new war. In 1941, Jerry turned five years old within days of Pearl Harbor. Now he understood how the adults had felt back then.
Jerry answered a phone call from his wife, Kathy, who managed a dance studio in Virginia. “Are you aware?” she asked.
“Yes, we’re watching it on television.”
Kathy imagined that everyone in the Pentagon would be on high alert, with red lights flashing, ready to spring into battle. Or, even better, evacuating the pentagonal target with its bullseye courtyard.
“What’s the plan there?” she asked.
Jerry laughed her off. “It’s a normal working day. We’re working.”
Simultaneously, Jack had nearly the same conversation with his wife, Janice.
Jerry turned away from the television and called in two Navy petty officers on his staff, Christine Williams and Charles Lewis. They stood by his desk as Jerry dialed the Hampton Inn to cancel their reservations. The call connected as Jerry heard a booming crump-thump noise.
Then the line went dead and the lights went out.
At 8:45 a.m., in a second-floor cubicle on the outer E Ring of Wedge One, Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills8 made
last-minute tweaks to a presentation she needed to deliver about an upcoming conference.
Marilyn’s day had begun hours earlier in a rush, with no time for her family’s usual morning prayer circle or Marilyn’s typical closing plea: “Lord, God, bring us all back home safely together.” Instead, Marilyn swayed and sang along in her car with gospel singer Fred Hammond’s rousing rendition of “Jesus Be a Fence Around Me.” She ignored fellow commuters staring through her windows, hit repeat, and gave a full-throated, full-bodied encore until she reached the Pentagon parking lot.
Nearly two hours into her workday, Marilyn rehearsed her presentation for her friend and cubiclemate Marian Serva, who pronounced Marilyn ready. She gathered her files and marched toward a conference room some twenty feet away. Along the way, Marilyn glanced across the front lines of her new professional home: the sprawling workspace of the Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, under the command of Lieutenant General Timothy Maude.
The general and his immediate staff occupied a suite of offices at the outer edge of the Pentagon’s E Ring, with windows facing west toward Arlington National Cemetery. Marilyn and 275 colleagues, two thirds of them military and the rest civilian, had moved two months earlier into a newly renovated, acre-sized plot of carpeted real estate that stretched uninterrupted from the E Ring through the D and C rings. Some ranking officers had private workspaces, but most worked in a “cubicle farm” of 138 partitioned workstations under acoustic ceiling tiles. Still smelling of fresh paint, and with all the charm of a robocall center, the area was officially called the Bay. Its inhabitants called it Dilbertville, a not-so-fond reference to the comic strip that satirized the fluorescent grind of office life.
Dilbertville was humming.9 On her way to the meeting, Marilyn passed a cluster of cubicle dwellers that included Specialist Michael Petrovich and civilians Tracy Webb and Dalisay Olaes, all checking email, working the phones, and organizing reports. Tracy and Dalisay hoped to slip away for a coffee break with their friend Odessa Morris, but Dr. Betty Maxfield, an Army demographer, delayed their departure when she dropped by to talk about personnel matters and a scarf she’d bought from Tracy, who had a sideline as an Avon representative.
Along with Marilyn, eleven officers and civilians headed toward the conference room for a bimonthly executive officers’ meeting. Colonel Philip McNair, executive officer under General Maude, would run the show. Also on their way were Major Regina Grant, a human resources officer who earlier in her career worked as a fire safety educator; Lieutenant Colonel Robert Grunewald, an information technology expert who’d helped to design the new personnel offices; Martha Carden, General Maude’s assistant executive officer and the office’s resident mother hen; and Lois Stevens, a civilian action control officer who’d be sitting in for a major away on leave.
Another participant was a minor Army legend: the affable sixty-nine-year-old Max Beilke,10 who’d served in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and who now looked after fellow veterans as deputy chief of retirement services. A lifetime earlier, on March 29, 1973, Master Sergeant Max Beilke walked to a transport plane in Saigon and took his place in history as the last American combat soldier11 to leave Vietnam. As Max approached the plane, a North Vietnamese lieutenant colonel stepped forward and handed him a parting gift: a straw placemat decorated with a serene image of a pagoda.
Upon entering the conference room, Marilyn did a sharp about-face and returned to her desk.
“Quick meeting,”12 Marian Serva said.
“I wish,” Marilyn replied. “It’s freezing in there.” She snatched her black cardigan from her chair and hustled back to the conference room.
One by one, starting at 9 a.m., the Army personnel staffers delivered their reports. Bob Grunewald ribbed Max Beilke about how great life sounded for retirees. Max left after his presentation, to attend a simultaneous meeting across the hall, in General Maude’s office on the outer E Ring.
Outside the conference room, word spread through Dilbertville about the attacks in New York. A handful of officers and civilians crowded around a television above Marian Serva’s desk. Among them was John Yates, fifty years old, a strapping former staff sergeant who served as the department’s security officer. He’d spent the previous eight years planning for the Army personnel team’s move to its new quarters. John watched for a while, then returned to his desk to call his wife, Ellen, whom he’d married the previous year.
