Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  It took less than one second for Flight 77 to stop moving after it hit the building. But, just as in the World Trade Center towers, the damage had only begun: fires raged, debris rained down, water lines burst, electrical wires snapped, and acrid black smoke spread and rose to the floors above.

  Several dozen Pentagon workers died instantly. Thousands more headed for escape routes that ranged from straightforward to treacherous. Others, some horribly burned, faced death as they sought safety or awaited rescue as air ran out in darkness, intense heat, and fire-scorched mazes of chest-high wreckage. Some military members and civilians, thrust by circumstance or impulse, became impromptu first responders, risking their own lives to save others.

  When the Pentagon shook, Navy doctor Dave Tarantino thought it was a construction accident from the renovations. Maybe a welder had hit a gas line, or a crane had toppled over. Then he and his coworkers, deep inside the building and three stories above where Flight 77 entered, thought about New York.

  Maybe it was a bomb.

  They had no time to speculate further, though: in less than a minute, alarms blared and loudspeakers ordered an evacuation. Black smoke snaked into their makeshift workspace. They rushed to seal secure files and shut down computers. Military and civilian workers poured from their offices into the hallway around the humanitarian assistance group’s desks, heading toward a main corridor. Dave and several others guided them through rising smoke to a stairwell that led down and out to the central courtyard. Dave could have gone outside with them, to set up an open-air triage station and wait for any wounded that might arrive. But a unique combination of forces acted upon him in ways no one could have predicted, not even Dave himself.

  As a doctor with trauma care experience, Dave believed that he should immediately help seriously injured people still trapped, just as he’d done years earlier when a plane crashed into an Alaska hillside. A third-generation Navy officer, he’d absorbed the principle of prioritizing ship and shipmates over oneself. The Pentagon was his ship, and aboard a burning ship every sailor is a firefighter, bound by duty and honor to fight flame. As a young man, Dave had vicariously suffered the shame felt by Conrad’s fictional Lord Jim for saving himself before others. And as the survivor of a near-fatal parachute fall, Dave knew how it felt to need help. While others rushed toward safety, Dave remained inside the Pentagon.

  The explosions had knocked out the lights, plunging the hallways into darkness, and thickening smoke obscured emergency exit signs mounted high near the ceilings. Dave half-crawled along the corridor walls to find a bathroom, where he wet paper towels to make crude breathing masks. He surmised that the explosion, whatever had caused it, had originated outside the building. Dave needed to help his Wedge One coworkers overcome their natural inclination to rush toward the outer edge of the Pentagon, the E Ring, and from there to the parking lots and roadways beyond. Dave had quickly realized that the smarter though less intuitive path would be to head deeper inside the Pentagon, to the central courtyard, through which survivors could then enter unaffected wedges of the building to reach safety.

  Exiting the bathroom into the darkened fourth-floor corridor, Dave called out to make sure no one was lost in the smoke. Staying low, he raced down a stairwell to the floor below. Choking and retching, unable to see his hand in front of his face, Dave led confused workers, some of them bruised and dazed, toward a stairway leading to the courtyard. He did the same on the second floor, at times crawling or crab-walking as he helped to guide and prod several dozen Pentagon colleagues through the smoky darkness.

  As Dave helped the fleeing survivors, he handed out wet paper towels to help people with breathing problems, leaving none for himself. Dave felt his throat and lungs burn from the bitter smoke of jet fuel. He needed fresh air, and he knew he’d find it in AE Drive. He wove his way there, moving against the crowd of people heading for safety. When he reached the breezeway, Dave drank in the clean air and regained his bearings.

  When Dave’s smoke-strained eyes cleared he saw military men and women from all branches, some heading toward the courtyard but others like him, looking for ways to help. He moved toward them and saw several holes in the cinderblock and brick outer wall of the C Ring. The largest hole was nearly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, blackened at its rough edges. Smoke poured out and climbed the wall toward the clear blue sky. As his eyes followed the smoke upward, Dave saw several men and women scrambling out a second-story window farther down AE Drive, then falling or jumping into the arms of several stout men who stood waiting below. One of the rescuers, a muscular Navy SEAL named Commander Craig Powell, soon moved from catching jumpers toward the holes in the C Ring where Dave stood.

