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| | Eyewitnesses to the explosion In
general, these 46 witnesses have very little to say about the causes of the
explosion. Most were inside the Pentagon when the incident occurred.
It is perhaps a little surprising that they didn't see more specific evidence of
an aircraft inside the building, if there really was one. We have not provided a running commentary for these
reports.
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Air Force Lt. Col. Marc Abshire, 40, a
speechwriter for Air Force Secretary James Roche, was working on
several speeches this morning when he felt the blast of the
explosion at the Pentagon. His office is on the D ring, near the
eighth corrider, he said. "It shot me back in my chair.
There was a huge blast. I could feel the air shock wave of it,"
Abshire said. "I didn't know exactly what it was. It
didn't rumble. It was more of a direct smack. I said, 'This
isn't right. Something's wrong here.'" "We all went out
in the hallway. People were yelling 'Evacuate! Evacuate!' And we
found ourselves on the lawn and looking back on our building. It
was very much a surrealistic sort of experience. It's just
definitely not right to see smoke coming out of the Pentagon. It
was a very strange sight to see."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html
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Anger and guilt still sear Lieutenant Colonel Michael Beans who
shakes his head ruefully and asks himself why he survived:
"Why you, not them? Who made that decision?" (...)
Inside the Pentagon, the blast lifted Beans off the floor
as he crossed a huge open office toward his desk. "You
heard this huge concussion, then the room filled with this
real bright light, just like everything was encompassed within
this bright light," said Beans. "As soon as I hit
the floor, all the lights went out, there was a small fire
starting to burn." His friends were not so lucky. Not
far away on the same floor, Beans' once familiar world had
turned into a terrifying maze as well. Opening a door to the
outer E-ring corridor, Beans saw waves of fire rolling towards
him like surf on a beach. Turning back, he groped slowly back
across the room on hands and knees. The sprinkler came on and
that kept the smoke and heat down. But it was nervewracking and
Beans was alone, listening as the building burned. "It was
so quiet," he recalled. "There was no screaming,
nobody saying anything, just nothing." He thought he might
not make it out alive. He thought about his wife, his daughter
and son, his 22 years in the army. "I remember taking a
couple of breaths there, and I made up my mind: I just can't go
out this way," he said. Suddenly out of the smoke a man ran
by. "I tried to grab him, and I tried to yell at him,"
Beans said. But "he just disappeared into the smoke."
Alone again, Beans crawled with his face to the floor. Then the
carpet turned to wet tile, and he looked up and saw he was in a
corridor. He ran and as the smoke cleared, he saw a guard. Beans
discovered later that his head and forearms were burned. He now
wears special flesh-colored compression sleeves on his arms.
"These burns are going to heal, eventually," he said.
But the memories "will be with me for the rest of my
life."
http://www.theosuobserver.com/main.cfm/include/smdetail/synid/54846.html
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Mickey Bell : The jet came in from the south and banked left as
it entered the building, narrowly missing the Singleton Electric
trailer and the on-site foreman, Mickey Bell. Bell had just left
the trailer when he heard a loud noise. The next thing he
recalled was picking himself off the floor, where he had been
thrown by the blast. Bell, who had been less than 100 feet
from the initial impact of the plane, was nearly struck by one
of the plane's wings as it sped by him. In shock, he got into
his truck, which had been parked in the trailer compound, and
sped away. He wandered around Arlington in his truck and tried
to make wireless phone calls. He ended up back at Singleton's
headquarters in Gaithersburg two hours later, according to
President Singleton, not remembering much. The full impact of
the closeness of the crash wasn't realized until coworkers
noticed damage to Bell's work vehicle. He had plastic and rivets
from an airplane imbedded in its sheet metal, but Bell
had no idea what had happened. During Bell's close call,
other Singleton workers, including sub-foreman Greg Cobaugh,
were doing other work on the first and third floors. The blast
wasn't very loud to them. They were talking about reports that
two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New
York - not considering the noise they heard could be a similar
attack.
