by Steve Vogel
At 2 P.M. the evacuation tone sounded and all rescue workers were pulled out again; the control tower at National Airport warned of an “inbound unidentified aircraft.” Smith heard the tone and left the building but sat down on the back of his fire truck and refused to go farther. “Well, if they’re going to crash something, they’re just going to get Mike today,” he said. “I’m not running anymore.” It turned out to be a plane carrying Attorney General John Ashcroft. Firefighters were furious.
After the all-clear, Smith and his crew attacked the fire, but the exhausted firefighters were replaced at 4 P.M. by fresh teams. They had each gone through four bottles of oxygen—one was usually enough even for a big fire—and the fire was still out of control. Smith and his dehydrated crew were put on IVs and taken to the hospital.
As Smith had feared, rescuers were not finding anybody alive. A FEMA urban search-and-rescue unit had been hunting through the rubble with dogs since early afternoon, with no success. Everybody the dogs found was dead.
Out front, Lieutenant Colonel Ted Anderson had given up hope. “There were hundreds of us just waiting with backboards, because we figured at some point we were just going to start dragging the dead out,” he said. Late in the day, Anderson overheard fire commanders talking. A group of bodies—five, according to a later FBI evidence report—had been found clustered in the first-floor E Ring corridor, about forty feet from the emergency exit where Anderson had tried to go back to pull more people out. Whether they were the ones the man in flames had screamed were looking for a way out, no one knew.
They would have won
Inside the National Military Command Center, the smoke continued to build. The Arlington County Fire Department was pressing for everyone—Rumsfeld included—to evacuate the NMCC. Rumsfeld still refused to go to Site R, but he did consider moving his headquarters to one of three close-by locations: the White House, the Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters across the river at Bolling Air Force Base, or a third classified alternate command center nearby. Rumsfeld’s eyes were smarting and his throat was raw. “The smoke was a problem, but it was not killing people in the part of the building we were in at that moment,” he later said.
Rumsfeld decided the Pentagon would not be abandoned. Even on fire, the Pentagon was the best place from which to run the new war. “We had things to do and business to conduct and problems to solve, and we had the necessary people and capacity here to do it, and I decided we’d do it,” he later said. Beyond that, the decision was completely in keeping with the secretary’s personality. For better and for worse, Rumsfeld had a long stubborn streak; he was a former naval aviator and had the swagger to match. “I also didn’t like the idea of evacuating,” he said. “They would have won, the terrorists.”
Fire commanders decided to send a team to evaluate the smoke and knock down any fire threatening the command center. Firefighters assembled gear, chalked out a plan, and were ready to go, but then realized nobody knew where the command center was. Ted Anderson, hovering nearby, volunteered to take them in.
A battalion chief threw an oxygen tank on Anderson’s back and a mask on his face. A bus drove them around to the River entrance, and Anderson—wearing his oxygen tank atop his striped shirt and tie—led the firefighters to the command center. The entrance was guarded by machine-gun–toting Pentagon police officers wearing black uniforms and helmets. Inside, it was packed and hazy, and many were wearing medical masks. The firefighters measured the air quality and deemed it survivable. Exhaust fans were set up to improve the air flow. They checked the area and found no fire near the command center; instead, it was smoke from the crash scene that was wrapping around the building and getting in the intake vents. Steve Carter got a call on the radio and came up with a low-tech solution. When the smoke wrapped around to the vents, workers on the roof closed the dampers, and when it blew away, they opened them.
The smoke did not entirely dissipate, and communications remained unreliable, but the command center stayed open. Rumsfeld and Air Force General Richard Myers, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, shuttled back and forth between the command center and the Cables communication hubs upstairs, depending on how bad the smoke was, and with whom they needed to speak.
