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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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I witnessed the jet hit the Pentagon on September 11. From my
office on the 19th floor of the USA TODAY building in Arlington,
Va., I have a view of Arlington Cemetery, Crystal City, the
Pentagon, National Airport and the Potomac River. ... Shortly
after watching the second tragedy, I heard jet engines pass our
building, which, being so close to the airport is very common.
But I thought the airport was closed. I figured it was a plane
coming in for landing. A few moments later, as I was looking
down at my desk, the plane caught my eye. It didn't register at
first. I thought to myself that I couldn't believe the pilot was
flying so low. Then it dawned on me what was about to happen. I
watched in horror as the plane flew at treetop level, banked
slightly to the left, drug it's wing along the ground and
slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon exploding into a
giant orange fireball. Then black smoke. Then white smoke.
http://www.jmu.edu/alumni/tragedy%5Fresponse/read%5Fmessages.html
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Lt. Col. Ted Anderson : "We ran to the end of our building,
turned left and saw nothing but huge, billowing black smoke,
and a brilliant, brilliant explosion of fire." (...)
One of the Pentagon's two fire trucks was parked only 50 feet
from the crash site, and it was "totally engulfed in
flames," Anderson says. Nearby, tanks full of propane
and aviation fuel had begun igniting, and they soon began
exploding, one by one. (...) Back in the building again,
Anderson said he began "screaming and hollering for people
as secondary and third-order explosions started going off. One
of them was a fire department car exploding-I think my
right eardrum exploded at the same time, and it unequivocally
scared the heck out of me."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/635293.asp
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Mrs. Deb Anlauf, resident of Colfax, Wisconsin, was in her 14th
floor of the Sheraton Hotel [located 1.6 mile from the
explosion], (immediately west of the Navy Annex) when she heard
a "loud roar": Suddenly I saw this plane right outside
my window. You felt like you could touch it; it was that close.
It was just incredible. "Then it shot straight across from
where we are and flew right into the Pentagon. It was just this
huge fireball that crashed into the wall (of the Pentagon). When
it hit, the whole hotel shook. (...) Jeff didn't feel the
impact of the plane crash as directly as his wife. He was
attending an environmental meeting on the second floor of the
hotel when the plane struck the Pentagon. About five seconds
before the crash, Jeff said he heard the sound of "tin
being dropped," likely as construction workers building an
addition to the hotel saw the plane and dropped their building
materials. "Then, about 5 seconds later, the whole hotel
shook," Jeff recalled. " I could feel it moving.
We said 'Oh, my gosh, what's going on?' "
http://www.leadertelegram.com/specialreports/attack/storydetail.asp?ID=7
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Gary Bauer, a former Presidential candidate, happened to be
driving into Washington, D.C. that morning, to a press
conference on Capitol Hill."I was in a massive traffic jam,
hadn't moved more than a hundred yards in twenty minutes. ... I
had just passed the closest place the Pentagon is to the exit on
395 . . . when all of a sudden I heard the roar of a jet
engine.""I looked at the woman sitting in the car next
to me. She had this startled look on her face. We were all
thinking the same thing. We looked out the front of our windows
to try to see the plane, and it wasn't until a few seconds later
that we realized the jet was coming up behind us on that major
highway. And it veered to the right into the Pentagon. The
blast literally rocked all of our cars. It was an incredible
moment.massnews.com / Amy Contrada / December 2001
http://www.massnews.com/past_issues/2001/dec%202001/1201bauer.htm
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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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Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant, said he witnessed an
explosion near the Pentagon. "It was a huge fireball, a
huge, orange fireball," he said in an interview on his
mobile phone. He said another witness told him a helicopter
exploded. (AP, Washington, 9/12/2001 11:45:33 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0%2C1300%2C550486%2C00.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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Richard Benedetto, a USA TODAY reporter, was on his way to
work, driving on the Highway parrallel to the Pentagon :
"It was an American Airlines airplane, I could see it very
clearly.(...) I didn't see the impact. (...) The sound itself
sounded more like a thud rather than a bomb (...) rather than
a loud bomb explosion it sounded muffled, heavy, very deep. I
didn't see any flaps, it looked like the plane was just in
normal flying mode but heading straight down. It was straight. The
only thing we saw on the ground outside there was a piece of a
... the tail of a lamp post. (Video)
high bandwidth : http://digipressetmp3.teaser.fr/uploads/491/Benedetto2.ram
low bandwidth : http://digipressetmp3.teaser.fr/uploads/491/Benedetto.ram
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Members of Congress have been shuttled to the site to inspect
the damage. Rep. Judy Biggert (R-Ill.) made the trip on
Thursday. She saw remnants of the airplane. ''There was a
seat from a plane, there was part of the tail and then there was
a part of green metal, I could not tell what it was, a part of
the outside of the plane,'' she said. ''It smelled like it was
still burning.''
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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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Sean Boger, Air Traffic Controller and Pentagon tower chief -
"I just looked up and I saw the big nose and the wings of
the aircraft coming right at us and I just watched it hit the
building." "It exploded. I fell to the ground and
covered my head. I could actually hear the metal going
through the building." The crew, Boger and Spc.
Jacqueline Kidd, air traffic controller and training supervisor,
prepared for President George W. Bush to arrive from Florida
around 12:30 p.m.
http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/6_46/local_news/12049-1.html
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Donald R. Bouchoux, 53, a retired Naval officer, a Great Falls
resident, a Vietnam veteran and former commanding officer of a
Navy fighter squadron, was driving west from Tysons Corner to
the Pentagon for a 10am meeting. He wrote: At 9:40 a.m. I was
driving down Washington Boulevard (Route 27) along the side of
the Pentagon when the aircraft crossed about 200 yards [should
be more than 150 yards from the impact] in front of me
and impacted the side of the building. There was an enormous
fireball, followed about two seconds later by debris raining
down. The car moved about a foot to the right when the shock
wave hit. I had what must have been an emergency oxygen bottle
from the airplane go flying down across the front of my Explorer
and then a second piece of jagged metal come down on the right
side of the car. Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2001
http://web.lexis-nexis.com...
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John Bowman, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and a
contractor, was in his office in Corridor Two near the main
entrance to the south parking lot. "Everything was calm,'
Bowman said. " Most people knew it was a bomb.
Everyone evacuated smartly. We have a good sprinkling of
military people who have been shot at."
http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/6_37/local_news/10380-1.html
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Staff Sgt. Chris Braman : The lawn was littered with twisted
pieces of aluminum. He saw one chunk painted with the letter
``A,'' another with a ``C.'' It didn't occur to Braman what the
letters signified until a man in the crowd stooped to pick up
one of the smaller metal shards. He examined it for a moment,
then announced: ``This was a jet.''
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Defense Protective Service officers were the first on the scene
of the terrorist attack. One, Mark Bright, actually saw the
plane hit the building. He had been manning the guard booth at
the Mall Entrance to the building. "I saw the plane at the
Navy Annex area," he said. "I knew it was going to
strike the building because it was very, very low -- at the
height of the street lights. It knocked a couple down." The
plane would have been seconds from impact -- the annex is only a
few hundred yards from the Pentagon. He said he heard the
plane "power-up" just before it struck the Pentagon.
"As soon as it struck the building I just called in an
attack, because I knew it couldn't be accidental," Bright
said. He jumped into his police cruiser and headed to the area.
http://www.dcmilitary.com/marines/hendersonhall/6_39/local_news/10797-1.html
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At the Pentagon, employees had heard about or seen footage of
the World Trade Centre attack when they felt their own building
shake. Ervin Brown, who works at the Pentagon, said he saw
pieces of what appeared to be small aircraft on the ground, and
the part of the building by the heliport had collapsed.
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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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It was a passenger plane. I think an American Airways plane, Mr
Campo said. "I was cutting the grass and it came in
screaming over my head. I felt the impact. The whole ground
shook and the whole area was full of fire. I could never
imagine I would see anything like that here."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0%2C1300%2C550486%2C00.html
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As former Cincinnatian James R. Cissell sat in traffic on a
Virginia interstate by the Pentagon Tuesday morning, he saw the
blur of a commercial jet and wondered why it was flying so low.
''Right about the time it was crossing over the highway, it kind
of dawned on me what was happening,'' said Cissell, son of
Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Jim Cissell. In the next blink
of an eye, he realized he had a front-row seat to history, as
the plane plowed into the Pentagon, sending a fireball
exploding into the air and scattering debris - including a tire
rim suspected of belonging to the airplane - past his car.
(...) In the next seconds dozens of things flashed through his
mind. ''I thought, 'This isn't really happening. That is a big
plane.' Then I saw the faces of some of the passengers on
board,'' Cissell said. While he remembers seeing the crash,
Cissell remembers none of the sounds. ''It came in in a
perfectly straight line,'' he said. ''It didn't slow down. I
want to say it accelerated. It just shot straight in.''
http://www.cincypost.com/attack/cissel091201.html
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Allen Cleveland of Woodbridge Virginia looked out from a Metro
train going to National Airport, to see a jet heading down
toward the Pentagon. "I thought, 'There's no landing strip
on that side of the subway tracks,' " Before he could
process that thought, he saw "a huge mushroom cloud. A lady
staThe lady next to me was in absolute hysterics."" .
. a silver pasenger jet, mid sized"
http://mfile.akamai.com/920/rm/thepost.download.akamai.com/920/nation/091101-5s.ram
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Soon after the crash (Within 30 seconds of the crash) I
witnessed a military cargo plane (Possibly a C130) fly over the
crash site and circle the mushroom cloud. My brother inlaw also
witnessed the same plane following the jet while he was on the
HOV lanes in Springfield. He said that he saw a jetliner flying
low over the tree tops near Seminary RD in Springfield, VA. and
soon afterwards a military plane was seen flying right behind
it. I think this was also a reason for the false threat of
another plane about to crash which caused rescuers to
have to evacuate for a short time after the initial crash. I
have done my research onthis and according to time magazine it
took 24 minutes before Norad was supposedly notified about this
particuliar jet and fighters were scrambling to intercept at
that time. Isn't it odd how there is Not a single mention of
this aircraft in ANY of the articles written about this crash?
Also if you had not noticed... There is not a single picture or
live footage of the actual jet prior to its crash at the
Pentagon. Nor is there any of the one that crashed in
Pennsylvania. But if Anyone who rides the metro-rail knows,
there are plenty of Video cameras all around National airport at
the parking Garages and the high level security buildings found
all around Crystal city. (3 of which I have personally found
pointed directly towards crystal city which would have given a
great line of site shot of that jet prior to the crash as well
as any other plane which might have been following it. I
personally believe that the government new full well that this
was about to happen and they are hiding something a lot bigger
than they are willing to let out. I was interviewed at
Washingtonpost.com and gave them my full story, but they did not
print it as I have told you. I also find it interesting that one
of the planes engines in the pennsylvania crash was supposedly
found 5 miles prior to the crash site (This information I'm
unsure of). The only thing that I'm aware of that might cause
that would be a heat seeking missle. A weapon which I am pretty
familiar with form Ord.training. I'm not saying that the
government new exactly what was about to happen, but I do
believe that they are definitely hiding something here. Many of
my friends in intelligence have said the same. I work in a Gov.
building in DC., but my heart is right there with you and your
team. I hope you and those who served with you are doing well.
