This was different; this was worse than that. There was no redness to my skin or even a tint of light to dark red. Most of my skin was just gone. And what little skin was left was charred black.
I looked down at my injuries, then began to tremble severely. I was in shock.
Mel
What is taking so long? I wondered. Why haven’t I heard anything yet?
I kept watching the television and waiting—and still nothing. Not one word. The wait was unbearable.
Matt went for another walk. While he was gone I prayed for Brian’s safety and the others in his office. Lord, please keep the others safe. Let them be okay. Let Brian be okay.
I wondered where my friend Debbie was and when she would arrive. I needed someone there with me.
Then all of a sudden, the damaged area of the Pentagon collapsed. As I watched the television, I fell to my knees in horror and cried out, “Oh, God, NO!!! No, no!” My chest felt so heavy I could hardly breathe. “Please, God, please!” I wept and pled. “I can’t make it without Brian. Please!”
Brian
“Call Mel! Call my wife! Tell her I’m okay,” I kept yelling in the makeshift triage area.
A lady who was working in that area asked me, “What’s your name?”
“Brian Birdwell,” I replied.
That’s when Bill McKinnon found out who I was. His face went white, and immediately he said, “Brian! Man, what’s your phone number? I’ll get ahold of Mel.” I gave him the number, which he tried to dial. But all the phone circuits were jammed.
Then Dr. John Baxter, an Air Force colonel and flight detachment physician, who was the senior medical person, along with several other military personnel—Specialist Kris Sorenson, Corporal Dan Nimrod, and Colonel Robin Davitt—began to evaluate my condition and tend to my wounds.
Blood was all over me. My light green uniform shirt was covered, as if I had dunked it in a pool of blood.
With all the soot and blood, Dr. Baxter didn’t know if I had puncture wounds from flying debris such as the steel or glass or if it was just the blood from being a skinned person.
Dr. Baxter asked, “Brian, are you hurt other than the burns? What do you think your other injuries are? Do you have any broken bones?”
I told him, “I don’t think I’m hurt other than the burns. I don’t feel as if there’s anything broken.”
Then he began to poke at different places on my body. “Can you feel this?” he would ask.
Dr. Baxter noticed that my shoes were still on my feet. I was wearing leather Florsheim shoes, which, miraculously, held up in the fire. So he took off my shoes, then cut what was left of my pants completely up the legs. He determined my feet were about the only places on my body that were unscathed. Even my ankles didn’t survive without burns—I had burn rings where my socks burned as they disintegrated. They weren’t even there! So my legs and ankles were charred black, while my feet were rosy pink and healthy.
Dr. Baxter grabbed some morphine and an IV unit from his medical bag. He gave me a shot of the morphine through my right foot to help alleviate some of the pain.
At the same time, they needed to put an IV in my left foot. That was Colonel Davitt’s job. She hadn’t put in an IV in years and was concerned about inserting it correctly and not hurting me more. But there was no one else who was available to do it. “I have to hit this vein just right,” she said nervously. “This is harder since it’s in your foot.”
Fortunately she hit the vein perfectly the first time. Not that I would have noticed anyway because of the intense pain in the other areas of my body.
While Colonel Davitt inserted the IV, a woman ran down the stairs to escape. But when she saw me lying there, she felt led to pray with me. So she came to my side and knelt beside my head. By the look on her face when she saw my injuries, I was struck again by how serious my condition must be. She asked my name, then told me, “Brian, my name is Natalie. I feel impressed to pray with you. Would that be all right?”
“Yes, please!” I couldn’t believe a Christian was there beside me. Natalie helped calm me while the triage personnel were working to get me ready to evacuate. Even more, she had thought to grab her Bible before she left her desk. Now she opened her Bible, and we began to recite the Twenty-third Psalm, then the Lord’s Prayer together. I spoke those words with such fervor. I knew that although I had survived the blast, I was still very much in danger of death. And the manner of my death was filling my thoughts.
I lay there trembling. My body was in shock. But my mind was still good and very active. I didn’t feel that much pain anymore, probably because I was so concerned about how I was going to die: I wanted to die a dignified death in which I didn’t panic but trusted God to maintain my composure.
“Please call my wife,” I said again.
“Of course I will, Brian,” Natalie said as she wrote down my phone number in her Bible.
Then she began to read Psalm 91 to me:
He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust!”
For it is He who delivers you from the snare of the trapper
and from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with His pinions,
and under His wings you may seek refuge;
his faithfulness is a shield and bulwark.
You will not be afraid of the terror by night,
or of the arrow that flies by day;
of the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
or of the destruction that lays waste at noon.
A thousand may fall at your side
and ten thousand at your right hand,
but it shall not approach you.
You will only look on with your eyes
and see the recompense of the wicked.
Someone suggested to Nimrod and Sorenson, “Go get some ice out of the Redskin snack bar.”
Nimrod and Sorenson went to get ice but didn’t bring it back because ice isn’t the best thing to do for burn survivors. You don’t put ice on burns because the ice sticks to the tissue, and then it just peels off more tissue layers. All it will do is insulate the heat inside you and continue to cook you.