  Dave looked around the debris and realized he was looking at an oversized tire, still attached to twisted metal mounts: clearly part of a commercial jet’s landing gear. Reality dawned on him that the damage wasn’t from a construction accident or an earthquake or a bomb. He’d wondered minutes earlier if terrorists would choose a military target—now he understood they’d picked the biggest one of all, the one where he worked. As Dave stared at the wreckage in AE Drive, he realized the debris wasn’t just mechanical parts and office junk. He recognized part of a foot, part of a leg, part of a skull.

  Then he heard voices pleading for help from inside the building.

  Sitting at his desk, a split second after he heard a crunching sound and the lights died, retired Navy flier Jerry Henson felt a crushing blow to the head. As the plane devastated the first floor of the E Ring, it tore through the Navy Command Center adjacent to the small office Jerry shared with his friend Jack Punches.

  Flight 77 didn’t strike their warren directly. Its wake created a tsunami of broken walls and ceilings, crushed masonry, splintered furniture, torn electrical wires, and disemboweled plumbing and heating pipes. Jerry felt as though all of it landed on him.

  The top of his desk had detached from its base and slid across the arms of his chair, at once immobilizing and protecting him, like the tray of a child’s high chair. Hundreds of pounds of rubble pinned Jerry off kilter in his chair. Part of the load pressed his head hard against his left shoulder, squeezing his face like a vise grip. The weight twisted his neck so painfully he thought it might be broken. Blood from a head wound dripped down his shoulder and right arm. More blood drained from cuts on his chin and cheek. Yet he remained conscious, and he believed that his torso and lower body were uninjured. To his surprise, Jerry could move his legs.

  “Help!” he called, coughing, unable to see in the sudden darkness. The smell of burning jet fuel, familiar from his flying days, convinced Jerry that his building had been hit the same way as the World Trade Center. “All this stuff is on top of me because an airplane has come through the Pentagon,” he thought. Black smoke at first seeped, then poured into what remained of his office. A fire burned behind his chair, and others burned nearby, adding to the smoke and casting a flickering glow that served as the only light.

  The plane’s entrance had lifted petty officers Christine Williams and Charles Lewis off the ground and thrown them to the floor. Both were trapped under mounds of debris. They answered Jerry’s calls but couldn’t free themselves from the wreckage. The two petty officers joined Jerry’s cries for help as they tried to dig themselves out. Even as Williams and Lewis slowly worked their way free, they had nowhere to go. Jerry and Jack’s windowless office was misshapen and filled with rubble. Much of the debris had come from the direction of the only doorway. If there was a way out, it was obscured by broken walls, upturned furniture, darkness, and smoke.

  Battling pain, inhaling smoke, Jerry fought to keep from passing out. Williams and Lewis were accounted for, but where was Jack Punches? Jerry had last seen Jack sitting by the television set after speaking with his wife, Janice. In his mind’s eye, Jerry could see Jack flanked on one side by heavy bookcases and on the other by a tall filing cabinet. Either or both might have crushed him.

  “Jack?” he called. “Jack? You a
ll right?” He got no reply but kept calling. Maybe, Jerry hoped, Jack was alive but had been knocked out cold. Maybe he’d awaken to the sound of his name. “Jack!”

  With no one answering his or the petty officers’ calls, Jerry tried to save himself. He snaked his left hand free. Little by little, he pushed away pieces of debris within reach. He’d survived combat in Vietnam and too many close calls to count. His family wanted him home. He didn’t want to die at his Pentagon desk.

  After a few minutes of clearing, Jerry repositioned his head just enough to ease the pain in his neck, although he remained trapped. He stretched and flexed his legs, fearing they’d fall asleep and make it hard to walk if he somehow got free. As more time passed, that became a fading hope. Jerry remained imprisoned by his desk and the collapsed walls and cabinets of his office. Weakened, his throat and lungs burning, Jerry knew that it wouldn’t matter if his legs worked if rescuers didn’t arrive soon.