http://www.necanet.org/whats_new/report.cfm?ID=1003
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LTC Brian Birdwell. He was just heading back down the hall to
his office when the building exploded in front of him. The
flash fire was immediate and the smoke was thick. The
blast had thrown him down, giving him a concussion. He
wanted to head down the hall toward the A ring...but because he
couldn't see anything he had no idea which way to go and he
didn't want to head in the wrong direction. (...) Once they
stabilized Brian, they transferred him to George Washington
Hospital where...the best, cutting edge burn doctor in the U.S.
The doctor told him that had he not gone to Georgetown first, he
probably would not have survived because of the jet fuel in
his lungs.
http://www.aog.usma.edu/Class/1961/BirdwellLuncheon.htm
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Down the hall from Yates, Lt. Col. Brian Birdwell, 40, had been
at his desk in Room 2E486 since 6:30 a.m. (...) Birdwell walked
out to the men's room in corridor 4, a move that saved his life.
He had just taken three or four steps out of the bathroom when
the building was rocked. "Bomb!" the Gulf War vet
immediately thought as he was knocked down. When he stood up, he
realized he was on fire. "Jesus, I'm coming to see
you"
http://www.hjpa.org/morenews.html
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Pentagon staff raced along a wooden pathway opposite the
Pentagon building, all heading towards bridges that would take
them across the Potomac River. Grown men ran at full pace. Rich
Brown was sitting at his desk and "there was just a huge
sound that shook the building for a second or two".
"I don't know what's happened. I assume it's a co-ordinated
terrorist attack."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/23/1030052968648.html
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Lisa Burgess, a reporter for the Army newspaper Stars and
Stripes, said she was walking in a corridor near the blast site
and was thrown to the ground by the force of the blast.
http://www.neurosis.org...
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Lisa Burgess : Stars and Stripes reporter Lisa Burgess was
walking on the Pentagon's innermost corridor, across the
courtyard, when the incident happened. " I heard two loud
booms - one large, one smaller, and the shock wave threw me
against the wall," she said.Burgess, reporting by
telephone from the scene at about 4 p.m., said that five
hours after the blast, still no one was able to get into the
building. After the first casualties were removed, no one
was brought out of the building, either dead or alive.
http://www.pstripes.com/01/sep01/ed091201i.html
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Navy Capt. Charles Fowler : Navy Capt. Charles Fowler, assigned
to the Joint Chiefs, was working on a speech for Gen. Henry
Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, when he heard the
explosion. " You could feel the building shake,"
said Fowler. "You knew it was a major explosion. I grabbed
all my gear and grabbed the laptop and headed out."
"The interesting part was we didn't hear the alarm go off,
but word got around very fast. It was an orderly
evacuation" Fowler's office, on the river side, appeared
to be on the opposite side from the explosion, he said.
"Tons of smoke was coming up from the wedge-lots of black
and gray smoke."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html
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Dan Fraunfelter : After the meeting, just before 9:30 a.m., the
young engineer grabbed a subcontractor to help him repair a
damaged ceiling grid on the third floor of the Pentagon's
E-Ring. The two were in the middle of the job when a strange
sound ripped through the room. It lasted just a split second,
says Fraunfelter, " A strange sucking, whirring sound,
like a loud vacuum cleaner." Then the sound stopped, the
building shook violently, and the lights went out.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/635293.asp
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At about 9:20 a.m., Lt. Col. Art Haubold, a public affairs
officer with air force, was in his office on the opposite side
of the complex when the plane struck. "We were sitting
there watching the reports on the World Trade Center. All of
a sudden, the windows blew in," he said. "We could
see a fireball out our window."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html
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Pinned in his chair and wrapped in a shroud of thick smoke and
darkness, Jerry Henson had almost given up hope. He could feel
all his limbs, but they wouldn't move. It was as if he were
frozen at his desk by forces he couldn't battle. Through the
smoke, he mustered some pleas for help. His mind still raced to
figure out what happened and whether this was real. It was 9:40
a.m., Sept. 11. (...) airliner (...) slammed into the Pentagon.