PHOTO INSERT II
James Forrestal leaving his office on September 22, 1947, the day the first secretary of defense moved into the Pentagon. “He has the bearing given to goodhearted gangsters in the movies,” one observer wrote. “There is the suggestion of the possibility of violence and the surface of perfectly constrained restraint.” (H&E)
With Forrestal looking over his shoulder, Robert McNamara welcomes his successor, Clark Clifford, to the secretary’s office in February 1968. “We mustn’t have another Forrestal,” LBJ said before ousting McNamara. (Washington Post, Wally McNamee)
The view of the Pentagon Mall plaza from the roof as marchers congregate on October 21, 1967. (CMH)
Military police try to hold back protesters during the chaos on the Mall plaza. “The situation became extremely fluid,” an Army report said. (Washington Post, Wally McNamee)
The Pentagon in the minutes after it was struck by a hijacked jet at 9:30 A.M. on September 11, 2001, before the building collapsed. (PENREN)
The fire surged after the collapse. (DoD)
Patty Pague, one of the Defense Intelligence Agency workers who escaped from the comptroller’s office by following Paul Gonzales, is treated at the scene. (Washington Post, Juana Arias)
Lt. Col. Ted Anderson, who pulled victims from the building before being restrained by firefighters, at the Pentagon River entrance. (Washington Post, Michael Williamson)
An enormous cloud of smoke rose over the building, seen from the opposite side of the Pentagon. (PENREN)
Firefighters on the roof investigate the collapse zone on September 11. (Washington Post, Michael Lutzky)
Firefighters and soldiers unfurl an American flag from the roof of the Pentagon on September 12, 2001. (DoD)
Lee Evey, head of the Pentagon renovation, tours the damage on September 21, cataloging the work that lay ahead. Evey knew nothing about construction but was a master of human nature and motivation. (Washington Post, Bill O’Leary)
Col. Phil McNair led colleagues from a burning office bay on September 11 and then pulled others out of the wreckage. (Washington Post, Michael Williamson)
Allyn Kilsheimer, with pink hard hat. “You make it happen at the construction site,” Evey told him. (Washington Post, Michael Williamson)
Doc Cooke, Director of Administration and Management for the Secretary of Defense, during the Phoenix Project reconstruction. “His power was formidable, this Godfather of the Pentagon.” (PENREN)
A Phoenix Project worker prepares a column in February 2002. (Washington Post, Carol Guzy)
The “T-Rex” excavator, on the right, joined by other demolition equipment, tears down destroyed portions of the Pentagon on October 25, 2001. (PENREN)
Peter Murphy, counsel for the commandant of the Marine Corps, on August 15, 2002, the day he moved back into his rebuilt E Ring office near the point where the plane hit the building. Behind him is the window where Murphy was standing when the plane hit. (Washington Post, Michael Lutzky)
The restored wall of the Pentagon, seen shortly before sunrise in September 2002, nearly one year after the attack. (Washington Post, Bill O’Leary)
Despite the problems, Rumsfeld had another surprise for the fire department. In mid-afternoon, he ordered that the Pentagon open for business the next day. The secretary did not bother to consult with Chief Schwartz or building supervisors before making his decision. “Having it open for business the next day seemed to me to be important,” Rumsfeld later said.
To make the point crystal-clear, Rumsfeld agreed to hold a press conference that evening inside the burning Pentagon. Reporters would be bussed to the press briefing room on the Mall side to hear a defiant statement that the Pentagon was still functioning.
Schwartz was astonished at
the news. They were battling a big and dangerous fire, an unknown number of dead were in the rubble, and there was danger of further collapse. Rumsfeld’s decision “placed additional burdens” on the fire department as well as the FBI evidence-recovery team, the federal after-action report concluded, although Schwartz later said it caused few problems.
Steve Carter was likewise flabbergasted. By early afternoon he believed the building was past the worst and was stabilizing; that, however, was a far cry from making tomorrow a regular workday. But as Carter thought about it, he could understand the rationale. The Pentagon had never closed its doors.
