The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  Carter climbed down into his tunnel. The smoke was so thick it felt like a sponge in his mouth. All the while he heard updates on his radio. The plane is fifteen minutes out…. The plane is ten minutes out…. The plane is five minutes out. Carter struggled to close the valves, breathing through the sleeve of his suit jacket. One by one, the valves were shut off. Water pressure soon built up to fifty pounds per square inch, enough to support firefighters. Carter then got a call that the chillers were back up. He figured he had just enough time to make it to the center courtyard before the next plane hit.

  Let me know in case I picked the wrong side

  Colonel Phil McNair made it fifty feet back into the black smoke on the second floor Army personnel office and realized he would likely die if he went any farther. Unable to find anyone else in the office bay, he retraced his steps and escaped out the second-floor window to AE Drive, the service road. McNair landed on the ground near a smoking hole in the C Ring wall. It led to what had been the Navy Command Center. He and Sergeant Major Tony Rose, a career counselor from the Army personnel office, could hear voices from behind the rubble calling for help. McNair, Rose, and others formed a chain, tossing computers, desks and ceiling tiles aside, the debris growing hotter and the smoke thicker the further they tunneled. Then an arm appeared through the rubble. It was a female sailor, trying to dig her way out. The rescuers pulled her out, and six other sailors behind her.

  They were still digging when a fireman yelled for them to leave: “There’s another one coming in!”

  McNair was puzzled: “What do you mean, there’s another one coming in?” he asked.

  “Another airplane,” the fireman told him. McNair was dumbfounded. All this time he thought it had been a bomb. McNair followed others to the center courtyard.

  Some three hundred employees and rescue workers had gathered in the courtyard, and the scene was chaotic. Doctors and nurses from the Pentagon medical clinic had set up two triage stations and were treating patients on the grass, Paul Gonzales among them. After leading his band of DIA employees out of the building, Gonzales had collapsed and gone into shock—hot, chemicals-laden air had damaged his lungs.

  Arlington Fire Battalion Chief Jerome Smith, commanding fire units in the courtyard, ignored the evacuation order, fearing the sight of fleeing rescuers would add to the victims’ trauma. But word spread and much of the crowd streamed out, heading through the undamaged portions of the building to the parking lots. Gonzales, on his back sucking in oxygen through a mask, heard people around him yelling: “A plane is coming! We’ve got to get him out.” Gonzales was put on a cart and driven to the North parking lot.

  McNair saw doctors kneeling over a badly burned victim lying beneath a courtyard tree and overheard the man give his name—it was John Yates, the security manager from his office. McNair would never have recognized him—Yates had been directly in the path of a fireball and now had burns over 38 percent of his body, his hair burned off and his skin raw. “I walked over and knelt down and put my face next to his, let him know there was a friendly face there, and tried to hold his hand,” McNair recalled. Yates screamed in pain. McNair looked and realized Yates’ skin was coming off his hand. They took Yates away on a gurney, leaving McNair standing alone. Then someone yelled for him to leave before the plane hit.

  Steve Carter, reaching the courtyard, decided to stay, breaking up his maintenance team into three groups of two. Each headed to different parts of the five-acre courtyard. Carter radioed his team members outside: “If anybody sees what side the plane is coming from, let me know, in case I picked the wrong side.”

  I guess that will be us doing the shooting

  At Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, Brigadier General David F. Wherley, Jr., commander of the D.C. Air National Guard, learned the Pentagon had been hit when one of his officers screamed while watching the news on the office television. Wherley took a moment to calm the woman, whose husband worked at the Pentagon. “You’ve got to be strong,” he told her. Then he raced out of his office and ran several hundred yards to the headquarters of the D.C. Guard’s 121st Fighter Squadron.

  Unlike other National Guard units, the D.C. Guard reported to the president, not a state governor. Squadron officers—who had a close relationship with the Secret Service agents who worked across the runway in the Air Force One hangar—had already heard from their contacts that the White House wanted fighters in the air. Wherley wanted more explicit authorization. “We have to get instructions,” he told the squadron officers. “We can’t just fly off half-cocked.”