" The impact was quite clear," Henson said.
" But it wasn't what you would think. It was just a loud
kathump. Just a loud noise." Then all his senses failed
him. The plane had sliced through the emergency lighting
generators leaving everything in blackness. Books and computer
monitors tumbled from the shelves behind him. Then his head
throbbed. Pain shot through his legs. He couldn't move. All he
could taste was smoke and dust. "I knew I was wounded some
place because you can tell the difference between water and
blood," he said. "Blood is sticky and tacky and warm.
But I couldn't tell where the blood was coming from." For
15 minutes he and two of his staff who also were trapped in the
office yelled for help. They yelled for Punches, Henson's
deputy. They yelled for other survivors. They yelled for anyone
at all. http://www.gomemphis.com/mca/america_at_war/article/0,1426,MCA_945_1300676,00.html
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Inside the hell that was once his office, Jerry Henson freed his
hands enough to move rubble off of his shoulders. He dislodged
his head. But he couldn't move the heavy desktop from his lap.
It had been 15, maybe 20 minutes since everything turned dark
and painful. Still no answer from Capt. Punches. Now fires
were burning closer as deposits of jet fuel ignited.
"You could hear them lighting off," Henson said.
"They would go 'poof,' kind of like when you light a
furnace. You could hear these getting closer." The two
other men in the office couldn't get to Henson, but they found a
hole in the wall to crawl through. And they found help. Minutes
passed slowly as Henson remained trapped in the dark and more
conscious of every breath. He heard rubble crumbling and
splashes like footsteps in puddles. Then he saw a slice of
light. "I'm a doctor, I'm here to help you," said a
voice. Navy Lt. Cmdr. David Tarantino, the doctor, and Capt.
David M. Thomas Jr. had dodged slithering electrical wires and
dripping solder to reach Henson. Tarantino, realizing Henson was
pinned, got on his back and lifted the table top with his feet
enough for Henson to slide out. Thomas and Tarantino pulled him
back out through the maze. With a blur of light and a rush of
fresh air, Henson knew he was safe. Jerry Henson, now 65, spent
four days at nearby Arlington Hospital Center. Doctors sewed up
the gash in the back of his head and on his chin. His neck was
sprained, his back was sore, and he still needed treatment for
smoke inhalation. "I was eager to get out," he said.
"I thought the sooner I was able to get walking and
breathing, the better I'd avoid pneumonia and things like
that."
http://www.gomemphis.com/mca/america_at_war/article/0,1426,MCA_945_1300676,00.html
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Daniel and his wife Cynthia McAdams : Two other witnesses,
Daniel McAdams and his wife, Cynthia, said they were sitting in
their kitchen drinking coffee in their third-floor condominium
in Arlington, Va., just two miles from the Pentagon when
they heard a plane fly directly overhead around 9:45 a.m. It was
unusually loud and low. Seconds later, they heard a big boom
and felt the doors and windows of their three-story building
shake. From their window, they could see a plume of black smoke
coming from the Pentagon. I said, Oh my God, ... I can t even
come to grips. It s just a shock, said Daniel McAdams, a
freelance journalist. It s scary to just be so close .... Who
knows if there's another one being hijacked that could miss the
target? I feel like a target here. Soon after, military planes
including F-15s were circling the Pentagon. Traffic clogged
McAdams street as workers fled.
http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2001/09/pdf/09112001EXTRA2.pdf
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Crawling, McNair turned toward the E Ring. The heat grew even
fiercer, and as he neared the door to the corridor he saw bright
orange through the crack along its bottom. He reversed
course, yelling, ``We've got to get out the other way.''
http://www.pilotonline.com/special/911/pentagon2.html
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Sheila Moody, in Room 472, heard a whoosh and a whistle and
she wondered where all this air was coming from. Then a blast of
fire that left as fast as it came. She looked down and saw her
hands aflame, so she shook them. She saw some light from a
window but could not reach it and could not find anything to
break it with in any case. Then she heard a voice.