Nobody left
Lee Evey had driven back from Tennessee in record time and showed up late in the afternoon with a car trunk filled with forty orders of hamburgers, french fries, and sodas for the renovation team. He was not prepared when he saw the destruction at the Pentagon. The news reports could not convey the smell of the smoke, the way it grabbed his throat when the wind shifted. It was virulent.
In Evey’s absence, the renovation office set up a command center on the heliport landing pad, assuming the role of logistics center by bringing in any supplies requested by the fire department, FBI, and other agencies at the scene. “If they needed it, we wanted it to be there,” Mike Sullivan, Evey’s deputy, recalled. AMEC, the Wedge 1 prime contractor, brought in shoring timber and steel. Facchina Construction, a major subcontractor, sent a fleet of backhoes, front-end loaders, dump trucks, and cranes, escorted to the site by state police. Construction managers brought in large, clean refuse containers the FBI could use to store evidence; they trucked in gravel for a road to support the heavy equipment in front of the building. When the fire worsened, they ordered generators and floodlights, knowing operations would be going around the clock. Sullivan made verbal contracts with construction companies to support the rescue, and within a few hours had assigned $400,000 worth of work. “I sure hoped the money would follow at some point,” he later said.
Jack Kelly and Les Hunkele, two of the most experienced construction hands at the site, recommended a first-rate structural engineer be brought in immediately to assess the building’s condition and advise fire and rescue teams on what areas were safe. They were in agreement: The guy they really needed at the scene was Allyn Kilsheimer.
When the call came from the Pentagon late in the morning, Kilsheimer already had a request from New York asking him to help at the World Trade Center. The calls were not surprising. Kilsheimer, founder and president of KCE Structural Engineers, was often called when disaster struck; he had worked the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He was expert at quickly assessing a damaged building, figuring out what had to be demolished, what could be saved, and how to fix it. Kilsheimer was a maverick, a profane sixty-one-year-old with a reputation for enormous energy. He summed up his management style simply: “I take charge of shit.”
At his office near Dupont Circle in Washington, Kilsheimer debated briefly whether he should go to New York or to the Pentagon. The latter was practically his back yard, so he had his office call New York to say he would help as he could but was on his way to the Pentagon.
Kilsheimer drove as close as he could to the building, but with the security and confusion, it took him two more hours on foot to work his way to the security barriers. Hunkele retrieved him—Kilsheimer was easy to spot, with his thick black and white beard and hair in a ponytail.
Evey had never heard of Kilsheimer, but he liked what his construction people told him. The two spoke at the heliport. “What do you want me to do?” Kilsheimer asked.
“Help these emergency people do what has to be done,” Evey replied. That was the extent of the meeting.
That evening, Kilsheimer spoke with Brigadier General Carl A. Strock, the senior Corps of Engineers officer at the site, to assess the building’s stability. Strock told Kilsheimer a team of structural engineers was on the way, but Kilsheimer did not want to wait. “Let’s just go take a look,” he told the general. The two borrowed firefighters’ uniforms and worked their way deep into the building, trying to gauge the conditions of the columns. Kilsheimer’s fireman pants were too big and he tripped and broke his toe, but kept going. They found terrible devastation, everything blackened and small fires still burning. Some areas were dangerously unstable, the columns destroyed or severely distorted. But it was clear that many areas of the building were holding up well, despite the damage.
Kilsheimer and Strock sloshed through water to reach the Navy Command Center. It was hot and horrible, filled with a terrible acrid smoke. Scalding water cascaded down from the floors above. The bright new renovated space where Lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer had begun his morning had served as a funeral pyre for two dozen people. To Kilsheimer’s right lay the remains of several victims, completely charred by fire. At his feet were two more bodies, oddly untouched by the flames. One victim—his face waxy and mouth bloody—seemed to be looking at Kilsheimer. “I wish we could do something for these people,” the general said.
“I don’t know what you can do, but we can fix it so you have people back here within a year,” Kilsheimer replied.
That night, Evey addressed about sixty renovation program workers gathered around him on the heliport. “Life, as we know it, has changed,” Evey said. “…If any one of you wants out, now is the time to do it. No questions will be asked.”