Take care.
http://www.spooky8.com/reviews.htm
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[We didn't know what kind of plane had hit the Pentagon, or
where it had hit. Later, we were told that] it was a 757 out of
Dulles, which had come up the river in back of our building,
turned sharply over the Capitol, ran past the White House and
the Washington Monument, up the river to Rosslyn, then dropped
to treetop level and ran down Washington Boulevard to the
Pentagon (...) As we watched the black plume gather strength,
less than a minute after the explosion, we saw an odd sight that
no one else has yet commented on. Directly in back of the plume,
which would place it almost due west from our office, a
four-engine propeller plane, which Ray later said resembled a
C-130, started a steep decent towards the Pentagon. It
was coming from an odd direction (planes don't go east-west in
the area), and it was descending at a much steeper angle than
most aircraft. Trailing a thin, diffuse black trail from its
engines, the plane reached the Pentagon at a low altitude and
made a sharp left turn, passing just north of the plume, and
headed straight for the White House. All the while, I was sort
of talking at it: "Who the hell are you? Where are you
going? You're not headed for downtown!" Ray and Verle
watched it with me, and I was convinced it was another attack.
But right over the tidal basin, at an altitude of less than 1000
feet, it made another sharp left turn to the north and climbed
rapidly. Soon it was gone, leaving only the thin black trail.
http://www.clothmonkey.com/91101.htm
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"It was striking to me how little of the building was
involved in the fire," said Dr. Corley, who has
reviewed the Pentagon report. The fire, he said, "didn't
spread and and trap other people in the building. "While
125 Pentagon workers and 59 passengers and crew members on the
plane died, few if any of the workers who died were from outside
the immediate impact zone."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/05/nyregion/05TOWE.html
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LTC Victor Correa work at the Pentagon. (...) LTC Victor
Correa's office, what was the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for
Personnel, now the Army G-1, was in the path of the Boeing 757
that crashed into the Pentagon on a sunny fall morning. He was
walking over to talk to a co-worker in the next cubicle when he
was knocked down by the impact. " I saw a fireball
come over my head," said Correa, an Active Guard
Reservist now assigned to Joint Chiefs of Staff, J-5. " The
fireball was coming like a wind-cloud of smoke trailing it.
I also noticed to my right the windows going out and coming
back in. The fireball came in and out quick - the speed
of lightning. As it went back, it left a cloud of smoke and
started dropping. At that time the fire system went up."
Being knocked down turned out to be a life-saver. (...) "We
thought it was some kind of explosion. That somehow someone got
in here and planted bombs because we saw these holes."
http://www.army.mil/usar/news/2002/09-11anniv/herotellsall.html
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He and two colleagues from Oracle software were stopped in a car
near the Naval Annex, next to the Pentagon, when they saw the plane
dive down and level off. "It was no more than 30 feet
off the ground, and it was screaming. It was just screaming. It
was nothing more than a guided missile at that point,"
Creed said. "I can still see the plane. I can still see it
right now. It's just the most frightening thing in the world, going
full speed, going full throttle, its wheels up," Creed
recalls.
http://www.ahwatukee.com/afn/community/articles/020906a.html
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Near the Lincoln Memorial, Dave heard two booms, which
sounded like the artillery salutes on the Mall on the Fourth of
July, he said. It was likely the noise from a secondary blast at
the Pentagon -
http://www.gridlockmag.com/911/
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For one employee with Wedge One's mechanical subcontractor
John J. Kirlin Inc., Rockville MD, "lucky" is an
understatement. "We had one guy who was standing, looking
out the window and saw the plane when it was coming in. He was
in front of one of the blast-resistant windows," says
Kirlin President Wayne T. Day, who believes the window structure
saved the man's life. According to Matt Hahr, Kirlin's senior
project manager at the Pentagon, the employee "was
thrown about 80 ft down the hall through the air. As he was
traveling through the air, he says the ceiling was coming down
from the concussion. He got thrown into a closet, the door
slammed shut and the fireball went past him," recounts Hahr.
"Jet fuel was on him and it irritated his eyes, but he
didn't get burned. Then the fireball blew over and the
sprinklers came on, and he was able to crawl out of the closet
and get out of the building through the courtyard."
http://www.designbuildmag.com/oct2001/pentagon1001.asp
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Instead of following the streams of people away from the
Pentagon, Steve DeChiaro ran toward the smoke. As he reached the
west side of the building he saw a light post bent in half.
"But when I looked at the site, my brain could not
resolve the fact that it was a plane because it only seemed like
a small hole in the building," he said. " No
tail. No wings. No nothing." He followed the emergency
crews that had just arrived. He saw people hanging out of
windows and others crawling from the demolished area.
"These people were covered in what I thought was powder - I
don't know anything about medicine or first aid, I'm an
engineer - but it looked like powder," DeChiaro said.
"Only later did I find out that it was their skin."
Civilians and soldiers joined emergency crews who were rushing
inside to pull out anyone they could. But shortly after 10 a.m.
police yelled at people to get back. "Just as we're about
to open the door, they start screaming, 'There's another inbound
plane', " DeChiaro said. "At that moment, your
thoughts are: 'I go in the building, I get killed, then I'm no
help to anybody.' In hindsight, I think we should have gone back
in that building." For nearly 15 minutes, they stood
watching the Pentagon burn and periodically checked the sky for
another plane. That plane never reached Washington but fell,
instead, in rural Pennsylvania. Teams of two and three
eventually were sent back in to find more victims. But as the
day grew longer, the flow of the injured stopped.
http://www.gomemphis.com/mca/america_at_war/article/0,1426,MCA_945_1300676,00.html
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" The only way you could tell that an aircraft was inside
was that we saw pieces of the nose gear. The devastation was
horrific. It was obvious that some of the victims we found had
no time to react. The distance the firefighters had to travel
down corridors to reach the fires was a problem. With only a
good 25 minutes of air in their SCBA bottles, to save air they
left off their face pieces as they walked and took in a lot of
smoke," Captain Defina said. Captain Defina was the shift
commander [of an aircraft rescue firefighters crew.]
http://www.nfpa.org/NFPAJournal/OnlineExclusive/Exclusive_11_01_01/exclusive_11.01.01.asp
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Michael DiPaula 41, project coordinator Pentagon Renovation Team
- He left a meeting in the Pentagon just minutes before the
crash, looking for an electrician who didn't show, in a
construction trailer less than 75 feet away. "Suddenly, an
airplane roared into view, nearly shearing the roof off the
trailer before slamming into the E ring. 'It sounded like a
missile,' DiPaula recalls . . . Buried in debris and covered
with airplane fuel, he was briefly listed by authorities as
missing, but eventually crawled from the flaming debris and the
shroud of black smoke unscathed.
http://www.sunspot.net/search/bal-archive-1990.htmlstory
(killtown)
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Marine Corps officer Mike Dobbs was standing on one of the upper
levels of the outer ring of the Pentagon looking out the window
when he saw an American Airlines 737 twin-engine airliner
strike the building. "It seemed to be almost coming in slow
motion," he said later Tuesday. "I didn't actually
feel it hit, but I saw it and then we all started running. They
evacuated everybody around us." http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news01/091201_news_dcscene.shtml
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"... we saw a plane coming toward us, for about 10 seconds
... It was like watching a train wreck. I was mesmerized. ... At
first I thought it was trying to crash land, but it was coming
in so deliberately, so level... Everyone said there was a
deafening explosion, but with the adrenaline, we didn't hear it."St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 13, 2001 - Philip Dine
http://web.lexisnexis.com ...
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~julianr/lexisnexis/dobbs.txt
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Steve Eiden, a truck driver, had picked up his cargo that
Tuesday morning in Williamsburg, Va., and was en route to New
York City and witnessed the aftermath. He took the Highway 95
loop in the area of the Pentagon and thought it odd to see a
plane in restricted airspace, thinking to himself it was odd
that it was flying so low. "You could almost see the
people in the windows," he said as he watched the plane
disappear behind a line of trees, followed by a tall plume of
black smoke. Then he saw the Pentagon on fire, and an
announcement came over the radio that the Pentagon had been hit.
http://www.baxterbulletin.com/ads/chronology2001/page2.html
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Traffic was at a standstill. I heard a rumble, looked out my
driver's side window and realized that I was looking at the nose
of an airplane coming straight at us from over the road
(Columbia Pike) that runs perpendicular to the road I was on.
The plane just appeared there- very low in the air, to the side
of (and not much above) the CITGO gas station that I never knew
was there. My first thought was "Oh My God, this must be
World War III!" In that split second, my brain flooded with
adrenaline and I watched everything play out in ultra
slow motion, I saw the plane coming in slow motion toward my
car and then it banked in the slightest turn in front of me,
toward the heliport. In the nano-second that the plane was
directly over the cars in front of my car, the plane seemed to
be not more than 80 feet off the ground and about 4-5 car
lengths in front of me. It was far enough in front of me that I
saw the end of the wing closest to me and the underside of the
other wing as that other wing rocked slightly toward the ground.
I remember recognizing it as an American Airlines plane -- I
could see the windows and the color stripes. And I remember
thinking that it was just like planes in which I had flown many
times but at that point it never occurred to me that this might
be a plane with passengers. In my adrenaline-filled state of
mind, I was overcome by my visual senses. The day had started
out beautiful and sunny and I had driven to work with my car's
sunroof open. I believe that I may have also had one or more car
windows open because the traffic wasn't moving anyway. At the
second that I saw the plane, my visual senses took over
completely and I did not hear or feel anything -- not the
roar of the plane, or wind force, or impact sounds. The plane
seemed to be floating as if it were a paper glider and I watched
in horror as it gently rocked and slowly glided straight into
the Pentagon. At the point where the fuselage hit the wall, it
seemed to simply melt into the building. I saw a smoke ring
surround the fuselage as it made contact with the wall. It
appeared as a smoke ring that encircled the fuselage at the
point of contact and it seemed to be several feet thick. I later
realized that it was probably the rubble of churning bits of the
plane and concrete. The churning smoke ring started at the top
of the fuselage and simultaneously wrapped down both the right
and left sides of the fuselage to the underside, where the
coiling rings crossed over each other and then coiled back up to
the top. Then it started over again -- only this next time, I
also saw fire, glowing fire in the smoke ring. At that point,
the wings disappeared into the Pentagon. And then I saw an
explosion and watched the tail of the plane slip into the
building. It was here that I closed my eyes for a moment and
when I looked back, the entire area was awash in thick black
smoke.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/supporting.asp?ID=30
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Former ammunition plant official evacuated building moments
before suicide airliner collision.Col. Bruce Elliott, former
commander of the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant who was reassigned
to the Pentagon in July, watched in horror Tuesday as a hijacked
757 airliner crashed into the nerve center of the U.S. military
command. Elliott, in a phone interview Wednesday, said he had
just left the Pentagon and was about to board a shuttle van in a
south parking lot when he saw the plane approach and slam into
the west side of the structure. "I looked to my left and
saw the plane coming in," said Elliott, who watched it for
several seconds. "It was banking and garnering speed. I
felt it was headed for the Pentagon." (...) "It was
like a kamikaze pilot. I felt it was going to ram the
Pentagon," he said. He said the craft clipped a utility
pole guide wire, which may have slowed it down a bit before it
crashed into the building and burst into flames. (...) Elliott
said the rubble was still smoldering Wednesday morning.
http://www.thehawkeye.com/features/911/IdxThur.html
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The plane approached the Pentagon about six feet off the
ground, clipping a light pole, a car antenna, a construction
trailer and an emergency generator before slicing into the
building, said Lee Evey, the manager of the Pentagon's ongoing
billion-dollar renovation. The plane penetrated three of the
Pentagon's five rings, but was probably stopped from going
farther by hundreds of concrete columns. The plane peeled back
as it entered, leaving pieces of the front of the plane near
the outside of the building and pieces from the rear of the
aircraft farther inside, Evey said. The floors just above
the impact remained intact for about 35 minutes after the crash,
allowing many people in those offices to escape, Evey said
http://detnews.com/2001/nation/0110/06/nation-312016.htm
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Internally, the Wedge One project included: complete
demolition of existing facilities; significant abatement of
hazardous materials (most notably, 28 million lbs. of
asbestos-contaminated material was removed); installation of all
new electrical, mechanical, plumbing and telecommunication
systems within the existing floorplan; structural steel
reinforcement; and replacement of all 1,282 windows in the
section, including 386 blast-resistant units on the outermost
"E Ring" and innermost "A Ring" of the
building. All-new office space was created with an open space
plan aimed at enhancing flexibility (...) Amazingly, the plane
pushed through the outermost "E Ring", and drove deep
into the interior, its nose coming to rest just inside the
"C Ring."
http://www.designbuildmag.com/oct2001/pentagon1001.asp
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We've learned -- this is wedge one, okay, the newly-renovated
area. The path of the airplane seems to have taken it along this
route, so it entered the building slightly, on this photo,
slightly to the left of what we call corridor four. There are 10
radial corridors in the building that extend from A ring out
through E ring, and this is the fourth of those radial
corridors. So it impacted the building in an area that had been
renovated, but its path was at a -- it appears to be at a
diagonal, so that it entered in wedge one but passed through
into areas of wedge two, an unrenovated portion of the building.