"Hello!" a man called out. "I can't see
you." Hello, she called back, and clapped her hands. She
heard him approach and sensed the shoosh of a fire extinguisher
and then saw him through a cloud of smoke, the rescuer who would
bring her out and ease her fear that she would never get to see
her grandchildren.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15
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Mr. Peter M. Murphy : No Marine Corps offices were closer to the
impact point than those of Mr. Peter M. Murphy, the Counsel for
the Commandant of the Marine Corps and the most senior civilian
working for the Marine Corps. Mr. Murphy and Major Joe D. Baker
were having a discussion in Mr. Murphy's office on the fourth
floor of the Pentagon's outermost ring, the E-Ring, overlooking
the helo-pad. With CNN on a TV monitor across the room, they
stopped their discussion when the news of the World Trade Center
attacks came on. After watching awhile, Mr. Murphy asked Mr.
Robert D. Hogue, his Deputy Counsel, to check with their
administrative clerk, Corporal Timothy J. Garofola, on the
current security status of the Pentagon. Garofola had just
received an e-mail from the security manager to all Department
of Defense employees that the threat condition remained
"normal." He passed this information to Hogue, who
stepped back into the doorway of Mr. Murphy's office to relay
the message. At that instant, a tremendous explosion with what
Mr. Murphy said was a noise "louder than any noise he
had ever heard" shook the room. Mr. Murphy, who had
been standing with his back to the window, was knocked
entirely across the room, while Hogue was jolted into his
office. Garofola's desk literally rose straight up several
inches then slammed down. The airplane had crashed almost
directly below Mr. Murphy's offices. The floor buckled at
the expansion joint that ran between the two offices and created
a discernible step up between the two rooms. The air was filled
with dust particles, and the ceiling tiles fell, leaving the
lights dangling from their electrical connections; the building
was crumbling.The men did not know what had hit them, but they
did know that it was time to get out. There was no panic, just a
shock-hazed determination to survive. Hogue went to Garofola and
told him to "get us out of here." The corporal
attempted to open the heavy magnetized door, but it had been
jammed and did not budge. Then, Mr. Murphy saw the
"Marine" come out in Garofola. He yanked the door as
hard as he could and it came open.
http://www.mca-marines.org/Leatherneck/nov01pentagonarch.htm
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Daniel C. Pfeilstucker Jr., caught in the flying debris, didn't
know if he was going to make it out alive. The Pentagon was on
fire. "It was horrifying," Mr. Pfeilstucker says (...)
Danny Pfeilstucker is a commissioning agent for John J. Kirlin
Inc., a Maryland-based mechanical contracting company that
worked on the Pentagon renovation project that was nearing
completion September 11. (...) Kirlin Inc., among many companies
involved in renovating the Pentagon since the early 1990s, was
in charge of updating plumbing and heating units. Around 9:30
a.m., Mr. Pfeilstucker and a co-worker got orders to check a
hot-water leak in a third-floor office on the western side.
After doing so, he stepped off an elevator on the second floor
in Corridor 4, ladder in hand. Suddenly the walls and the
ceiling began to collapse around him. The lights went out.
"It went from light to dark to orange to complete
black," Mr. Pfeilstucker says. "It was so dark I
couldn't even see my hand in front of my face."Within
seconds, his left leg buckled. Unable to grab on to anything, he
was thrust 70 feet down the corridor and into a tiny telephone
closet halfway down the hallway connecting E Ring and A Ring.
