Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  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 unq
uenchable 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.

  Chapter 20

  “This Is Your Plane Crash”

  Shanksville, Pennsylvania

  Just after 9 a.m., inside her hilltop house in rural Stoystown, Pennsylvania, homemaker Linda Shepley watched her television in shock.1 The scree
n showed smoke billowing from a gash in the North Tower as Today show anchor Katie Couric interviewed an NBC producer who witnessed the crash of American Flight 11.

  “You say that emergency vehicles are there?”2 Couric asked Elliott Walker by phone.

  “Oh, my goodness!” Walker cried at 9:03 a.m. “Ah! Another one just hit!”

  Linda watched the terror in her living room beside her husband, Jim, a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation manager, who’d taken the day off to trade in their old car. The Shepleys saw a grim-faced President Bush speak to the nation from Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. Then Couric interviewed a terrorism expert but interrupted him for a phone call with NBC military correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, who declared at 9:39 a.m., “Katie, I don’t want to alarm anybody right now, but apparently, it felt just a few moments ago like there was an explosion of some kind here at the Pentagon.”

  From the home where they’d lived for nearly three decades, the Shepleys could have driven to Washington in time for lunch or to New York City for an afternoon movie. Yet as the political and financial capitals reeled, those big cities felt almost as far away as the caves of Afghanistan. Jim went to the garage, to clean out the car he still planned to trade in that day. Linda hurried to finish the laundry before she accompanied Jim to the dealership.

  Forty-seven years old, with kind eyes and three grown sons, Linda loved the smell of clothes freshly dried by the crisp Allegheny mountain air. As ten o’clock approached, she filled a basket with wet laundry and carried it to the clothesline in her backyard, two grassy acres with unbroken views over rolling hills that stretched southeast toward the neighboring borough of Shanksville. As Linda lifted a wet T-shirt toward the line, she heard a loud thump-thump sound behind her, like a truck rumbling over a bridge. Startled, she glanced over her left shoulder and saw a large commercial passenger plane, its wings wobbling, rocking left and right, flying much too low in the bright blue sky.