And, of course, you all know it's got rings A through E, five
stories tall, et cetera. QUESTION: That seems to indicate that
it came to rest in ring C, the nose cone. EVEY: Let me talk to
that, because you've asked a number of questions already about
the extent of penetration, et cetera. This is an overhead of the
building. The point of penetration was right here, and we
blocked that out to show that's the area of collapse. The plane
actually penetrated through the E ring, C ring -- excuse me -- E
ring, D ring, C ring. This area right here is what we call A-E
Drive. And unlike other rings in the building, it's actually a
driveway that circles the building inside, between the B and the
C ring. The nose of the plane just barely broke through the
inside of the C ring, so it was extending into A-E Drive a
little bit. So that's the extent of penetration of the aircraft.
The rings are E, D, C, B and A. Between B and C is a driveway
that goes around the Pentagon. It's called A-E Drive. The
airplane traveled in a path about like this, and the nose of
the aircraft broke through this innermost wall of C ring into
A-E Drive. QUESTION: One thing that's confusing -- if it
came in the way you described, at an angle, why then are not the
wings outside? I mean, the wings would have shorn off. The tail
would have shorn off. And yet there's apparently no evidence of
the aircraft outside the E ring. EVEY: Actually, there's
considerable evidence of the aircraft outside the E ring. It's
just not very visible. When you get up close -- actually, one of
my people happened to be walking on this sidewalk and was right
about here as the aircraft approached. It came in. It clipped a
couple of light poles on the way in. He happened to hear this
terrible noise behind him, looked back, and he actually -- he's
a Vietnam veteran -- jumped prone onto the ground so the
aircraft would not actually -- he thinks it (would have) hit
him; it was that low. On its way in, the wing clipped. Our
guess is an engine clipped a generator. We had an emergency
temporary generator to provide life-safety emergency electrical
power, should the power go off in the building. The wing
actually clipped that generator, and portions of it broke off.
There are other parts of the plane that are scattered about
outside the building. None of those parts are very large,
however. You don't see big pieces of the airplane sitting
there extending up into the air. But there are many small pieces.
And the few larger pieces there look like they are veins out of
the aircraft engine. They're circular. QUESTION: Would you say
that the plane, since it had a lot of fuel on it at the impact,
and the fact that there are very small pieces, virtually
exploded in flames when it tore into the building? I mean, since
there are not large pieces of the wings laying outside, did it
virtually explode? EVEY: I didn't see it. My people who did see
it enter the building describe it as entering the building
and then there being flames coming out immediately afterwards.
Whether you describe it as an explosion or not, people I talk to
who were there, some called it an explosion. Others called it a
large fire. I'm not sure. I wasn't there, sir. It's just a guess
on my part.
http://www.patriotresource.com/wtc/federal/0915/DoD.html
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Walker Lee Evey, program manager of the Pentagon restoration
project : The fire was so hot, Evey said, that it turned
window glass to liquid and sent it spilling down walls into
puddles on the ground. The impact cracked massive concrete
columns far beyond the impact site, destabilizing a broader
section of the building than contractors had originally thought.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/03/07/attack/main503257.shtml
On Sept. 11, Flight 77 sliced through the outermost three of
the Pentagon's five concentric rings. Fires from the plane's
20,000 gallons of fuel melted windows into pools of liquid
glass. The impact of the crash fractured concrete pillars
well beyond the incisions in the three outer rings.
http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/2821782.htm
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I hate to disappoint anyone, but here is the story behind the
photograph. At the time, I was a senior writer with Navy Times
newspaper. It is an independent weekly that is owned by the
Gannett Corporation (same owners as USA Today). I was at the
Navy Annex, up the hill from the Pentagon when I heard the
explosion. I always keep a digital camera in my backpack
briefcase just as a matter of habit. When the explosion happened
I ran down the hill to the site and arrived there approximately
10 minutes after the explosion. I saw the piece, that was near
the heliport pad and had to work around to get a shot if it with
the building in the background. Because the situation was still
fluid, I was able to get in close and make that image within
fifteen minutes of the explosion because security had yet to
shut off the area. I photographed it twice, with the newly
arrived fire trucks pouring water into the building in the
background. The collapse of the building above area happened
long after I left the scene. I was not even aware that that had
happened until that evening when I watched the news. My photos
were on the wire by noon. That was the only piece of wreckage of
any SIZE that I saw, but was by no means the ONLY piece. Right
after photographing that piece of wreckage, I also photographed
a triage area where medical personnel were tending to a
seriously burned man. A priest knelt in the middle of the area
and started to pray. I took that image and left immediately. As
I stepped onto the highway next to the triage area, I knelt down
to tie my shoe and all over the highway were small pieces of
aircraft skin, none bigger than a half-dollar. Anyone
familiar with aircraft has seen the greenish primer paint that
covers many interior metal surfaces - that is what these shards
were covered with. I was out of the immediate area photographing
other things within 20 minutes of the crash.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/frameup/message/1254
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Kim Flyler was trying to sneak into a parking space near to the
building when she saw the plane: "At that moment I heard a
plane and then a loud cracking noise.... Right before the plane
hit the building, you could see the silhouettes of people in
the back two rows. You couldn't see if they were male or
female, but you could tell there was a human being in
there."
The Observer, Sept. 8, 2002
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"Traffic was at a standstill, so I parked on the shoulder,
not far from the scene and ran to the site. Next to me was a
cab from D.C., its windshield smashed out by pieces of lampposts.
There were pieces of the plane all over the highway,
pieces of wing, I think. (...) "There were a lot of people
with severe burns, severe contusions, severe lacerations, in
shock and emotional distress"
http://www.msnbc.com/news/635293.asp
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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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Kat Gaines, heading south on Route 110, approached the parking
lots, saw a low-flying jetliner strike the top of nearby
telephone poles. "
http://www.fccc.org/News/valor.htm
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Gilah Goldsmith, personnel attorney at the Pentagon. When she
got to her office sometime around 9, she phoned her daughter and
heard "an incredible whomp noise." It didn't seem so
unusual since her office is situated near a narrow area where
trucks sometimes come by and hit the wall. Goldsmith was told to
evacuate. "We saw a huge black cloud of smoke," she
said, saying it smelled like cordite, or gun smoke.
http://www.jewishsf.com/bk010921/usp14a.shtml
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Afework Hagos, a computer programmer, was on his way to work but
stuck in a traffic jam near the Pentagon when the plane flew
over. "There was a huge screaming noise and I got out of
the car as the plane came over. Everybody was running away in
different directions. It was tilting its wings up and down
like it was trying to balance. It hit some lampposts on the way
in."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0%2C1300%2C550486%2C00.html
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Asework Hagos, 26, of Arlington, was driving on Columbia Pike on
his way to work as a consultant for Nextel. He saw a plane
flying very low and close to nearby buildings. "I thought
something was coming down on me. I know this plane is going to
crash. I've never seen a plane like this so low." He said
he looked at it and saw American Airline insignia and when it
made impact with the Pentagon initially he saw smoke, then
flames.
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Harrington was working on the installation of new furniture in
Wedge One, when he was called out to the parking lot to talk
about security with his customer moments before the crash.
"About two minutes later one of my guys pointed to an
American Airlines airplane 20 feet high over Washington
Blvd.," Harrington said. " It seemed like it made
impact just before the wedge. It was like a Hollywood movie
or something.
http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/6_37/local_news/10380-1.html
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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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From the view of the Navy Annex : After a few moments, Lt Gen
Ron Kadish, Director of the Ballistic Missile Defense
Organization entered the Secure Conference Room to pursue the
day's activities and do real work. This office, with two nice
windows and a great view of the monuments, the Capitol and the
Pentagon was "good digs" by any Pentagon standard. I
walked in the office and stood peering out of the window looking
at the Pentagon. As I stood there, I instinctively ducked at the
extremely loud roar and whine of a jet engine spooling up.
Immediately, the large silver cylinder of an aircraft appeared
in my window, coming over my right shoulder as I faced the
Westside of the Pentagon directly towards the heliport. The
aircraft, looking to be either a 757 or Airbus, seemed to come
directly over the annex, as if it had been following Columbia
Pike - an Arlington road leading to Pentagon. The aircraft was
moving fast, at what I could only be estimate as between 250 to
300 knots. All in all, I probably only had the aircraft in my
field of view for approximately 3 seconds. The aircraft was at a
sharp downward angle of attack, on a direct course for the
Pentagon. It was "clean", in as much as, there were no
flaps applied and no apparent landing gear deployed. He was
slightly left wing down as he appeared in my line of sight, as
if he'd just "jinked" to avoid something. As he
crossed Route 110 he appeared to level his wings, making
a slight right wing slow adjustment as he impacted low on the
Westside of the building to the right of the helo, tower and
fire vehicle around corridor 5. What instantly followed was a large
yellow fireball accompanied by an extremely bass sounding, deep
thunderous boom. The yellow fireball rose quickly as black
smoke engulfed the entire Westside of the Pentagon, obscuring
the whole of the heliport. I could feel the concussion and
felt the shockwave of the blast impact the window of the Annex,
knocking me against the desk.
http://lists.travellercentral.com/pipermail/tml/2001-September/013153.html
http://www.ournetfamily.com/WarOnTerror/emails/pentagonwitness.shtml
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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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Nicholas Holland, an engineer with AMEC Construction Management
of Bethesda, Md., had spent the last two years working to
reinforce the walls. Two summers ago, a blast wall of reinforced
steel and concrete was installed right where the plane hit. It
stood for 25 minutes after it was hit before collapsing, long
enough for people to escape, Holland said.
http://www.detnews.com/2001/nation/0109/11/nation-291261.htm
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Being a former transport type (60's era) I cannot understand
how that plane hit where it did giving the direction the
aircraft was taking at the time. As most know, the Pentagon lies
at the bottom of two hills from the west with the east side
being next to the river at 14th street bridge. One hill is at
the Navy Annex and the other is Arlington Cemetery. The plane
came up I-395 also known as Shirley Hwy. (most likely used as a
reference point.) The plane had been seen making a lazy pattern
in the no fly zone over the White House and US Cap. Why
the plane did not hit incoming traffic coming down the river
from the north to Reagan Nat'l. is beyond me .
Strangely, no one at the Reagan Tower noticed the aircraft.
Andrews AFB radar should have also picked up the aircraft I
would think. Nevertheless, the aircarft went southwest near
Springfield and then veered left over Arlington and then put the
nose down coming over Ft Myer picking off trees and light poles
near the helicopter pad next to building. It was as if he
leveled out at the last minute and put it square into the
building. The wings came off as if it went through an arch way
leaving a hole in the side of the building it seems a little
larger than the wide body of the aircraft. The entry point was
so clean that the roof (shown in news photo) fell in on the
wreckage. They are just now getting to the passengers today. The
nosewheel I understand is in the grass near the second ring.