All I know is that the blast must have pushed open the steel
door to the closet," says Mr. Pfeilstucker, who had
been 40 feet away from the plane's point of impact.He
remembers shutting the door and trying to stand up, not
understanding what had just happened. "I thought it was
some sort of a construction blast," Mr. Pfeilstucker says.
"Or maybe there was a helicopter accident." His hard
hat and work goggles were blown away. His ladder also had
disappeared. (...) The fire sprinklers came on as the
temperature shot up.Then he smelled jet fuel and smoke. The
putrid odor was seeping into the closet."It was this odor
that I can't describe, but one that I'll never forget, that's
for sure," Mr. Pfeilstucker says. "It was so hard
to breathe. I didn't think I was going to make it out."
http://www.washtimes.com/september11/heaven.htm
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Plaisted, an artist, was sitting at her desk at home less
than one mile from the Pentagon ... I jumped up from my
chair as the screeching and whining of the engine got even
louder and I looked out the window to the West just in time to
see the belly of that aircraft and the tail section fly directly
over my house at treetop height. It was utterly sickening to
see, knowing that this plane was going to crash. The sound was
so incredibly piercing and shrill- the engines were straining to
keep the plane aloft. It is a sound I will never stop hearing-
and I now imagine the screams of the innocent passengers were
commingled with the sounds of the engines and I am haunted. I
was unaware at this time that the World Trade center had been
attacked so I thought this was just" a troubled plane en
route to the airport. I started to run toward my front door but
the plane was going so fast at this point that it only took 4 or
5 seconds before I heard a tremendously loud crash and books
on my shelves started tumbling to the floor.
http://arlingtondpca.homestead.com
http://www.wherewereyou.org
contribution # 1148
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Eyewitness: The Pentagon By Lon Rains Editor, Space News - In
light traffic the drive up Interstate 395 from Springfield to
downtown Washington takes no more than 20 minutes. But that
morning, like many others, the traffic slowed to a crawl just in
front of the Pentagon. With the Pentagon to the left of my van
at about 10 o'clock on the dial of a clock, I glanced at my
watch to see if I was going to be late for my appointment. At
that moment I heard a very loud, quick whooshing sound that
began behind me and stopped suddenly in front of me and to my
left. In fractions of a second I heard the impact and an
explosion. The next thing I saw was the fireball. I was
convinced it was a missile. It came in so fast it sounded
nothing like an airplane. Friends and colleagues have asked me
if I felt a shock wave and I honestly do not know. I felt
something, but I don't know if it was a shock wave or the fact
that I jumped so hard I strained against the seat belt and
shoulder harness and was thrown back into my seat. ' http://www.space.com/news/rains_september11-1.html
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Floyd Rasmusen, a senior management analyst at the Pentagon,
was inside. "All of a sudden all of my telephones cut
off," he said. "I heard an explosion. All of a
sudden I saw all of this flaming debris come flying toward me."
He got his staff out of the building.
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news01/091201_news_dcscene.shtml
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Rick Renzi a law student - ''The plane came in at an incredibly
steep angle with incredibly high speed,''... was driving by the
Pentagon at the time of the crash about 9:40 a.m. The impact
created a huge yellow and orange fireball, he added.
Renzi, who was interviewed at the scene by FBI agents, said he
stopped his car to watch and saw another plane following and
turn off after the first craft's impact.
http://www.pittsburgh.com/partners/wpxi/news/pentagonattack.html
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Lt. Commander John Sayer, a Navy reservist, was riding on a bus
when he heard a thud. "It sounded like a very loud clap,"
he said. "At first I thought an airplane had hit in front
of the Pentagon, but when I got closer I saw that it had struck
the Pentagon."
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news01/091201_news_dcscene.shtml
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Rob Schickler, a Baylor University 2001 graduate and Arlington,
Va. resident, said. "A plane flew over my house," ( one
mile away from the Pentagon). "It was loud, but not
unusual because the [Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport]
is by my house, on the other side of the Pentagon. Occasionally
planes that miss the landing fly over my house." "A
few seconds later, there was this sonic boom," he said.