  Wherley called the Secret Service. An agent got the White House bunker on another line and began relaying instructions that Wherley was told were coming from the vice president. Within a half-hour, Wherley had received oral instructions giving his pilots extraordinary discretion. The White House authorized them to shoot down any aircraft—including passenger airliners—threatening Washington. “They said challenge them, try to turn them away; if they don’t turn away, use whatever force is necessary to keep them from hitting buildings downtown,” Wherley recalled.

  Three of the squadron’s F-16 jets had just returned from a training mission to North Carolina. Only one of the aircraft had enough fuel to keep flying. Major Billy Hutchison, who had just landed and was still in his cockpit, was told to take off again. He launched at 10:38, carrying no ammunition and with little idea of his mission. His F-16 roared up and down the Potomac and over the Pentagon. Two other pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Marc Sasseville and Lieutenant Heather Penney, were given a cursory briefing at the headquarters. “There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to talk about, because we didn’t know what was going on,” Sasseville recalled.

  They ran to the tarmac, but their jets had not yet been armed with missiles. “Just give me an airplane,” Sasseville demanded. They took off at 10:42, carrying 20-mm training rounds for their Gatling guns. On the radio, the squadron relayed instructions to look for a hijacked aircraft approaching from the northwest, in the direction of Georgetown. “We didn’t know what we were looking for—how high he was coming, or low, or where he was going,” Sasseville recalled. He wondered how to take down a passenger jet with training rounds and thought he might be able to saw off a wing. Penney—whose call sign was “Lucky”—planned to fly her F-16 into the passenger plane to bring it down, calculating she might have time to eject before the collision.

  Two more jets were launched ten minutes later carrying AIM-9 air-to-air missiles. Monitoring radios in the operations room, Wherley heard the FAA broadcast orders closing airspace across the country and directing all planes to land, concluding with a warning that violators would be shot down. The words chilled the general. “I guess that will be us doing the shooting,” he thought.

  Well, a little too late

  In the Pentagon courtyard, Steve Carter heard the roar of a jet growing louder, echoing around the walls. Carter anxiously scanned the sky. Then Hutchison’s F-16 soared over the Pentagon, less than a thousand feet over the building. “That’s the point when I felt nothing else bad was going to happen,” Carter recalled. In front of the building, through a break in the smoke, Ted Anderson saw F-16s orbiting low over the city and was shocked. He had never thought he would be looking up through a burning Pentagon at jets flying fighter protection over the nation’s capital. Arlington Police Lieutenant Bruce Hackert, who served with the Army in Vietnam, had a different reaction when he saw the jets: “Well, a little too late,” he thought.

  It was too late, on several counts. United Airlines Flight 93 had crashed in a field at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 A.M., thirty-five minutes before the first F-16 was launched from Andrews. Moreover, the hijacked plane had gone down twelve minutes before fire and rescue workers were ordered to evacuate the Pentagon.

  The false information reporting the plane’s continued approach to Washington apparently came from FAA displays showing the plane’s projected path to Washington, not its actual radar track. The information was re
layed to the Secret Service and the FBI. Combs, the FBI special agent at the Pentagon, had stayed at Chief Schwartz’s side, giving him updates on the plane’s supposed path, all of which were broadcast on the emergency network, spreading great alarm. At 10:37, Combs reported to Schwartz that the hijacked plane had crashed, supposedly at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the mountains of Maryland—one more bad piece of information.