Right now it is estimated that it will take two years to repair
the damage. Ironcally, the area had just been remodeled with
most of the area was still blocked off and some offices were
empty. I know a young Army Major who went to a planned staff
meeting at 8:30 am sharp. He left his office and attended the
meeting, there was something he needed. He called his friend
also a major near his office on his cell phone. As they were
talking his friend said, My God a plane has just came through
near your office "(which was not part of the new area, but
near it ). Fire rolled down the hallway, somehow his friend on
the phone ducked down another hallway. Four of the Major's
friends did not make it. Incidently, the fireball also went
along the outside of the building as shown by the blackend side
of the building to left of the impact point. The reason the fire
took so long to put out was because the attic was filled with
"horse hair" for insulation put there in 1942 when the
building was built.
http://www.beanerbanner.com/a_father____.htm
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office when the explosion at the Pentagon occurred. "About
a third of the sky was blacked with smoke", He said. Hunt
was in contact with this office via e-mail on September 11 until
he left work and decided to walk, rather than catch a crowded
subway. "I talked to a number of average people in route
who said they saw the plane hovering over the Washington Mall
Area at an altitude lower that the height of the Washington
Monument" Hunt stated. He said they reported to him they
could clearly see the markings of an American Airlines airliner
and some even said they could make out faces of passengers in
the aircraft windows. Again, this is what Bob Hunt heard from
witnesses on the street in Washington D.C. on September 11,
2001.
http://www.sierratimes.com/02/03/15/arjj031502.htm
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From time spent on military aircraft as part of his job at the
Pentagon, Will Jarvis (who graduated with a bachelor of applied
science in 1987 while attending New College) knows what
aviation fuel smells like. That smell was his only clue that
a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, where he works as an
operations research analyst for the Office of the Secretary of
Defense. Jarvis, who was around the corner from the disaster,
tried but failed to see the plane when he left the building.
" There was just nothing left. It was incinerated. We
couldn't see a tail or a wing or anything," he says.
"Just a big black hole in the building with smoke pouring
out of it." For someone sitting only 300 metres away from
the carnage of American Airlines Flight 77, Jarvis and his
officemates were surprisingly well insulated from it. "We
thought the plane was a dump truck backing into the building,
because there was a lot of construction going on," he says.
The group noticed that the sky was darker than normal, but still
didn't think much of it. " Then I saw little bits of
silver falling from the sky," says Jarvis.
http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/02winter/f02.htm#jarvis
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Terrance Kean, 35, who lives in a 14-story building nearby,
heard the loud jet engines and glanced out his window. "I
saw this very, very large passenger jet," said the
architect, who had been packing for a move. "It just plowed
right into the side of the Pentagon. The nose penetrated into
the portico. And then it sort of disappeared, and there was
fire and smoke everywhere. . . . It was very sort of surreal."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A13766-2001Sep11
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Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.), a Naval Reserve intelligence
officer. ''Apparently, the fire killed everybody in there,''
said Kirk, shortly after he learned that two friends perished in
the center. Kirk also went to the site. ''The first thing you
smell is the burning. And then you can smell the aviation fuel.
And then you can smell this sickly, rotten-meat smell,'' he
said.
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One of the aircraft's engines somehow ricocheted out of the
building and arched into the Pentagon's mall parking area
between the main building and the new loading dock facility,
said Charles H. Krohn, the Army's deputy chief of public
affairs. Those fleeing the building heard a loud secondary
explosion about 10 min. after the initial impact.
http://www.aviationnow.com/content/publication/awst/20010917/aw48.htm
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Sgt. William Lagasse, a pentagon police dog handler, the son of
an aviation instructor, was filling up his patrol car at a gas
station near the Pentagon when he noticed a jet fly in low. He
watched as the plane plowed into the Pentagon. Initially, he
thought the plane was about to drop on top of him -- it was that
close. Lagasse knew something was wrong. The 757's flaps were
not deployed and the landing gear was retracted.
http://206.181.245.163/ebird/e20011108vivid.htm
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I saw the aircraft above my head about 80 feet above the ground,
400 miles an hour. The reason, I have some experience as a pilot
and I looked at the plane. Didn't see any landing gear.
Didn't see any flaps down. I realized it wasn't going to
land. . . . It was close enough that I could see the windows
and the blinds had been pulled down. I read American
Airlines on it. . . .I got on the radio and broadcast. I said a
plane is, is heading toward the heliport side of the building.
http://web.lexis-nexis.com...
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~julianr/lexisnexis/lagasse1.txt
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After the second plane hit the World Trade Center, Major Lincoln
Leibner jumped in his pickup truck and raced to the Pentagon. As
he ran to an entrance, he heard jet engines and turned in time
to see the American Airlines plane diving toward the building.
"I was close enough that I could see through the windows
of the airplane, and watch as it as it hit," he said.
"There was no doubt in my mind what I was watching. Not for
a second. It was accelerating," he said. " It
was wheels up, flaps up, engines full throttle. "
http://www.theosuobserver.com/main.cfm/include/smdetail/synid/54846.html
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Maj. Leibner drove in and made it as far as the south parking
lot, where he got out on foot. "I heard the plane
first," he said. "I thought it was a flyover Arlington
cemetery." From his vantage point, Maj. Leibner looked up
and saw the plane come in. "I was about 100 yards away,"
he said. " You could see through the windows of the
aircraft. I saw it hit." The plane came in hard and
level and was flown full throttle into the building, dead
center mass, Maj. Leibner said. "The plane completely
entered the building," he said. "I got a little
repercussion, from the sound, the blast. I've heard
artillery, and that was louder than the loudest has to offer.
I started running toward the site. I jumped over a fence. I was
probably the first person on the scene." A tree and the
backend of a crash truck at the heliport near the crash site
were on fire and the ground was scorched, Maj. Leibner
recounted. " The plane went into the building like a toy
into a birthday cake," he said. "The aircraft went
in between the second and third floors." At that point, no
one was outside. Spotting a Pentagon door that had been blown
off its hinges, Maj. Leibner went in and out several times,
helping rescue several people. "The very first person was
right there," he said. "She could walk. I walked her
out onto the grass." Maj. Leibner said a police officer
pulled up onto the grass and began to help. "Everybody was
hurt," Maj. Leibner said. "They were all civilian
females. Everybody was burned on their hands and faces.
http://www.usmedicine.com/article.cfm?articleID=384&issueID=38
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Captain Lincoln Leibner says the aircraft struck a helicopter on
the helipad, setting fire to a fire truck. We got one guy out of
the cab," he said, adding he could hear people crying
inside the wreckage. Captain Liebner, who had cuts on his hands
from the debris, says he has been parking his car in the car
park when the crash occurred."
http://abc.net.au/news/2001/09/item20010911230953_1.htm
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It was so shocking, I was listening to the news on what had
happened in New York, and just happened to look out the window
because I heard a low flying plane and then I saw it hit the
Pentagon. It happened so fast... it was in the air one moment
and in the building the next... I still have a hard time
believing it, but every time I look out the window, it seems
to be more real than it did the time before... K.M., Pentagon
City, USA
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/talking%5Fpoint/newsid%5F1537000/1537530.stm
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David Marra, 23, an information-technology specialist, had
turned his BMW off an I-395 exit to the highway just west of the
Pentagon when he saw an American Airlines jet swooping in, its
wings wobbly, looking like it was going to slam right into the
Pentagon: "It was 50 ft. off the deck when he came in. It
sounded like the pilot had the throttle completely floored.
The plane rolled left and then rolled right. Then he caught
an edge of his wing on the ground." There is a
helicopter pad right in front of the side of the Pentagon. The
wing touched there, then the plane cartwheeled into the
building.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,174655-4,00.html
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``I saw a big jet flying close to the building coming at full
speed. There was a big noise when it hit the building,''
said Oscar Martinez, who witnessed the attack. Extrait article :
Away from the Pentagon, unexplained explosions were reported in
the vicinity of the State Department and the Capitol.
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/11_APdc.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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Traffic is normally slow right around the Pentagon as the road
winds and we line up to cross the 14th Street bridge heading
into the District of Columbia. I don't know what made me look
up, but I did and I saw a very low-flying American Airlines
plane that seemed to be accelerating. My first thought was just
'No, no, no, no,' because it was obvious the plane was not
heading to nearby Reagan National Airport. It was going to
crash.
http://depts.washington.edu/uweek/archives/2001.10.OCT_04/_article9.html
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Father Stephen McGraw was driving to a graveside service at
Arlington National Cemetery the morning of Sept. 11, when he
mistakenly took the Pentagon exit onto Washington Boulevard,
putting him in a position to witness American Airlines Flight 77
crash into the Pentagon. "The traffic was very slow moving,
and at one point just about at a standstill," said McGraw,
a Catholic priest at St. Anthony Parish in Falls Church. "I
was in the left hand lane with my windows closed. I did not hear
anything at all until the plane was just right above our
cars." McGraw estimates that the plane passed about 20 feet
over his car, as he waited in the left hand lane of the road, on
the side closest to the Pentagon. "The plane clipped the
top of a light pole just before it got to us, injuring a taxi
driver, whose taxi was just a few feet away from my car. "I
saw it crash into the building," he said. "My only
memories really were that it looked like a plane coming in for a
landing. I mean in the sense that it was controlled and sort of
straight. That was my impression," he said. " There
was an explosion and a loud noise and I felt the impact. I
remember seeing a fireball come out of two windows (of the
Pentagon). I saw an explosion of fire billowing through those
two windows. "He literally had the stole in one hand
and a prayer book in the other and in one fluid motion crossed
the guardrail," said Mark Faram, a reporter from the Navy
Times who witnessed McGraw in the first moments after the crash.
http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/6_39/local_news/10772-1.html
http://www.mdw.army.mil/news/Pentagon%5Fcrash%5Feyewitness%5Fcomforted%5Fvictims.html
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The crew of a military cargo plane watched helplessly on Sept.
11 as a hijacked airliner plunged into the Pentagon, a defense
official confirmed Tuesday. The report confirms the eyewitness
account of two Hampton Roads residents who were near the
Pentagon that day and said they saw a second plane flying near
the doomed passenger jet. A C-130 cargo plane had departed
Andrews Air Force Base en route to Minnesota that morning and
reported seeing an airliner heading into Washington 'at an
unusual angle,' said Lt. Col. Kenneth McClellan, a Pentagon
spokesman. Air-traffic control officials instructed the
propeller-powered cargo plane 'to let us know where it's going,'
McClellan said. But, he said, there was no attempt to intercept
the hijacked airliner. 'A C-130 obviously goes slower than a
jet,' McClellan said. 'There was no way he was going to
intercept anything.' The C-130 pilot 'followed the aircraft and
reported it was heading into the Pentagon,' he said. 'He saw it
crash into the building. He saw the fireball. In the days
immediately following the Sept. 11 hijackings, the Pentagon had
no knowledge of the C-130's encounter, because all reports were
classified by the Air National Guard, the Pentagon spokesman
said. 'It was very hard to get any information out,' McClellan
said. ("C-130 crew saw Pentagon strike, official
confirms", Terry Scanlon et David Lerman, Daily Press, 17
octobre 2001) -
http://dailypress.com
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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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The worker, William Middleton Sr., was running his street
sweeper through the cemetery when he heard a harsh whistling
sound overhead. Middleton looked up and spotted a commercial jet
whose pilot seemed to be fighting with his own craft. Middleton
said the plane was no higher than the tops of telephone poles as
it lurched toward the Pentagon. The jet accelerated in the
final few hundred yards before it tore into the building.
http://www.s-t.com/daily/12-01/12-20-01/a02wn018.htm
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I was right underneath the plane, said Kirk Milburn, a
construction supervisor for Atlantis Co., who was on the
Arlington National Cemetery exit of Interstate 395 when he said
he saw the plane heading for the Pentagon. "I heard a
plane. I saw it. I saw debris flying. I guess it was hitting
light poles," said Milburn. "It was like a WHOOOSH
whoosh, then there was fire and smoke, then I heard a second
explosion." - (Washington Post, September 11, 2001) -
http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html
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This is a hole in -- there was a punch-out. They suspect that
this was where a part of the aircraft came through this hole,
although I didn't see any evidence of the aircraft down there.