Nobody left.
Aerial view of the Phoenix Project, March 2002.
The Pentagon had held
The orange glow on the horizon grew brighter as Lieutenant Colonel Ted Anderson drew closer. Shortly after 3 A.M. on September 12, 2001, Anderson was riding up Interstate 395 through Northern Virginia, heading back to the Pentagon. Late the night before, he had made it home to his Alexandria apartment, sleeping for several hours before bolting awake. He tossed aside his soot-and-blood-covered suspenders and tie and put on his green Army battle-dress uniform. Another Army officer picked him up and they drove to the Pentagon, carrying flashlights, water, and breathing masks. At first they could not see the building—the low ground of Hell’s Bottom was shielded from sight until they crested the hill at Arlington Ridge. Then the Pentagon burst into view. Flames were shooting from the roof, and the enormous building glowed like a harvest moon. Firefighters in front of the gash pumped long streams of water into the blaze.
At 3:30 A.M., Anderson walked into the building to report to duty. He was not alone. Some ten thousand colleagues showed up for work that morning at the Pentagon. The building was burning and the hallways were dark with a smoky haze. An unknown number of their colleagues lay dead in the rubble. Anderson was distraught, but the defiant scene in the Pentagon that morning revitalized him. He now understood what it must have been like to be in Washington on December 8, 1941. “The thing I’m most proud of is that I was part of ten thousand people who reported to work in a blazing building,” he later said. “Ten thousand people instinctively knew we were at war now and knew their place of duty was here, regardless of the fact that we had no electricity, we had no water, we had no communications.”
Donald Rumsfeld, back in his office at 5:30 A.M., went to a Pentagon studio to tape a message that was broadcast during the day to U.S. troops and Defense Department employees around the world. “This building is a place dedicated to the ethos of heroism,” Rumsfeld told them. “Heroes have gone before us. At the Pentagon yesterday, heroes were here again.”
The building itself proved heroic on September 11, holding up long enough to allow thousands of people to escape. The ones most impressed were those who knew its warts best, among them assistant building manager Steve Carter. “The plane went through three rings, but it stopped it,” he said. “The building held.” Through it all, most of the building had not even lost power. The only reason many areas were dark was because electricity was turned off to protect rescuers from arcing and sparking. To Carter, the Pentagon was like an aging battleship, an old bucket of bolts,
hit by a kamikaze attack but refusing to go down.
It was hardly business as usual. Half the building was closed off; many corridors were blocked by yellow crime-scene tape and guarded by soldiers with M-16 rifles. Employees stood at windows looking onto the center courtyard, watching firefighters on the roof struggle with the blaze; the fire underneath the slate had grown during the night. Inside the crash zone, pools of fuel from the jet had ignited and firefighters were attacking the fire with foam.
Military officers walked down hallways filled with the stench of smoke, greeting one another with relieved handshakes or commiserating over missing colleagues. Down in the Army Operations Center, where Anderson reported, plans were being formed to pursue the al Qaeda network in Afghanistan.
An American flag, put on the roof during the night by firefighters, flew over the collapse zone. Major General James T. Jackson, commander of the Army’s Military District of Washington, spotted it and wanted a much larger one put up. “If I can get a flag to drape off the side of the building, can you put it up?” he asked Arlington assistant fire chief Jim Schwartz, the incident commander. The roof was still burning, but Schwartz agreed. Soldiers from Fort Myer arrived in the afternoon with the U.S. Army Band’s twenty-by-thirty-eight-foot garrison flag. With the help of firefighters, the soldiers brought the big flag up an aerial ladder to the roof and moved to a point twenty-five yards south of the collapse zone. Yellow-helmeted firefighters, red suspenders over their blue T-shirts, attached it to the limestone entablature atop the fifth floor. Under a brilliant blue sky, the soldiers stood at attention and saluted as the flag unfurled three stories down the side of the building.