  At 10:38 A.M., Schwartz sounded the all-clear, ending the evacuation twenty-five minutes after it started. Between the two evacuations, rescue workers had had little time to fight the fire or look for survivors in the one hour since the plane had hit the building. Combs and Schwartz—who would perform heroically through the ordeal—were blameless. They had acted responsibly on information Combs had confirmed from a second source. The evacuation for the phantom plane—and two more false alarms over the next twenty-four hours—“extracted a serious toll in terms of the physical and psychological well-being of responders,” a federal after-action report on the emergency response concluded. “These evacuations also interrupted the fire attack and changed on-site medical treatment of injured victims during the crucial early stages.” Whether the evacuations cost any lives is unknown. “I really can’t say if there was anybody in there whose life hung in the balance,” Schwartz later said.

  The evacuation was just one of several grave miscommunications involving United Flight 93. Air Force F-16s under command of NORAD had scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in southeast Virginia at 9:30 A.M. and were high over the Washington area by 10:10 A.M., but the pilots had been told they did not have shootdown authority. Meanwhile, no one in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon or at NORAD headquarters was even aware that the D.C. Guard F-16s from Andrews were over Washington with authorization to shoot down passenger jets. Cheney apparently thought his shootdown instructions were being relayed to the NORAD jets and later told the 9/11 Commission he did not know that fighters had been scrambled from Andrews.

  Had brave passengers aboard United 93 not staged a revolt against the hijackers that ended with the crash in Pennsylvania, the plane would likely have reached Washington by 10:23 A.M. At that time, the F-16s from Langley lacked authority to shoot down the plane, and the F-16s from Andrews were not yet in the air. The 9/11 Commission wrote, “We are sure the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93.”

  Tell me exactly where it hit

  Lee Evey pulled into the Wendy’s on I-81 just south of the Virginia-Tennessee border for lunch on September 11. His brother-in-law had died the day before, and the Pentagon renovation chief had been on the road for six hours with his car radio and his two cell phones turned off, driving to North Carolina for the funeral.

  No one was at the counter at first, but then ashen-faced employees came from the backroom and told him the news. Evey raced back north, talking into both cell phones at once. “Tell me exactly where it hit,” he instructed his deputy, Michael Sullivan. The jet had cut diagonally through the newly renovated wedge and then continued into Wedge 2, Sullivan told him.

  The plane’s path.

  From a purely analytical perspective, the plane had hit the building in the best possible place. First, both wedges were only partially occupied. About a fifth of the offices in Wedge 1 were still vacant. Meanwhile, about two-thirds of the occupants of Wedge 2 had moved out in preparation for the next phase of renovation. Instead of the 9,500 employees who might have been there, about 4,600 employees occupied the two wedges at the time of the terrorist strike. Of those, about 2,600 were in the immediate impact area. Moreover, the plane had hit an area with no basement. If there had been one under the first floor, its occupants could easily have been trapped by fire and killed when the upper floors collapsed.

  The plane struck the Pentagon just to the right of an expansion joint, one of the gaps left in the concrete work from the original design of the building to allow expansion or contraction from temperature changes. When the building collapsed around the impact point, the concrete broke cleanly at the expansion joint, saving the area to the north. It was another stroke of enormous good fortune, one that undoubtedly saved lives.

  The hijackers had not hit the River or Mall sides, where the senior military leadership had been concentrated since 1942. Rumsfeld had been sitting in the same third-floor office above the River entrance as every secretary of defense since Louis Johnson in 1949, a location that had been a matter of public record all that time. The joint chiefs and all the service secretaries were arrayed in various prime E-Ring offices on the River and Mall sides. All the command centers save the Navy’s were on the River or Mall sides; the National Military Command Center could have been decimated as the Navy Command Center was, a disaster that could have effectively shut down the Pentagon as the first American war of the twenty-first century began.

  The plane, ironically, had struck the first section of the Pentagon occupied in the spring of 1942. Marjorie Hanshaw Downey, the Iowa girl who had moved in then with her fellow War Department plank walkers, wept in her suburban Maryland apartment as she watched television that day and realized the area she had occupied nearly sixty years earlier been hit. “It really hurt when I saw that,” she recalled. “Not only for the people, but what it did to our country.”