(...) This pile here is all Pentagon metal. None of that is
aircraft whatsoever. As you can see, they've punched a hole
in here. This was punched by the rescue workers to clean it out.
You can see this is the -- some of the unrenovated areas
where the windows have blown out.
http://www.patriotresource.com/wtc/federal/0915/DoD.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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Terry Morin, a former USMC aviator, Program Manager for SPARTA,
Inc was working as a contractor at the BMDO offices at the old
Navy Annex. Having just reached the elevator in the 5th Wing of
BMDO Federal Office Building (FOB) # 2. He heard "an
increasingly loud rumbling" One to two seconds later the
airliner came into my field of view. By that time the noise was
absolutely deafening. The aircraft was essentially right over
the top of me and the outer portion of the FOB (flight path
parallel the outer edge of the FOB). Everything was shaking and
vibrating, including the ground. I estimate that the aircraft
was no more than 100 feet above me (30 to 50 feet above the FOB)
in a slight nose down attitude. The plane had a silver body with
red and blue stripes down the fuselage. I believed at the time
that it belonged to American Airlines, but I couldn't be sure. It
looked like a 737 and I so reported to authorities. Within
seconds the plane cleared the 8th Wing of BMDO and was heading
directly towards the Pentagon. Engines were at a steady
high-pitched whine, indicating to me that the throttles were
steady and full. I estimated the aircraft speed at between
350 and 400 knots. The flight path appeared to be deliberate,
smooth, and controlled. As the aircraft approached the Pentagon,
I saw a minor flash (later found out that the aircraft had
sheared off a portion of a highway light pole down on Hwy 110).
As the aircraft flew ever lower I started to lose sight of the
actual airframe as a row of trees to the Northeast of the FOB
blocked my view. I could now only see the tail of the aircraft.
I believe I saw the tail dip slightly to the right indicating a
minor turn in that direction. The tail was barely visible when I
saw the flash and subsequent fireball rise approximately 200
feet above the Pentagon. There was a large explosion
noise and the low frequency sound echo that comes with this
type of sound. Associated with that was the increase in air
pressure, momentarily, like a small gust of wind. For those
formerly in the military, it sounded like a 2000lb bomb going
off roughly 1/2 mile in front of you. At once there was a huge
cloud of black smoke that rose several hundred feet up.
Elapsed time from hearing the initial noise to when I saw the
impact flash was between 12 and 15 seconds. (...) the aircraft
had been flown directly into the Pentagon without hitting the
ground first or skipping into the building. (...) The
firemen were appreciative, as the heat inside the building
generated from the 8,500 gallons of jet fuel was, in their
words, "unbelievable." It was reported that at least
three of the fireman had to be given IV fluids due to the
extreme heat.
http://www.coping.org/911/survivor/pentagon.htm
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A silver, twin-engine American Airlines jetliner gliding almost
noiselessly over the Navy Annex, fast, low and straight toward
the Pentagon, just hundreds of yards away. It was a nightmare
coming to life. The plane, with red and blue markings, hurtled
by and within moments exploded in a ground-shaking "whoomp"
as it appeared to hit the side of the Pentagon. A huge flash
of orange flame and black smoke poured into the sky. Smoke
seemed to change from black to white, forming a billowing
column in the sky.
http://www.navytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-467181.php
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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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"The plane exploded after it hit, the tail came off
and it began burning immediately. Within five minutes,
police and emergency vehicles began arriving," said Vin
Narayanan, a reporter at USA TODAY.com, who was driving near the
Pentagon when the plane hit.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/11/washscene.htm
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At 9:35 a.m., I pulled alongside the Pentagon. With traffic
at a standstill, my eyes wandered around the road, looking for
the cause of the traffic jam. Then I looked up to my left and
saw an American Airlines jet flying right at me. The jet roared
over my head, clearing my car by about 25 feet. The tail of
the plane clipped the overhanging exit sign above me as it
headed straight at the Pentagon. The windows were dark on
American Airlines Flight 77 as it streaked toward its
target, only 50 yards away. The hijacked jet slammed into the
Pentagon at a ferocious speed. But the Pentagon's wall held
up like a champ. It barely budged as the nose of the plane
curled upwards and crumpled before exploding into a massive
fireball. The people who built that wall should be proud.
Its ability to withstand the initial impact of the jet probably
saved thousands of lives. I hopped out of my car after the jet
exploded, nearly oblivious to a second jet hovering in the
skies. Hands shaking, I borrowed a cell phone to call my mom and
tell her I was safe. Then I called into work, to let them know
what happened. But not once was I able to take my eyes off the
inferno in front of me. I think I saw the bodies of passengers
burning. But I'm not sure. It could have been Pentagon workers.
It could have been my mind playing tricks on me. I hope it was
my mind playing tricks on me. The highway was filled with
shocked commuters, walking around in a daze.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/17/first-person.htm
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At the Dulles tower, O'Brien saw the TV pictures from New York
and headed back to her post to help other planes quickly land.
"We started moving the planes as quickly as we could,"
she says. "Then I noticed the aircraft. It was an
unidentified plane to the southwest of Dulles, moving at a very
high rate of speed ... I had literally a blip and nothing
more." O'Brien asked the controller sitting next to her,
Tom Howell, if he saw it too. "I said, 'Oh my God, it looks
like he's headed to the White House,'" recalls Howell.
"I was yelling ... 'We've got a target headed right for the
White House!'" At a speed of about 500 miles an hour,
the plane was headed straight for what is known as P-56,
protected air space 56, which covers the White House and the
Capitol. " The speed, the maneuverability, the way that
he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us
experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military
plane," says O'Brien. "You don't fly a 757 in that
manner. It's unsafe." The plane was between 12 and 14 miles
away, says O'Brien, "and it was just a countdown. Ten miles
west. Nine miles west ... Our supervisor picked up our line to
the White House and started relaying to them the information,
[that] we have an unidentified very fast-moving aircraft inbound
toward your vicinity, 8 miles west." Vice President Cheney
was rushed to a special basement bunker. White House staff
members were told to run away from the building. "And it
went six, five, four. And I had it in my mouth to say, three,
and all of a sudden the plane turned away. In the room, it was
almost a sense of relief. This must be a fighter. This must be
one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol our capital, and to
protect our president, and we sat back in our chairs and
breathed for just a second," says O'Brien. But the plane
continued to turn right until it had made a 360-degree maneuver.
"We lost radar contact with that aircraft. And we waited.
And we waited. And your heart is just beating out of your chest
waiting to hear what's happened," says O'Brien. "And
then the Washington National [Airport] controllers came over our
speakers in our room and said, 'Dulles, hold all of our inbound
traffic. The Pentagon's been hit.'"
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/2020/2020_011024_atc_feature.html
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Northern Virginia resident John O'Keefe was one of the commuters
who witnessed the attack on the Pentagon. 'I was going up 395,
up Washington Blvd., listening to the the news, to WTOP, and
from my left side-I don't know whether I saw or heard it first-
I saw a silver plane I immediately recognized it as an American
Airlines jet,' said the 25-year-old O'Keefe, managing editor of
Influence, an American Lawyer Media publication about lobbying.
'It came swooping in over the highway, over my left shoulder,
straight across where my car was heading. I'd just heard them
saying on the radio that National Airport was closing, and I
thought, That's not going to make it to National Airport."
And then I realized where I was, and that it was going to hit
the Pentagon. There was a burst of orange flame that shot out
that I could see through the highway overpass. Then it was just
black. Just black, thick smoke.'"
http://www.lexisone.com/news/nlibrary/b091201a.html
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"I don't know whether I saw or heard it first -- this
silver plane; I immediately recognized it as an American
Airlines jet," said the 25-year-old O'Keefe, managing
editor of Influence, an American Lawyer Media publication about
lobbying. "It came swooping in over the highway, over my
left shoulder, straight across where my car was heading.
"The eeriest thing about it, was that it was like you were
watching a movie. There was no huge explosion, no huge rumbling
on ground, it just went 'pfff'. It wasn't what I would
have expected for a plane that was not much more than a football
field away from me. "The first thing I did was pull
over onto the shoulder, and when I got out of the car I
saw another plane flying over my head, and it scared ...me,
because I knew there had been two planes that hit the World
Trade Center. And I started jogging up the ramp to get as far
away as possible. "Then the plane -- it looked like a C-130
cargo plane -- started turning away from the Pentagon, it did a
complete turnaround.
http://www.nylawyer.com/news/01/09/091201l.html
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"There was a burst of orange flame that shot out that I
could see through the highway overpass. Then it was just black.
Just black thick smoke. "The eeriest thing about it, was
that it was like you were watching a movie. There was no huge
explosion, no huge rumbling on ground, it just went 'pfff'. It
wasn't what I would have expected for a plane that was not much
more than a football field away from me.
http://www.nylawyer.com/news/01/09/091201l.html
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Mary Ann Owens, a journalist with Gannett News Service - was
driving along by the side of the Pentagon. Here, she recalls the
events of that horrific day and her feelings about the tragedy
12 months on. The sound of sudden and certain death roared in my
ears as I sat lodged in gridlock on Washington Boulevard, next
to the Pentagon on September 11. Up to that moment I had only
experienced shock by the news coming from New York City and
frustration with the worse-than-normal traffic snarl ... but it
wasn't until I heard the demon screaming of that engine that I
expected to die. Between the Pentagon's helicopter pad, which
sits next to the road, and Reagan Washington National Airport a
couple of miles south, aviation noise is common along my commute
to the silver office towers in Rosslyn where Gannett Co Inc.
were housed last autumn. But this engine noise was different. It
was too sudden, too loud, too encompassing. Looking up didn't
tell me what type of plane it was because it was so close I
could only see the bottom. Realising the Pentagon was its
target, I didn't think the careering, full-throttled craft would
get that far. Its downward angle was too sharp, its elevation of
maybe 50 feet, too low. Street lights toppled as the plane
barely cleared the Interstate 395 overpass. Gripping the
steering wheel of my vibrating car, I involuntarily ducked as
the wobbling plane thundered over my head. Once it passed, I
raised slightly and grimaced as the left wing dipped and
scraped the helicopter area just before the nose crashed
into the southwest wall of the Pentagon. Still gripping the
wheel, I could feel both the car and my heart jolt at the
moment of impact. An instant inferno blazed about 125
yards from me. The plane, the wall and the victims
disappeared under coal-black smoke, three-storey tall flames and
intense heat. As the thudding stopped, screams of horror and
hysteria rose from the line of cars (...) The full impact of
actually being alive overwhelmed me. A mere 125 yards had made
me a witness instead of a casualty. Survival wasn't a miracle,
it was luck ... pure luck.
http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/display.var.624436.Top+Stories.0.html
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Gannett News Service employee Mary Ann Owens was stopped in
traffic on the road that runs past the Pentagon, listening on
the radio to the news of the World Trade Center attacks, when
she heard a loud roar overhead and looked up as the plane barely
cleared the highway. "Instantly I knew what was happening,
and I involuntarily ducked as the plane passed perhaps 50 to 75
feet above the roof of my car at great speed," Owens said.