" The house shook, the windows were vibrating."
"There was a hole in the building, and you could smell it
in the air. It's a beautiful day, but you can smell the burning
concrete and burning jet fuel."
http://www3.baylor.edu/Lariat/091201/alumni.html
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Don Scott, a Prince William County school bus driver living
in Woodbridge, was driving eastward past the Pentagon on his way
to an appointment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: "I
had just passed the Pentagon and was near the Macy's store in
Crystal City when I noticed a plane making a sharp turn from
north of the Pentagon. I had to look back at the road and then
back to the plane as it sort of leveled off. I looked back at
the road, and when I turned to look again, I felt and heard a
terrible explosion. I looked back and saw flames shooting up and
smoke starting to climb into the sky."Washington Post,
9/16/01(Lexis Nexis)
http://web.lexis-nexis.com...
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~julianr/lexisnexis/scott.txt
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Tom Seibert : "We heard what sounded like a missile, then
we heard a loud boom," said Tom Seibert, 33, a network
engineer at the Pentagon. "We were sitting there and
watching this thing from New York, and I said, you know, the
next best target would be us. And five minutes later,
boom."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0%2C1300%2C550486%2C00.html
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Lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer, U.S. Navy (Retired) : At exactly
0943, the entire command center exploded in a gigantic orange
fireball, and I felt myself being slammed to the deck by a
massive and thunderous shock wave. It felt to me as if the
blast started at the outer wall, blowing me forward toward
Commander Dunn's desk. I never lost consciousness, and though
the entire space was pitch black, I sensed I was on fire.
While still lying on the deck, I ran my fingers through my hair
and over my face to extinguish flames. Simultaneously, I tried
to roll my body in order to smother the fire I felt burning my
back and arms. As I stood to get my wits about me, I could make
out just barely, through thick, acrid smoke, the carnage of what
had been just moments before a space full of my shipmates. I
could not see much, but I could tell the ceiling had collapsed
and everything around me was blown to bits. I felt as if I was
crawling over rubble several feet high. Soon I came upon frayed
electrical cables dangling from the caved-in ceiling, in front
of broken pipes gushing water.
http://www.usna79.com/News/Features/Proceedings_Toti_article.htm
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Kevin Shaeffer was sprawled by the shock wave, then
watched from the floor as a roiling, bright orange ball of
fire shot toward him and everything -- cubicles, desks,
ceiling tiles, the building's concrete support columns --
everything blew to pieces. Flames bathed his skin, his eyes, his
lungs. The room went dark. Shaeffer, dazed, prone on the carpet,
realized his back and head were on fire. He rolled to put
himself out, then staggered to his feet. He ran a hand through
his hair. His scalp felt wet.
http://www.pilotonline.com/special/911/pentagon2.html
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Wayne Sinclair heard it before he felt it. He outfitted
computers for the Army on the first floor of the D Ring. As
usual that morning, Sinclair, 54, caught the subway so he could
be at work by 6, always the first of the seven employees to
arrive in Room 1D520. (...) they heard a thunderous roar.
Everything turned black. Smoke and fire engulfed the room. Walls
crumbled. Desks, file cabinets, and computers hurtled through
the air. "You couldn't see anything," he says. Some
people were thrown to the floor. Sinclair could feel his face,
ears, and arms burning. But he couldn't see them because the
smoke was so thick. People screamed for help. Chaos reigned.
http://www.hjpa.org/morenews.html
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Sinclair, 54, was sitting at his desk on the first floor of the
Pentagon that morning when he felt a giant "gush of air,
then everything went dark."
http://www.washingtonpost.com...