  Most remarkably, the plane had hit the only renovated wedge. The renovators had started their work in the same place as the original constructors. The plane had hit the only place where the exterior wall had been reinforced with steel; the only place ballistic cloth had been hung to catch blast shards; the only walls with blast-resistant exterior windows; the only wedge with sprinklers.

  Years of work had gone up in flames, but Evey felt overwhelming relief when Sullivan told him where the plane had hit. The costly improvements had bought priceless protection and time for the thousands who managed to escape.

  I’m not running anymore

  The plane’s path did not strike Phil McNair as good fortune. Leaving the center courtyard, he had walked out a corridor to the South parking lot. He was soaking wet and black with soot, unable to talk from the smoke he had inhaled. McNair walked around the building until he came to the smoking hole where his office had been. The plane had hit almost directly below the office of his commander, Lieutenant General Tim Maude, the Army’s chief of personnel. One look, and McNair knew there was no hope for most of his people. He knew where he had been, and, seeing the devastation, he knew that anyone who had been closer than he had been had to be dead.

  A nurse saw McNair, standing unsteadily, gazing at the wreckage. She grabbed him. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” McNair croaked. “I could use a little oxygen.” Within minutes he was in an ambulance on his way to Arlington Hospital with dangerous levels of carbon monoxide in his blood. Ambulances had already rushed Paul Gonzales and Kevin Shaeffer to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, their drivers swearing and driving off-road to get around horrendous traffic. Gonzales would soon be on life support after his lungs failed. Shaeffer had burns over 42 percent of his body, and in the emergency room he overheard a nurse assessing his chances as fifty-fifty. Shaeffer grabbed her and pulled her close. “No! I’m alive!” he gasped. “I’m going to live!”

  They had made it out alive, but by then it was obvious to Arlington Fire Captain Mike Smith that no one else would. Firefighters had regrouped after the evacuation for the phantom airplane and were making a new assault on the blaze, which had intensified in their absence. The young firefighters in Smith’s crew were taken aback by what they saw. Smith was one of the anchors of the fire department, solid and even-keeled, a captain whom other firefighters would follow anywhere. “Listen, the key is we’re going to stay together and we’ll stay safe,” Smith told them. But he was worried too.

  It was unlike any fire Smith had fought in thirty years. Jet fuel had splashed deep into the building and ignited raging fires. Later measurements indicated the fire reached 1,740 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature similar to th
at in the twin towers. The intensity of the fire was forcing crews out of some areas. Protective clothing shielded the firefighters from the fire, but Smith felt as if he was in an oven.

  Smith looked up through a ventilation shaft and could see big fires burning through the second and third floors. They were spreading up into the fourth and fifth floors and then the roof. A thick layer of roofing wood beneath the slate was soon burning out of control, protected by the concrete below it and the slate atop it. Up on the roof, exhausted firefighters cut trenches across the slate roof to break the path of the flames, guessing where to breach ahead of a fire they could not see.

  Those watching the scene on television and those standing in front of the building had a deceptive view of the scope of the disaster. The Pentagon’s very size distorted the perception, even among emergency officials, at first. The 80-foot gash on the building’s face was a relatively short gap in the 921-foot wall. But the rescue workers inside found an entirely different reality. “Huge heaps of rubble and burning debris littered with the bodies and body parts…covered an area the size of a modern shopping mall,” the federal after-action study said. Smith knew from training that a high-impact airline crash decimated a body, but that was no preparation for seeing it on this scale. “It was just a horrible, horrible scene.”

  The five-story collapse zone in the E Ring was surrounded by damaged areas extending hundreds of feet, where columns and supports had been blown out and floors were sagging and in danger of further collapse. Structural specialists dispatched by the Federal Emergency Management Agency feared the collapsed two-foot thick concrete roof was poised to slide onto rescue workers. As Smith’s crew moved deeper into the building, there were dead zones where his radio was not picking up any traffic. “I didn’t have the safety of feeling like someone really knew where we were,” he recalled.