"The plane slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon. The
impact was deafening. The fuselage hit the ground and blew up."
http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2001/09/12terrorspreadsto.html
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Steve Patterson, who lives in Pentagon City, said it appeared to
him that a commuter jet swooped over Arlington National
Cemetery and headed for the Pentagon "at a frightening rate
... just slicing into that building." Steve Patterson, 43,
said he was watching television reports of the World Trade
Center being hit when he saw a silver commuter jet fly past the
window of his 14th-floor apartment in Pentagon City. The plane
was about 150 yards away, approaching from the west about
20 feet off the ground, Patterson said. He said the
plane, which sounded like the high-pitched squeal of a fighter
jet, flew over Arlington cemetary so low that he thought it was
going to land on I-395. He said it was flying so fast that he
couldn't read any writing on the side. The plane, which appeared
to hold about eight to 12 people, headed straight for the
Pentagon but was flying as if coming in for a landing on a
nonexistent runway, Patterson said. "At first I thought 'Oh
my God, there's a plane truly misrouted from National,'"
Patterson said. "Then this thing just became part of the
Pentagon ... I was watching the World Trade Center go and then
this. It was like Oh my God, what's next?" He said the
plane, which approached the Pentagon below treetop level, seemed
to be flying normally for a plane coming in for a landing other
than going very fast for being so low. Then, he said, he saw the
Pentagon "envelope" the plane and bright orange
flames shoot out the back of the building. "It looked
like a normal landing, as if someone knew exactly what they were
doing," said Patterson, a graphics artist who works at
home. "This looked intentional.".
Barbara Vobejda - Washington Post Staff Writer - Sept. 11,
4:59 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html
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The airliner crashed between two and three hundred feet from my
office in the Pentagon, just around a corner from where I work.
I'm the deputy General Counsel, Washington Headquarters
Services, Office of the Secretary of Defense. (...) My
colleagues felt the impact, which reminded them of an
earthquake. People shouted in the corridor outside that a
bomb had gone off upstairs on the main concourse in the
building. No alarms sounded. I walked to my office, shut down my
computer, and headed out. Even before stepping outside I
could smell the cordite. Then I knew explosives had been
set off somewhere. I looked to my right and saw a raging
fire and smoke careening off the facade to the sky. (...) Two
explosions, a few minutes apart, prompted me to start walking.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2001/09/19perkal.html
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October 18, 2001 - Christine Peterson, '73 found herself in the
thick of last month's terrorist tragedy, and submitted this
report. It offers a personal perspective on the events in
Washington, D.C., which have perhaps been overshadowed in the
media by the scope of the horrors in New York. It was 9:30 a.m.
on Tuesday, September 11th, and traffic was terrible. For all of
my twenty-eight years living in the Washington, D.C. area,
terrible traffic was a constant. I'd been in Boston the day
before and gotten home late. That morning I repacked my suitcase
because I was heading out to San Francisco on the 3:20 p.m.
flight. I just needed a few hours in the office first, and now I
was officially late for work. I was at a complete stop on the
road in front of the helipad at the Pentagon; what I had thought
would be a shortcut was as slow as the other routes I had taken
that morning. I looked idly out my window to the left -- and saw
a plane flying so low I said, "holy cow, that plane is
going to hit my car" (not my actual words). The car shook
as the plane flew over. It was so close that I could read the
numbers under the wing. And then the plane crashed. My mind
could not comprehend what had happened. Where did the plane go? For
some reason I expected it to bounce off the Pentagon wall in
pieces. But there was no plane visible, only huge billows of
smoke and torrents of fire. (...) A few minutes later a second,
much smaller explosion got the attention of the police arriving
on the scene.
http://www.naualumni.com/News/News.cfm?ID=613&c=4
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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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Frank Probst : a Pentagon renovation worker and retired Army
officer, he was inspecting newly installed telecommunications
wiring inside the five-story, 6.5-million-square-foot
building.The tall, soft-spoken Probst had a 10 a.m. meeting.
About 9:25 a.m., he stopped by the renovation workers' trailer
just south of the Pentagon heliport. Someone had a television
turned on in the trailer's break room that showed smoke pouring
out of the twin towers in New York. "The Pentagon would
make a pretty good target," someone in the break room
commented. The thought stuck with Probst as he picked up his
notebook and walked to the North Parking Lot to attend his
meeting. Probst took a sidewalk alongside Route 27, which runs
near the Pentagon's western face. Traffic was at a standstill
because of a road accident. Then, at about 9:35 a.m., he saw the
airliner in the cloudless September sky. American Airlines
Flight 77 approached from the west, coming in low over the
nearby five-story Navy Annex on a hill overlooking the Pentagon.
He has lights off, wheels up, nose down," Probst
recalled. The plane seemed to be accelerating directly toward
him. He froze. "I knew I was dead," he said later.
"The only thing I thought was, 'Damn, my wife has to go to
another funeral, and I'm not going to see my two boys
again.'" He dove to his right. He recalls the engine
passing on one side of him, about six feet away. The plane's
right wing went through a generator trailer "like
butter," Probst said. The starboard engine hit a low cement
wall and blew apart. He still can't remember the sound of
the explosion. Sometimes the memory starts to come back when he
hears a particularly low-flying airliner heading into nearby
Reagan National Airport, or when military jets fly over a burial
at Arlington National Cemetery. Most of the time, though, his
memory is silent. "It was pretty horrible," he said of
the noiseless images he carries inside him, of the jet
vanishing in a cloud of smoke and dust, and bits of metal
and concrete drifting down like confetti. On either side of
him, three streetlights had been sheared in half by the
airliner's wings at 12 to 15 feet above the ground. An engine
had clipped the antenna off a Jeep Grand Cherokee stalled in
traffic not far away.
http://www.militarycity.com/sept11/fortress1.html
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"I was standing on the sidewalk (parallel to the site of
impact)...and I saw this plane coming right at me at what seemed
like 300 miles an hour. I dove towards the ground and watched
this great big engine from this beautiful airplane just
vaporize," said Frank Probst, a member of the Pentagon
renovations crew commented. "It looked like a huge
fireball, pieces were flying out everywhere."
http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/6_55/local_news/10660-1.html
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Naval officer Clyde Ragland, who works near the Pentagon, was
stuck in his office because the streets outside were clogged
with traffic. He and his co-workers were watching television
reports of the disaster in New York when "we gazed out our
own windows and, to our horror and disbelief, saw huge billows
of black smoke rising from the northeast, in the direction of
D.C. and the river . . . and the Pentagon." Ragland
described billowing black smoke and " what looked like
white confetti raining down everywhere." He said it
soon became apparent "that the 'confetti' was little
bits of airplane, falling down after being flung high into the
bright, blue sky."
http://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/20010912170838.asp
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la%2D091201main.story
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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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When she thinks of that day, Ramos also recalls another burn
patient whom she treated just after getting Maj. Leibner into
the ambulance. "I turned around and a burn patient was
coming out," she said. "I was afraid I'd be caught
with her in the line of fire." The woman's clothes were
literally exploded off her body, Ramos said. "Her legs were
so bad that her skin was coming off," she said. "She
was really in shock. She had like a vacant stare. She was all
sweaty, her legs were burned, and her clothes were blasted off
her back because her back was bare. We got her onto a stretcher
face down and DiDi started an IV, and they were ready to take
her into the ambulance. We evacuated at that point." They
later heard that the burn patient died a couple of days
afterward. The victims exited the building in waves, but after a
short while they stopped coming out. "After the first hour,
it was very frustrating," Ramos said. "You felt
hopeless," added Lopez. "You can't go in and no one is
coming out." Ramos said she still gets galvanic skin
responses when she recalls the events of that morning.
"Everything was so busy, you couldn't remember
everything," she said. (...) It took some time before
Ramos, Maj. Leibner and others were able to talk openly of their
experiences that day. "We went to several debriefings,"
Ramos said.
http://www.usmedicine.com/article.cfm?articleID=384&issueID=38
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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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James S Robbins a national-security analyst & 'nationalreviewonline'
contributor: "I was standing, looking out my large office
window, which faces west and from six stories up has a
commanding view of the Potomac and the Virginia heights."
"The Pentagon is about a mile and half distant in the
center of the tableau. I was looking directly at it when the
aircraft struck. The sight of the 757 diving in at an
unrecoverable angle is frozen in my memory, but at the time.
" I did not immediately comprehend what I was witnessing.
There was a silvery flash, an explosion, and a dark, mushroom
shaped cloud rose over the building. I froze, gaping for a
second until the sound of the detonation, a sharp pop at
that distance, shook me out of it. "
http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins040902.asp
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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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Noel Sepulveda, a Master Sgt. received the awards during a
special ceremony at the Pentagon April 15. He left Bolling Air
Force Base, D.C., for a meeting at the Pentagon, only to be told
it was cancelled. Walking back to his motorcycle he saw a
commercial airliner coming from the direction of Henderson Hall
the Marine Corps headquarters.. It "flew above a nearby
hotel and drop its landing gear. The plane's right wheel
struck a light pole, causing it to fly at a 45-degree
angle", he said. The plane tried to recover, but hit a
second light pole and continued flying at an angle. "You
could hear the engines being revved up even higher," The
plane dipped its nose and crashed into the southwest side of the
Pentagon. " The right engine hit high, the left engine
hit low. For a brief moment, you could see the body of
the plane sticking out from the side of the building. Then a
ball of fire came from behind it." An explosion followed,
sending Sepulveda flying against a light pole. "if the
airliner had not hit the light poles, it would have slammed
into the Pentagon's 9th and 10th corridor "A" ring,
and the loss of life would have been greater."
http://www.jimroche.com/pentagon_hero.htm
http://www.af.mil/news/Apr2002/n20020415_0585.shtml
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Recognition of Master Sergeant Noel Sepulveda : (...) on
September 11, 2001, Master Sergeant Noel Sepulveda was on
assignment at the Pentagon as a Medic. He was standing in the
parking lot at the Pentagon when he noticed a jetliner lower
its landing gear as if to make a landing an then he realized
that the airplane was actually heading towards the southwest
wall of the Pentagon; and he was standing only 150 feet from
the point of impact and for a brief moment he could see the body
of the plane sticking out from the side of the building,
followed by an explosion; and the blast of the impact was so
tremendous, that from his vantage point, it threw him backward
over 100 feet slamming into a light pole causing him internal
injuries; and despite his internal injuries, Master Sergeant
Noel Sepulveda remained on his duty station at the Pentagon for
seven days after this attack while manning a triage station to
assist the other victims of the attack
http://www.lulac.org/Issues/Resolve/2002/30%20Sepulveda.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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"Where the plane came in was really at the construction
entrance," says Jack Singleton, president of Singleton
Electric Co. Inc., Gaithersburg MD, the Wedge One electrical
subcontractor. " The plane's left wing actually came in
near the ground and the right wing was tilted up in the air.
That right wing went directly over our trailer, so if that wing
had not tilted up, it would have hit the trailer. My foreman, Mickey
Bell, had just walked out of the trailer and was walking
toward the construction entrance."
http://www.designbuildmag.com/oct2001/pentagon1001.asp
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Skarlet, webmaster of punkprincess.com : As I came up along the
Pentagon I saw helicopters. (...) it was headed straight for the
building. It made no sense. (...) A huge jet. Then it was
gone. A massive hole in the side of the Pentagon gushed
smoke. The noise was beyond description. The smell seemed to
singe the inside of my nose. The earth seemed to stop shaking
for a second, but then sirens began and the ground seemed to
shake again - this time from the incoming barrage of firetrucks,
police cars. military vehicles. (...) I called my boss. I had no
memory of how to work my cellphone. I hit redial and his number
came up. "Something hit the Pentagon. It must have been a
helicopter." I knew that wasn't true, but I heard myself
say it. I heard myself believe it, if only for a minute. " Buildings
don't eat planes. That plane, it just vanished. There should
have been parts on the ground. It should have rained parts on my
car. The airplane didn't crash. Where are the parts?"