  Although Flight 77 struck the west face of the Pentagon at the E Ring’s ground-floor level, the impact sent a volcanic force into the Army personnel offices directly above. Explosions of jet fuel and dense smoke burst upward as the plane’s wreckage plowed through three rings of the first floor toward AE Drive.

  In the Army personnel conference room, acoustic tiles lifted from their frames as a fireball belched from the ceiling behind Martha Carden’s seat. Walls cracked and peeled away. Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills flew from her chair to the other side of the room. She banged her head and blacked out momentarily, then awoke in the pitch darkness with no idea how she’d gotten there. Her left cheek was burned, her hair singed, her nose and mouth coated with the smell and taste of jet fuel. She heard Colonel Phil McNair: “Get under the table! Get below the smoke!”

  Lieutenant Colonel Bob Grunewald, like Marilyn a former military police officer, disobeyed20 that order. Worried about his friend, he cried out: “Where is Martha?”

  “Help!” Martha Carden called from the other side of the room. “Somebody help!”

  “I’ll come get you!” Bob Grunewald yelled as he dived across the table. He crawled ten feet to reach Martha, still in her chair, disoriented and covered with pieces of broken ceiling tile, but unhurt. When Bob reached her, he pulled her to the floor and told her to hang on to his belt. With Martha clinging to him, Bob crawled toward what he hoped would be an exit.

  Orienting herself after her blackout, Marilyn Wills scrambled on hands and knees several feet to a door that led into a corridor that circumnavigated the E Ring. She grabbed the handle and yanked, but the door was jammed inside its casing.

  Marilyn couldn’t see anyone else in the room, but she yelled to alert them: “The door’s locked—we can’t get out of here!” Marilyn thought of her family’s prayer to be reunited safely at the end of each day, which she hadn’t had time to say that morning. “Oh Jesus, it’s so hot,” she thought. “I’m going to die.”

  When no one answered her calls, Marilyn wondered if she was alone. Yet that didn’t make sense. Moments earlier, after Max Beilke’s departure, she’d been one of eleven people in the meeting room. Perhaps because she was stunned by the initial blow, Marilyn didn’t hear Phil McNair, Bob Grunewald, and others yelling orders and encouragement as smoke filled the room.

  “Stay low!” “Keep together!” “Move fast!” “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  In the suffocating darkness, determined to make it home to her family, Marilyn knew that her only hope would be the door she’d entered through, at the opposite end of the room, which opened onto Dilbertville. The conference room wasn’t large, but Marilyn felt as though she crawled for a long time. Heat baked her uniform and skin, and Marilyn could no longer imagine the frigid air that had prompted her to grab her sweater. She pulled one arm out of the black cardigan, half-dragging it as she crawled. As she neared the door, Marilyn felt a hand lock onto her ankle.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “It’s Lois,” said the civilian control officer, Lois Stevens, a petite woman in her sixties who’d spent a quarter century working at the Pentagon. She sounded calm.

  “Okay, good,” Marilyn said. “Come on, you hold on to me. Don’t let go. We’re going to get out of here.”

  Dave Tarantino stood in the breezeway that was AE Drive, where the ground was wet from broken pipes and littered with human remains, ruined furniture, and airplane wreckage. He joined an impromptu squad of about twenty21 people, a mix of civilians and military, officers and enlisted personnel, from the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy, engaged in a spontaneous joint rescue effort. Among them were Lieutenant General Paul Carlton Jr., the surgeon general of the Air Force, and the oversized Navy SEAL Craig Powell, who had reported for work in the Pentagon only days earlier.

  Another first responder was Navy Captain Dave Thomas.22 At forty-three, smart and articulate, balding and bespectacled, he was the son of a career Navy officer and one of four brothers to attend the Naval Academy. He’d spent a dozen years at sea as a surface warfare officer, most recently as commander of the guided missile destroyer USS Ross, named for an American hero of Pearl Harbor who was the first Medal of Honor recipient of World War II. Wounded and blinded by a bomb23 aboard the USS Nevada, Donald K. Ross repeatedly braved smoke and fire to keep the battleship’s dynamos spinning, singlehandedly preventing the big ship from sinking and blocking the harbor.