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Mike Slater, a former Marine : Then the Pentagon, built to
withstand terrorist attacks, shook like a rickety roller
coaster. A section of it collapsed and burned. "It sounded
like a roar," said Mr. Slater, who was 500 yards away from
where the jet slammed into the Pentagon's west side. "I
knew it was a bomb or something." Within the last year,
the Pentagon had put up shatter-reducing Mylar sheeting to
reduce the impact of a potential terrorist bomb. (...) As soon
as Mr. Slater stepped outside, he saw and smelled something
uncomfortably familiar. "I saw a mass of oily smoke and
thought of the oil fields of Kuwait," he said. "There
were 3,000 Americans killed in Pearl Harbor, this will be at
least that many, if not more, and I hope Congress has the guts
to do something about it."
http://www.americanmemorials.com/memorial/tribute.asp?idMemorial=1316&idContributor=7466
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Mike Slater, a former Marine, was inside the Pentagon, 500 yards
from the jet's impact. " It was like a bomb," he
said. "I saw a mass of oily smoke and thought of the oil
fields of Kuwait."
http://maninut.com/patriotic_sites/tribute.htm
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At the Pentagon, Marine Maj. Stephanie Smith helped one victim,
who was suffering from smoke inhalation and a leg injury.The
injured "were covered with smoke and their uniforms were
covered with smoke," Smith said. People were bloodied and
soaked with water from the sprinkler system, she said." You
felt it more than you heard it," she said of the blast.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/11/pentagon-workers.htm
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SGT Dewey Snavely was driving along Arlington's Quaker Lane when
the radio blasted the morning's first harrowing reports, then
warned that a third plane was heading his way. Minutes later,
jet engines rumbled overhead. "The guy I was with looked up
and said: 'What the hell is that plane doing?' Then we heard an
explosion and the truck rocked back and forth." Snavely, a
member of the Engr. Co. on transition leave, knew deep in his
gut that the Pentagon was under attack. http://www.army.mil/soldiers/oct2001/features/aftermath.html
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Over in his office at 1D-525 on the first floor of D Ring,
Robert Snyder, an Army lieutenant colonel, had been surfing the
Web to check on the World Trade Center horror. He heard a crack
and boom, and then, instantly, he saw flame and felt engulfed.
The lights went out and his digital watch stopped. It read
00:00:00. He hit the floor, having been taught in military
training that staying low was the best way to avoid smoke. The
only light came from a series of small fires burning around
the room.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15
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People kept their cool, people started working with each other
to get out," said Lieutenant Colonel Robert Snyder, who was
in the basement level of the Pentagon building when one of the
explosions hit.
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Stanley St Clair was stumbling along the road away from the vast
building, covered in dust. He had been working on renovations on
the first floor of the section which was struck by the plane.
"It shook the whole building and hurt our ears. Papers and
furniture and debris just went flying through the hallway and I
thought it was a bomb or something. Then someone started
shouting get out, get out." http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,550486,00.html
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Carl Mahnken and his colleague in the Army public relations
office, David Theall, had been in a first-floor studio only a
few dozen feet from where the plane hit. A computer monitor
had blown back and hit Theall in the head, but he was
conscious and he led the way out for his buddy. They were
walking over electrical wires, ceiling panels. They could see no
more than five feet in any direction. After the initial whoosh
and blast, it had seemed eerily silent until they reached the D
Ring hallway, where they heard other people, crying, moaning,
talking. (...) Theall said to Mahnken, "Buddy, I ain't
going to let you go. We had survived this. This force that
drove us through walls."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15
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Major John Thurman reflects on the friends and colleagues he
lost. He was prepared for the dangers of war, he says. But this
was so unexpected. (...) Thurman also was blown backward.