That's the conversation I had with myself on the way to work. It
made sense this morning. I swear that it did. (....) I finally
cleared my head enough to drive and spent hours getting home. I
spent an eternity in my car. I couldn't roll up the windows, the
car smelled like the Inferno. Concrete dust coats the outside of
the car, turning it a weird color. Eventually I got back here,
back to the place I should have stayed in the first place. There
seems to be no footage of the crash, only the site. The gash
in the building looks so small on TV. The massiveness of the
structure lost in the tight shots of the fire. There was a
plane. It didn't go over the building. It went into the
building. I want them to find it whole, wedged between floors or
something. I know that isn't going to happen, but right now
I pretend. I want to see footage of the crash. I want to make
it make sense. I want to know why there's this gap in my memory,
this gap that makes it seem as though the plane simply became
invisible and banked up at the very last minute, but I don't
think that's going to happen. I don't want to see footage of the
crash. It seems so unhealthy to see the planes in NY crash over
and over. To see the building fall again and again. I saw it
once, the Pentagon is shambles. I don't know that I want to see
the crash ever again. Even the pictures of the blaze are too
much right now as the firefighters try to contain it. It's weird
to watch it on TV while the same smoke drifts by your windows.
I've showered and showered. Ultimately, I think I'm going to
throw away my clothes. I don't think the smell will ever come
out. I've reached my parents. My brother is already on a
Classified assignment. Who the hell knows where he is. I'm
assuming he's safe. I have no idea. Posted by skarlet at September
11, 2001 08:41 PM
http://punkprincess.com/archives/002150.html
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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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USAToday.com Multimedia Editor, saw it all: an American Airlines
jetliner fly left to right across his field of vision as he
commuted to work Tuesday morning. It was highly unusual. The
large plane was 20 feet off the ground and a mere 50 to 75 yards
from his windshield. Two seconds later and before he could see
if the landing gear was down or any of the horror- struck faces
inside, the plane slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon 100
yards away. My first thought was he's not going to make it
across the river to National Airport. But whoever was flying the
plane made no attempt to change direction. It was coming in at a
high rate of speed, but not at a steep angle-- almost like a
heat-seeking missile was locked onto its target and staying
dead on course... "I didn't feel anything coming out of the
Pentagon [in terms of debris]," he said. "A couple of
minutes later, police cars and fire trucks headed to the
scene." Ironically, the passage of emergency vehicles got
traffic moving again, which was now crunching over twisted
metal Sucherman guessed was the skin of the plane.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,9306,00.asp
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I heard a sonic boom and then the impact, the explosion.
... There were light poles down. There was what appeared to be
the outside covering of the jet strewn about. ... Within about
two minutes there were firetucks on the scene. Within a minute
another plane started veering up and to the side. At that point
it wasn't clear if that plane was trying to manouver out of the
air space or if that plane was coming round for another hit.
(Audio)
http://play.rbn.com/?url=usat/usat/g2demand/010911sucherman.ra&
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Jim Sutherland, a mortgage broker, was driving near the Pentagon
at 9:40 a.m. when he saw a 737 airplane 50 feet over
Interstate 395 heading in a straight line into the side of the
Pentagon. The fireball explosion that followed rocked his car.
Drivers began pulling over to the side - some taking pictures -
not quite believing what they were seeing.
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news01/091201_news_dcscene.shtml
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Levi Stephens 23, courier Armed Forces Information Service -
According to one witness, "what looked like a 747"
plowed into the south side of the Pentagon, possibly skipping
through a heliport before it hit the building. Personnel working
in the Navy Annex, over which the airliner flew, said they heard
the distinct whine of jet engines as the airliner approached.
"I was driving away from the Pentagon in the South Pentagon
lot when I hear this huge rumble, the ground started shaking ...
I saw this [plane] come flying over the Navy Annex. It flew over
the van and I looked back and I saw this huge explosion,
black smoke everywhere."
http://www.pstripes.com/01/sep01/ed091201i.html
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FBI evidence teams combing the area of impact along the
building's perimeter found parts of the fuselage from the Boeing
757, said Michael Tamillow, a battalion chief and search and
rescue expert for the Fairfax County, Virginia, Fire Department.
No large pieces apparently survived.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/12/pentagon.terrorism/
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Around 9:40 a.m. I reached the heliport area (beside the
Pentagon). So I got about 100 yards or so past the heliport and
then all of the sudden I heard this loud screeching sound that
just came out of nowhere and it intensified. This huge WHOOSH!
And something made me look in my rearview mirror and by the time
I looked up I saw the side of the Pentagon explode. I was
stunned. It was just so surreal, like something out of a movie,
like Die Hard. The side of a building just exploded! As the
fireball got higher and higher, you saw this debris go up in the
air. I am watching this in my rearview mirror, and then I
thought, Oh my God, there is debris coming toward me! So
my reaction was, I ducked into my passenger seat and I heard
the pitter-patter of pebbles and concrete bouncing off my
car. And the next thing you know, I heard this big crash come
from somewhere. It sounded like glass being shattered and I
thought maybe, at first, it was one of my windows so I popped up
to look but everything was fine. But when I looked to the car
next to me I realized that something went through (the
drivers) rear windshield and shattered it. There was a hole
where you could see that something went through it. I put the
car in park - it is amazing how instinct takes over because I
will never know how it is I kept my foot on the brake when I
ducked at the same time. I should have rammed right into the guy
in front of me. I got out of the car and the guy in front of me,
he and I just looked at each other. It seemed like everybody who
was on the road got out of their cars and just looked in
disbelief as the fireball just kept getting bigger and bigger.
My jaw was dropped, his jaw was dropped, and then, at that
point, something about trying to make sure people were OK
overtook me and I started going around to the people in the
other cars to see if they were all right.I and the guy in front
of me went to the car next to me and asked the driver if he was
all right and if he was OK to drive. He was in shock, you could
tell. He just kept looking straight ahead. He didn't even look
back, he was so fixated on looking north. He didn't want to look
south at the Pentagon. And it took a couple of times for me and
the other guy to say, Can you drive? Hello? Are you OK? Are you
OK? And he said, Yeah, I think I can drive. We asked him again,
Can you drive? and that time he was more sure and said, Yes,
yes, I can drive. Then both I and the guy in front of me looked
at his rear windshield and saw what was about a four-inch hole
in it and the rest of the window was shattered as if someone
took a baseball bat to it. At that point I realized - you see at
that point I didn't know it was a plane, I thought it was a
missile strike - how dangerous things were. And I just
started yelling, We gotta get out of here, to the guy in front
of me - and he agreed - and we started yelling at people, Get
back in your cars! We gotta get the f--- out of here! And I just
kept repeating, Get in your cars! Let's go, let's go! Get the
f--- out of here. Go! Go! Go! And people must have listened
because down the road you heard more people telling everyone to
get in their cars and go. Cars were going over the median on
Route 27 because there wasn't any traffic coming southbound
toward the Pentagon. People were hopping over it any way they
could, on the grass, anything. It was a little scary at that
point. Pulling away from the Pentagon there was tons of stuff
on the ground, big pieces of metal, concrete, everything. We
got up to a certain point and there was this huge piece of
something - I mean it was big, it looked like a piece of an
engine or something - in the road. And there was somebody,
definitely a security guard or maybe a military person, with his
car in front of it making sure no one touched it. (...) I
looked back and I saw the fire, it was just huge and just
incredible. I still cannot believe it. At that point in
time, I remembered I had a camera in my trunk. I got off an
off-ramp beside the Pentagon and parked my car in the grass and
started taking pictures. The whole time I was taking pictures it
was so detailed. I could this huge piece of a wheel on fire
through the black smoke, but I could not see into the Pentagon
itself.
http://www.counseling.org/ctonline/news/amazing1001.htm
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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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"I glanced up just at the point where the plane was going
into the building," said Carla Thompson, who works in an
Arlington, Va., office building about 1,000 yards from the
crash. "I saw an indentation in the building and then it
was just blown-up up--red, everything red," she said.
"Everybody was just starting to go crazy. I was
petrified."
http://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/20010912170838.asp
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There is no doubt in my mind that last week's attack on America
was an act of war. I fought in the Gulf War. I saw bombs and
missiles explode overhead. I saw people die. And when, on my way
to work Sept. 11, I saw an American Airlines jet come overhead
and slam into the Pentagon, it all came back. Hard. I was
sitting in heavy traffic in the I-395 HOV lanes about 9:45 a.m.,
directly across from the Navy Annex. I could see the roof of the
Pentagon and, in the distance, the Washington Monument. I heard
the scream of a jet engine and, turning to look, saw my driver's
side window filled with the fuselage of the doomed airliner. It
was flying only a couple of hundred feet off the ground - I
could see the passenger windows glide by. The plane looked as if
it were coming in for a landing - cruising at a shallow angle,
wings level, very steady. But, strangely, the landing gear
was up and the flaps weren't down. I knew what was about to
happen, but my brain couldn't quite process the information.
Like the other commuters on the road, I was stunned into
disbelief. The fireball that erupted upon impact blossomed
skyward, and the blast hit us in a wave. I don't remember
hearing a sound. It was so eerily similar to another
experience during the Gulf War - a missile strike that killed a
Marine in my unit - that when I jumped out of my SUV, I felt
like I'd jumped into my past and was in combat once again. The
feeling was the same, but the context was all wrong. (...) What
if 'dash two' was inbound to the Pentagon? Then a gray
C-130 flew overhead, setting off a new round of panic.
I tried to reassure people that the plane was not a threat. All
around me people began to panic, fleeing for their lives. Afraid
of being trapped, I drove through a gap in the median barrier
and drove across 395 to an exit ramp.
http://www.militarycity.com/sept11/911_1068139.html
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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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A pilot who saw the impact, Tim Timmerman, said it had been an
American Airways 757. " It added power on its way in,"
he said. " The nose hit, and the wings came forward and
it went up in a fireball." Smoke and flames poured
out of a large hole punched into the side of the Pentagon.
Emergency crews rushed fire engines to the scene and
ambulancemen ran towards the flames holding wooden pallets to
carry bodies out. A few of the lightly injured, bleeding and
covered in dust, were recovering on the lawn outside, some in
civilian clothes, some in uniform. A piece of twisted aircraft
fuselage lay nearby. No one knew how many people had been
killed, but rescue workers were finding it nearly impossible to
get to people trapped inside, beaten back by the flames and
falling debris.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,550486,00.html
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Tim Timmerman : Pilot. I was looking out the window; I live on
the 16th floor, overlooking the Pentagon, in a corner apartment,
so I have quite a panorama. And being next to National Airport,
I hear jets all the time, but this jet engine was way too loud.
I looked out to the southwest, and it came right down 395, right
over Colombia Pike, and as is went by the Sheraton Hotel, the
pilot added power to the engines. I heard it pull up a
little bit more, and then I lost it behind a building. And then
it came out, and I saw it hit right in front of -- it didn't
appear to crash into the building; most of the energy was
dissipated in hitting the ground, but I saw the nose break up, I
saw the wings fly forward, and then the conflagration
engulfed everything in flames. It was horrible. It was a Boeing
757, American Airlines, no question. It was so close to me it
was like looking out my window and looking at a helicopter. It
was just right there. (We were told that it was flying so low
that it clipped off a couple of light poles as it was coming in)
That might have happened behind the apartments that occluded my
view. And when it reappeared, it was right before impact, and
like I said, it was right before impact, and I saw the
airplane just disintegrate and blow up into a huge ball of
flames. And the building shook, and it was quite a
tremendous explosion. I noticed the fire trucks and the
responses was just wonderful. Fire trucks were there quickly. I
saw the area; the building didn't look very damaged initially,
but I do see now, looking out my window, there's quite a chunk
in it. But I think the blessing here might have been that the
airplane hit before it hit the building, it hit the ground, and
a lot of energy might have gone that way. That's what it
appeared like.