  At the Pentagon, Dave Thomas had spent almost eighteen months leading a team preparing a massive report on Navy strategy and policy required by Congress every four years, part of the painstaking work that set him on a path to becoming an admiral one day. Every morning at 9:30 a.m., four hours into his workday, he had a standing appointment for coffee with his best friend, Captain Robert Dolan, a rising Navy star who worked in a strategy office within the Navy Command Center. Their bond spanned their adult lives, starting with three years as roommates at the Naval Academy. Bob Dolan had served as Dave Thomas’s best man and later became godfather to one of Dave’s two children. Dave loved Bob like a brother and felt the same love in return.

  When Dave Thomas heard about the New York attacks, he called Bob, who agreed that they’d be too busy for a coffee break. Minutes later, when Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, Dave Thomas wanted to get outside to safety as quickly as possible. Instead he was driven by instinct to move toward the flames, a throwback to his shipboard days. He hustled from his fourth-floor office, located two corridors away from the point of impact, down the stairs and out onto AE Drive. He looked up and saw black smoke rising from farther down the breezeway, so he ran toward the flames, just as Dave Tarantino had done. As Dave Thomas moved against the crowd toward the smoke, he realized that the trail led toward his best friend Bob Dolan’s office.

  Dave Thomas skidded to a stop when he reached the ruins of Flight 77 on AE Drive. His gaze settled on what looked like five black dots on the ground. Then he recognized that the dots were the polished nails of a detached foot. He wondered why strands of seaweed waved in a creek flowing through the Pentagon breezeway. Then he realized he was looking at human hair and part of a scalp in water pouring from a broken main. Nearby he saw what looked like a field-dressed deer. No. Minutes earlier the butchered flesh had been a living, breathing person.

  Dave Thomas spotted an elderly custodian he knew, a small man, always neatly dressed, dragging two heavy fire extinguishers. The man trudged toward the smoking holes in the wall of the C Ring. Beyond those holes was whatever remained of the Navy Command Center. Dave Thomas’s friend Bob Dolan wasn’t among the rescuers, which meant that he was somewhere inside, trapped, hurt, or worse.

  Dave Thomas took a fire extinguisher and crawled into one of the holes. He found himself inside what had been an electrical closet, now a mess of tangled wiring. He reached a metal door where he could hear people pounding and screaming for help from the other side. He grabbed a metal pole and tried to break through, his efforts prompting the people on the other side to yell louder in hope of deliverance. But the door held, and
the people inside grew quiet.

  As he searched for another way around, Dave Thomas could only hope that they found a way out. The extinguisher ran out of water and he returned to AE Drive, his lungs aching. Someone gave him a penlight. Guided by the tiny white beam of light, he crawled back into the building through a different hole. It felt like entering a kiln.

  “Anybody in here?” he yelled. “Bob, you here?”

  Molten metal from welded seams and liquefied plastic from the sheaths of electrical wire dripped from what remained of the ceiling. The drops burned his skin, so Dave Thomas took off his khaki uniform shirt and wrapped it around his head as an improvised pith helmet. His glossy dress shoes began to melt, baking his feet. He went outside, splashed water on his head and feet, and crawled back inside through another hole in the C Ring wall. That route was even hotter, with fires burning and smoke boiling, but Dave Thomas saw a path that led to where Bob Dolan’s desk had been. He went as far as he could, but the desk was no longer there. He screamed for Bob, for anybody. An Army officer covered in blood and dust ran past him, out to AE Drive, but Dave Thomas found no sign of his best friend.

  Still trapped in his chair, Jerry Henson felt air and time running out. Perhaps fifteen minutes had passed since the explosion. The smoke was so thick he felt as though he could grab chunks of it. He grew listless, and the skin around his nostrils and mouth became blackened by soot. His breaths grew shallow and his calls grew faint, then collapsed into coughs. His throat burned. Jerry felt as though he was being strangled by unseen hands. He felt rising heat at his back from a fire behind his chair.