“Honey, do me a favor,”13 Ellen said. “For the rest of the day, work from underneath your desk.”
John laughed: “Sure, babe, no problem.” He told her he loved her and returned to the horrifying images on Marian Serva’s TV.
No one disturbed the executive officers’ meeting with news of the terrorist hijackings, so the presentations continued with the participants in high spirits. As her turn to speak neared, Marilyn sensed that the scheduled half-hour 9 a.m. meeting had run long. She glanced at her watch: 9:36 a.m. Colonel Phil McNair gave her the floor.
Marilyn took a deep breath and began: “Well . . .”
The room rocked. McNair leapt to his feet and shouted: “What the hell was that?” Everything went black.
The roar of jet engines startled facilities manager George Aman14 as he worked in Arlington National Cemetery, the vast military burial ground beside the Pentagon. A Vietnam War veteran, Aman had spent a quarter century tending to the cemetery’s hallowed hills, pampering the thick green grass dotted with more than four hundred thousand marble tombstones in eternal formation. He was accustomed to planes passing overhead, but never this loud, never this low.
The noise rose to a growling crescendo. Aman feared that the plane would crash into the maintenance building where he stood terrified. But it flew past him, so close that Aman swore he could see the faces of American Airlines Flight 77 passengers in the windows. Aman couldn’t say whether he spotted author and commentator Barbara Olson, sixth-grade student Bernard C. Brown II, pregnant flight attendant Renée May, or retired Rear Admiral Wilson “Bud” Flagg. All he could say with certainty was that the faces bore empty looks of despair. Overcome, confused, Aman worried that he’d wet his pants.
As fast as it came into view, the plane disappeared.
“Good God almighty,” he said, an exclamation that doubled as a prayer.
Aman heard another worker’s radio broadcasting urgent updates about the terror attacks in New York City, with frenzied reports about hijacked planes and burning towers some two hundred fifty miles to the northeast. Now, at 9:37 a.m., seconds after the plane streaked past the cemetery, a thunderous explosion shook George Aman’s world. Yet he didn’t immediately connect the horror he heard on the radio to the low-flying plane or the blast he had heard nearby.
Then a coworker screamed: “Goddamn, they done blowed up the Pentagon!”
With terrorist pilot Hani Hanjour pushing the throttles, Flight 77 pierced the west wall of the Pentagon’s E Ring at the first-floor level, between corridors Four and Five, only a few feet off the ground. Because the plane struck at an angle, part of the upturned right wing slashed through the concrete slab of the second floor. At the moment of impact, the jet was traveling at roughly 530 miles per hour,15 or 708 feet per second, loaded with 5,300 gallons16 of fuel.
The bone-rattling impact, felt several blocks away by George Aman and untold others, sent a fireball two hundred feet above the building’s roof. Whirling plumes of dense gray-black smoke were visible for miles. The explosion consumed much of the plane’s tail in the milliseconds before it entered the building: although the Boeing 757’s tail was forty-five feet high, the initial damage to the Pentagon reached only twenty-five feet up the outer wall.17
When it pierced the Pentagon’s limestone skin, the jet acted like an incendiary bullet entering a body between two ribs, tearing through the vital organs within. The plane’s six hundred thousand bolts and rivets and sixty miles of wiring became superheated, superdeadly shrapnel.18 Momentum and multiple explosions of fuel enlarged the
swath of destruction to more than an acre of office space on each of the first and second floors, with less intense damage on the three upper floors. The plane and its contents fragmented into countless lethal pieces, slashing and burning through people and furniture and equipment and load-bearing columns in the newly rebuilt section called Wedge One, where some thirty-eight hundred men and women, military and civilian, were at work at 9:37 a.m. on September 11.
Slightly minimizing the destruction was the fact that Wedge One was the first section of the building to undergo a major renovation, with work five days from completion. Newly installed structural steel tubing reinforced the outer wall of the E Ring, where the plane entered. Blast-resistant windows with inch-and-a-half-thick glass had been mounted on the exterior wall, reducing flying shards. The new windows were a response to the 1995 domestic terrorism bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, where fractured glass caused some of the 168 deaths and numerous injuries.
In addition, Wedge One had the building’s only fire sprinklers, and its renovated exterior walls were backed by Kevlar cloth, similar to the material used in bulletproof vests, to prevent shattered pieces of masonry from becoming deadly projectiles. The Pentagon’s four unrenovated wedges would have been more vulnerable to damage on September 11. On the other hand, Wedge Two was nearly empty, in anticipation of the next phase of construction, so even if the building damage had been greater, casualties there likely would have been fewer.
When it entered Wedge One of the Pentagon, what remained of Flight 77 took an angled path,19 penetrating the E, D, and C rings. Airplane parts punched holes through thick walls, reaching as deep as AE Drive, about 270 feet from where the plane entered. The front portion of Flight 77 disintegrated as it moved through the building, creating a hole through which rear sections of the plane traveled farther into the Pentagon. As a result, remains of the five hijackers, who were in the front section, would be found relatively close to the impact point, while remains of passengers and crew members, who’d been herded toward the rear, would be recovered farther inside.
Fall and Rise Page 34