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/11/bn.32.html
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Donald "Tim" Timmerman, watched from across Interstate
395: I was looking out the window; I live on the 16th floor,
overlooking the Pentagon, in a corner apartment, so I have quite
a panorama. And being next to National Airport, I hear jets all
the time, but this jet engine was way too loud. I looked out to
the southwest, and it came right down 395, right over Colombia
Pike, and as it went by the Sheraton Hotel, the pilot added
power to the engines. I heard it pull up a little bit more, and
then I lost it behind a building. And then it came out, and I
saw it hit right in front of -- it didn't appear to crash
into the building; most of the energy was dissipated in hitting
the ground, but I saw the nose break up, I saw the wings fly
forward, and then the conflagration engulfed everything in
flames. It was horrible. What can you tell us about the
plane itself? It was a Boeing 757, American Airlines, no
question.You say that it was a Boeing, and you say it was a
757 or 767? 7-5-7.757, which, of course..American
Airlines.American Airlines, one of the new generation of jets.
Right. It was so close to me it was like looking out my window
and looking at a helicopter. It was just right there. . .cnn.com
TRANSCRIPT
http://commemoratewtc.com/transcripts/tr-13-46.php
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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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Alan Wallace usually worked out of the Fort Myer fire station,
but on Sept. 11 he was one of three firefighters assigned to
the Pentagon's heliport. Along with crew members Mark
Skipper and Dennis Young, Wallace arrived around 7:30 in the
morning. After a quick breakfast, the 55-year-old firefighter
moved the station's firetruck out of the firehouse. President
Bush had used the heliport the day before: he'd motorcaded to
the Pentagon, then flown to Andrews Air Force Base for a trip to
Florida. Bush was scheduled to return to the Pentagon helipad
later on Tuesday, Wallace says. So Wallace wanted the firetruck
out of the station before Secret Service vehicles arrived and
blocked its way. He parked it perpendicular to the west wall of
the Pentagon. Wallace and Skipper were walking along the right
side of the truck (Young was in the station) when the two looked
up and saw an airplane. It was about 25 feet off the ground and
just 200 yards away-the length of two football fields. They had
heard about the WTC disaster and had little doubt what was
coming next. "Let's go," Wallace yelled. Both men ran.
Wallace ran back toward the west side of the station, toward a
nine-passenger Ford van. "My plans were to run until I
caught on fire," he says. He didn't know how long he'd have
or whether he could outrun the oncoming plane. Skipper ran north
into an open field. Wallace hadn't gotten far when the plane
hit. "I hadn't even reached the back of the van when I felt
the fireball. I felt the blast," he says. He hit the
blacktop near the left rear tire of the van and quickly shimmied
underneath. "I remember feeling pressure, a lot of heat,"
he says. He crawled toward the front of the van, then emerged to
see Skipper out in the field, still standing. " Everything
is on fire. The grass is on fire. The building is on fire. The
firehouse is on fire," Wallace recalls. "There was
fire everywhere. Areas of the blacktop were on fire."
Wallace ran over to Skipper, who said he was OK, too. They
compared injuries-burned arms, minor cuts, scraped skin. He ran
back into the station to try to suit up. But he found debris
everywhere. The ceiling had crumbled, there were broken lights
and drywall everywhere. His boots were on fire. His fire
pants filled with debris. The fire alarm was blaring.Then
Wallace heard someone call from outside. "We need help over
here," someone yelled. He ran back outside over to the
Pentagon building and helped lower people out of a first-floor
window, still some six feet off the ground. He helped 10 to 15
people to safety. Most could walk, though he helped carry one
badly burned man. "He wasn't too responsive," Wallace
recalls. He helped two other men drag him to the other side of
the heliport then he turned around. "I've got to go
back," he said. Working with a civilian, Wallace headed
back to the building. He could hear more cries for help from
inside. There was trash and debris everywhere. The trees were
on fire. Wallace headed into the building through an open
door, but couldn't find anyone else to save. "After a while
I didn't hear anybody calling anymore," he says. "They
probably found another way out."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/635293.asp
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About 9:40, Alan Wallace had finished fixing the foam metering
valve on the back of his fire truck parked in the Pentagon fire
station and walked to the front of the station. He looked up and
saw a jetliner coming straight at him. It was about 25 feet off
the ground, no landing wheels visible, a few hundred yards away
and closing fast. "Runnnnn!" he yelled to a pal. There
was no time to look back, barely time to scramble. He made it
about 30 feet, heard a terrible roar, felt the heat, and dove
underneath a van, skinning his stomach as he slid along the
blacktop, sailing under it as though he were riding a luge. The
van protected him against burning metal that was flying around.
A few seconds later he was sliding back out to check on his
friend and then race back to the firetruck. He jumped in, threw
it into gear, but the accelerator was dead. The entire back of
the truck was destroyed, the cab on fire. He grabbed the radio
headset and called the main station at Fort Myer to report the
unimaginable. The sun was still low in the sky, obscured by the
Pentagon and the enormous billowing clouds of acrid smoke,
making it hauntingly dark. The ground was on fire. Trees were
on fire. Hot slices of aluminum were everywhere. Wallace
could hear voices crying for help and moved toward them. People
were coming out a window head first, landing on him. He had
faced incoming fire before -- he was with the hospital corps in
Vietnam when mortars and rocket shells dropped on the operating
room near Da Nang -- but he had never witnessed anything of
this devastating intensity.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15
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The morning of Sept. 11 was crystal clear in Washington, still
summer warm. It would be easy to relax on a morning like that,
but outside the Pentagon, firefighter Alan Wallace and the
safety crew at the Pentagon's heliport pad already were too
busy. President Bush was scheduled to fly from Florida that
afternoon, and his helicopter, Marine One, would carry him to
the Pentagon. Secret Service was everywhere and their
cars blocked the driveway. So the meticulous Wallace moved the
fire truck out of the way, parking it about 15 feet from the
Pentagon. That's when Wallace got a call from his chief at
nearby Fort Myer telling him of the attacks in New York and to
be on alert. Minutes later, Wallace and his buddy Mark Skipper
looked up and saw the gleam of a silver jetliner. But it was
flying too low. Maybe less than 25 feet off the ground. And it
was heading right at them. "I yelled to Mark, 'Let's go!'
" He bolted to the right, and a second later felt the
searing heat of the blast behind him. He hit the ground and
rolled under a parked van as a fire engulfed his fire truck,
then blew through the firehouse. Wallace got back to his feet,
saw Skipper had escaped, then rushed to the scorched fire truck
to see if it would run, but the truck only belched fire. It
wouldn't move. So Wallace switched on the truck's radio.
"Foam 61 to Fort Myer," he said. "We have had a
commercial carrier crash into the west side of the Pentagon at
the heliport, Washington Boulevard side. The crew is OK. The
airplane was a 757 Boeing or a 320 Airbus." Although he
was still frantic and shaken, Wallace's report turned out to be
painfully accurate. (...) With bits of cloth and fiberglass
still raining down outside the blackened section of the
Pentagon, Alan Wallace's instincts focused on trying to help
somehow. The truck was useless. So he dashed for his gear inside
the torched firehouse. His boots were filled with debris. His
suspenders were on fire. Wallace and two other firefighters
rushed to a window, where Pentagon employees were crammed
together, frantic to escape the darkness. Fire burst through
the windows above them. The ground burned near Wallace with heat
so hot he thought several times that his pants were on fire.
They began grabbing arms and pulling people out - 15 in all.
" They were all burned," Wallace said. But there
wasn't time for Wallace and the other firefighters to get
emotional. "We just seemed to stay in one mode there until
we ran out of people coming out," Wallace said. And no one
was sure how many more remained inside.
www.gosanangelo.com...
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Terry C. Wallace - Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory - I
looked pretty hard -- and to be honest I can't find any
CONCLUSIVELY above the noise. I calculated an expected magnitude
assuming that the impact was on the wall, not vertical (like UA
flight), and got a magnitude of .8 The noise at all the stations
(closest is 60 km aways) is above this.
http://www.unknownnews.net/cdd060702.html
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Washington, Mike Walter, USA Today, on the road when a jet
slammed into the Pentagon: "I was sitting in the northbound
on 27 and the traffic was, you know, typical rush-hour -- it had
ground to a standstill. I looked out my window and I saw this
plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming. And I
thought, 'This doesn't add up, it's really low.' "And I saw
it. I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It
went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon. " Huge
explosion, great ball of fire, smoke started billowing out.
And then it was chaos on the highway as people tried to either
move around the traffic and go down, either forward or backward.
"We had a lady in front of me, who was backing up and
screaming, 'Everybody go back, go back, they've hit the
Pentagon.' "It was just sheer terror."
http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/09/11/witnesses/
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/pentagon.terrorism/
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Her brother, [Keith Wheelhouse], of Virginia Beach, spotted the
planes first. The second plane looked similar to a C-130
transport plane, he said. He believes it flew directly
above the American Airlines jet, as if to prevent two planes
from appearing on radar while at the same time guiding the jet
toward the Pentagon.
http://indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=131871
Daily Press; Newport News; Sep 14, 2001; TERRY SCANLON |
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Don Wright from the 12th floor, 1600 Wilson Boulevard, in
Rosslyn: " .. I watched this .. .it looked like a
commuter plane, two engined ... come down from the south
real low ... " (Real Audio)
http://www.sun-sentinel.com...
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Ian Wyatt glanced into the sky just as a commercial airplane
roared by about 100 yards off the ground. "I was so scared
I thought it was coming after me and just ducked for
cover," said Wyatt, a 1999 graduate of Mary Washington
College who was walking to his federal job when terrorists
struck at the heart of the nation's defense yesterday morning.
"It was going so fast and it was so low," he said,
standing on Army-Navy Drive. "The only intelligent thought
that came into my head was, 'Oh my God, they hit the Pentagon.'
I could then hear cars squealing all around and people were just
stunned." After the plane struck the west side of
the famed five-sided building, thick black smoke billowed
from a huge crater as fire raged within.
http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2001/092001/09122001/390193/printer_friendly
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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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Just prior to the impact there were three firemen on the
helipad at the Pentagon. The president was supposed to land at
the helipad two hours after the impact, and so they had just
pulled the foam truck out of the firehouse and were standing
there when they looked up and saw the plane coming over the
Navy Annex building. They turned and ran, and at the point
of impact were partially shielded by their fire truck from the
flying debris of shrapnel and flames. They were knocked to the
ground by the concussion, were able to get up, go over to the
fire truck, and initially they were able to get it started to
call for help at Fort Myer. And then they had to put out parts
of their uniform--their bunker gear was actually on fire, so the
first thing they had to do was put out their own fire truck and
their fire equipment and they tried to start the truck and move
it, but they discovered that it wouldn't move. They got out and
looked, and the whole back of the fire truck had melted.
Audio : http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/audio.asp?ID=6
Transcript : http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/transcript.asp?ID=6
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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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Madelyn Zakhem, executive secretary at the STC (VDOT Smart
Traffic Center), had just stepped outside for a break and was
seated on a bench when she heard what she thought was a jet
fighter directly overhead. It wasn't. It was an airliner coming
straight up Columbia Pike at tree-top level. "It was huge!
It was silver. It was low -- unbelievable! I could see the
cockpit. I fell to theground.... I was crying and scared".
"If I had been on top of our building, I would have been
close enough to reach up and catch it,"
http://www.roadstothefuture.com/VA_Sept21.txt
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