If I had only a small burn, they could have gotten cold water to help the burn cool. But because my burn was so major, they wanted to make sure those burned parts of my body were stuck out in the open to allow the heat to dissipate and leave my body.
So they put just enough wrapping on me to protect my burn areas, basically just to lightly cover my burns.
Natalie continued to pray over me. While the others were working on me with the IV and evaluating the level of my injuries, I paid attention to Natalie. I didn’t concentrate on what Dr. Baxter or the others were doing to me.
Sorenson knelt beside me at my face level on one side. Natalie was right next to him. I recognized Sorenson immediately because just a week before I had gone for my annual “after forty years old” Army physical. I’d gone for the lab work, and Sorenson was the guy who drew the blood. Unfortunately the lab sample didn’t make it to the computer, so I had to give blood a second time—and Sorenson drew the sample again.
As soon as I saw him beside me, I said, “Some way to give blood this time, isn’t it, Sorenson?” He looked at me confused because he didn’t recognize me. He simply covered me loosely with a blanket.
Nimrod was on my left, and Colonel Davitt and Colonel Baxter were at my feet.
While they were all working, I concentrated on listening to Natalie as she read comforting Scriptures and then prayed for me.
I again blurted out my phone number and asked her to contact Mel. She promised she would make sure Mel knew I was okay.
Within minutes of arriving at that area, I was prepped for the hospital. Once the “ambulance” arrived, they brought over a gurney. Natalie had just finished praying with me, then Dr. Baxter
let her know they were getting ready to move me.
They turned me on my side, stuck a body board underneath me, picked me up, placed me on the gurney, and then into a golf-cart-sized Pentagon ambulance to rush me toward the area where the hospital ambulance was supposed to be waiting.
“Please don’t forget to call my wife!” I shouted to Natalie.
“I won’t forget,” she said back.
Again I was struck by how serious my condition must be. I was the first person evacuated. I knew from experience that meant I was also the one in the worst shape.
* * *
Because I was still conscious through the entire ordeal, I felt it was important to know where I was and try to concentrate on what was happening. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because I needed to have some sense of control. While my eyes were swollen and kept watering, I was still able to see things out of the sides of my eyes.
I knew I’d been put on the golf cart and that we had started in the A-Ring by Corridors 5 and 6. I watched as we passed the Korean War Memorial and wound our way down corridors, through parking garage-type loops, and finally came out at the Corridor 8 exit, which was almost directly on the other side of the building. We drove outside to the north parking lot. And at that point my eyes had swollen almost to the point of being completely closed.
The driver stopped outside at the northeast side of the building and dropped me off to wait for an official ambulance or medevac helicopter.
And there I lay, helpless, with the sun from the bright, cloudless morning sky beating down on my already cooked face. I was grateful when a woman came and held an umbrella over me to shield me from the sun.
* * *
As I lay on that gurney, unable to move, in incredible pain, time seemed to stop. I wondered, What’s taking so long? Everything up to that point had gone so quickly. Medical officers had rushed to take care of me, and then I’d been driven quickly out to the north parking lot. So why was I waiting here? Shouldn’t someone be rushing me to the hospital by now? I thought.
I couldn’t see much of the scene taking place outside, but I could hear it. There was still chaos. Thousands of people streamed out into the north parking area. Sirens blared; people screamed and cried.
Then some police officers or some authority figures began announcing, “There’s another plane coming! Get away from the building!”
I heard the word plane, and everything sunk in. The explosion and my lying out on the gurney near death were connected to the World Trade Center plane crashes that I’d watched on television with my coworkers before I left for the men’s room. The terrorists had crashed a plane into the Pentagon as well.
When people heard the warning, some started to scream, and the person holding the umbrella over me threw the umbrella aside and took off running. I wanted to run too—but I couldn’t even move.
Just then Natalie emerged from that side of the building and saw what had happened. She hadn’t followed me; she had gone out the pedestrian pathway. But we ended up in the same general vicinity. Somehow she spotted my stretcher and immediately came to me. She had tried to call Mel but couldn’t get through since all the cell and land phone lines were overloaded. She began to pray with me some more, encouraging me.
I heard a lot of sirens going by, but I didn’t know if they were ambulances or police cars. And no vehicle stopped to pick me up. Finally Natalie and a few other people decided to move me closer to the road for better access to an ambulance. Someone called out to about six military personnel nearby to help push the stretcher.
By the grace of God, I knew one of the officers, Major John Collison, whose office was in another part of the Pentagon. But just like Bill McKinnon, John didn’t recognize me.
I was getting rolled around a lot, down the road toward Arlington Cemetery and on the grassy area near the parking lot. It seemed as though we kept going and going but not getting anywhere.
Finally we stopped, quite a distance from the building. An Air Force tech, Sergeant Reservist Jill Hyson, showed up to help. Jill worked as an X-ray technician but was doing her regulation two weeks of training at the Pentagon.