(...) But it was a plane passing beneath him, smashing through
pilons and shaking the building's 60-year-old structure. " I
saw flames coming over the walls, and then retreat back. And
immediately the room was filled with smoke and the like,"
Thurman said. (...) Thurman was trying to orient himself in a
darkened room. His once familiar office was a jumble of toppled
wall lockers and upended furniture. Two officemates, a man and a
woman, were alive. The three crawled face down through the
wreckage, looking for a way out but finding only fire and blind
alleys. One officemate passed out, then the other. An
overpowering desire to sleep overcame Thurman. "Suddenly it
hit me that I was going to die." "I thought,'Oh my
god, my parents are going to have their first grandchild and
same day they are going to lose their first son, their first
child," he said. "And I got really mad." The
burst of adrenalin gave Thurman just enough strength to push his
way to safety before his soot-coated lungs gave out.
http://www.theosuobserver.com/main.cfm/include/smdetail/synid/54846.html
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Henry Ticknor, intern minister at the Unitarian Universalist
Church of Arlington, Virginia, was driving to church that
Tuesday morning when American Airlines Flight 77 came in fast
and low over his car and struck the Pentagon. " There was
a puff of white smoke and then a huge billowing black cloud,"
he said.
http://www.uua.org/world/2002/01/feature3a.html
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Ron Turner, the Navy's deputy chief information officer, was
standing solemnly at a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery
when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon
Tuesday morning. He had only to turn to watch the disaster
unfold. "T here was a huge fireball," he said,
"followed by the [usual] black cloud of a fuel burn."
Turner, a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, said the
explosion was just the same as explosions of jet fighters and
helicopters during his tour of duty in 1971. "It reminded
me of being back in Vietnam," he said, "watching Tan
Son Nhut Air Base burn."
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0901/091301j3.htm
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''It wasn't like a rumble, it was just - boom,'' said Tom Van
Leunen of the Navy Public Affairs Office. ''It was shocking. ...
It immediately put you on your heels, in fact in my case,
actually, it kind of knocked me down.''
http://www.boston.com...
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Jose Velasquez : "It was like an earthquake" ,
"By the time I got outside all I could see was a giant
cloud of smoke, first white then black, coming from the Pentagon,"
he said. Velasquez says the gas station's security cameras are
close enough to the Pentagon to have recorded the moment of
impact. "I've never seen what the pictures looked
like," he said. " The FBI was here within minutes
and took the film."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/1211_wirepentagon.html
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Security officer John Yates was picked up and hurled 30 feet.
Sgt. Maj. Tony Rose, punched into a ceiling column, watched as
the glass in the C Ring windows spidered into tiny cubes. The
sound erupted a heartbeat later, a monstrous boom and crunch
like a thousand file cabinets toppling at once. To demographer
Betty Maxfield, the room seemed to freeze, intact, for a moment,
then in slow motion the computers clicked off and the lights
failed and a fireball rolled through the cubicle farm like a
wave, with bulbous head and tapered tail, and as it passed,
everything around it burst into flames. Cabinets overturned,
partitions exploded, ceiling tiles burned and danced and fell
with their metal frames. The air boiled. (...) John Yates came
to his senses to find that his death was at hand. He could not
breathe. He could not see. The room was ablaze around him. The
metal furniture jumbled all about was hot enough to raise
blisters. He heard screams. He wasn't sure that some weren't
his. His glasses remained on his face. They were smeared with
something -- unburned jet fuel, which Yates mistook for blood.
He carefully took them off, folded them, and slipped them into
his shirt pocket, then stumbled toward the big room's interior.
http://www.pilotonline.com/special/911/pentagon2.html
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John Yates worked in 2E471, a warren of cubicles. At 50, he was
an Army security manager who handed out keys and employee
badges. (...) He had been sitting on a table watching TV. When
he stood up, the Pentagon shuddered. A big ball of fire knocked
him to the floor. Black smoke flooded the room. Searing heat
scorched him. Upended file cabinets blocked him.
http://www.hjpa.org/morenews.html
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``The whole building shook'' with the impact, said Terry
Yonkers, an Air Force civilian employee at work inside the
Pentagon at the time of the attack. ``There was screaming and
pandemonium,'' he said, but the evacuation ordered shortly
afterward was carried out smoothly.
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/11_APdc.html
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