She took the toe tag that was on one of my feet. The toe tag listed my name and the medical procedures Dr. Baxter had performed on me. That tag was used to ensure that the emergency room physician would know what I had been given.
Jill began to take my vital signs and write them down. Then she handed the tag to Lieutenant Colonel Mike Bouchard and said, “Hang on to this. These are the vital signs, name of the casualty, and other information. We need to give this to the staff at the emergency room when we get there.”
We started across the grass again and apparently Bouchard, who worked in the same department as Collison, looked at the paper and read my name. He tapped Major Collison on the shoulder and whispered, “Look at this paper. Look who this is.”
He handed the tag to Collison, who stared at my face but still must not have believed it. Collison whispered back, “No way.”
“It is,” Bouchard insisted. “Look at the paper.”
After a moment Collison grabbed my bandaged left hand and said in a shaky voice, “Sir, this is Major Collison. I’m here.”
Those simple words were the most comforting thing for me. I was still afraid. I knew I wasn’t in good shape. But John’s presence calmed me.
“All right,” I said. “That’s great.”
Then I squinted at him; his face had turned white with shock. “John,” I said, “go with me to the hospital. I want you to go with me.”
“Roger, Sir,” John answered. “I’ll stay with you the whole time.”
He continued to hold my bandaged hand while they moved me to the road where an ambulance could pick me up. Still no vehicle came.
Most of the ambulances had driven around to the south side of the building, the closest point to where the explosion had taken place and also where the helipad was located. We were in north parking, on the opposite side of the building.
We waited about fifteen minutes until Shirley Baldwin, a nurse from the Pentagon’s medical clinic, found me. She briefly assessed my injuries and looked at my IV running from my foot. “This is too low,” she said to a medic nearby. “This man needs to be hydrated immediately. Give me another IV!”
“We don’t have one,” the medic said.
“Well, go into the building and get another one. Now!”
Her urgent tone made me afraid. “Ma’am,” I asked her, “am I going to die?”
I noticed a moment’s hesitation before she leaned over and told me, “You’re going to be okay. We’re going to get you to the hospital. Just hang on.” I believed her because the look on her face said she believed it. I didn’t know until later that she’d never told a patient that before.
A few moments later somehow the IV fell out of my foot. I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could tell by the tone of a nurse’s announcement that losing that IV was bad for me. Very bad.
Shirley told the people around my gurney, “Look, I know they called for an ambulance for this man more than a half hour ago. But we’re not getting anything over here because they’re all on the other side of the building.”
Someone suggested flagging down a vehicle to take me to the hospital. And that’s exactly what Shirley did. She commandeered a Jeep. Immediately Collison, Bouchard, and Colonel Robert Cortez opened the back door, collapsed my stretcher, and tried to push me into the back. But the back wasn’t deep enough to accommodate my body board. They took me off the stretcher—keeping me on the body board—and tried to load me in, but my feet were sticking out.
“This isn’t going to work,” someone shouted. “Take him out! Let’s flag down another vehicle.”
So out I went and waited for another vehicle.
Immediately Shirley spotted Army Captain Wineland, who was trying to drive his White Ford Expedition out of the parking lot.
“Get that one!” She said. “That will work.”
One of the off
icers flagged him down, walked up to the SUV, and told Wineland, “Your service is demanded. Take your vehicle, pull it over here next to this officer, and dump your stuff from the back of your vehicle out on the grass. You’re going to drive him to the hospital.”
Captain Wineland pulled up his vehicle next to me, and before he could get out of the Expedition, three guys had opened the back, jumped in, and started pitching everything—including golf clubs and other expensive items—out onto the grass next to the main road.
The captain jumped out and helped Collison, Brouchard, and Cortez maneuver me into the back. Then Jill jumped into the Expedition and sat on my left. John jumped into the vehicle and sat on my right. Again, with John sitting next to me, I felt the comfort of knowing someone was there with me who knew me. I wanted to know that if I was going to die, somebody I knew, who knew me, would be there and be able to tell Mel what happened.
Breathing was becoming extremely difficult. I could feel mucus or debris from the explosion coming out of my nose and throat. Since I was shaking so badly, they decided to put a space blanket over me to keep me warm. However, we quickly realized that was a bad decision because the blanket was sticking to my skin and cooking me still further. They immediately threw off the blanket—taking a chunk of my skin with it. The intense jet fuel odor filled that Expedition—not that I could smell it—or anything else—since my nostrils were fried. But I knew it had to be strong since several people kept commenting about it.
When everyone was situated in the Expedition, Lieutenant Colonel Bouchard handed Major Collison the paper with all my information on it. Then I heard all the doors shut. We were ready to go, but we didn’t move.
Captain Wineland said, “Where are we going?”
Just then a Navy enlisted man pulled up on a motorcycle.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Do you need some help?”
I could barely see Jill out of the corner of my eye. She yelled, “We have a casualty, and he’s critical. We’re going to Georgetown!”
“I know where that is,” the motorcyclist said.
“Then let’s go!” Jill yelled. “Lead the way!”
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