The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [19]
The plane hit just as Jester’s deputy was passing on the “Alpha” alert order. Six hundred feet from the point of impact, Jester heard the noise, felt a shaking, but—so huge and so solidly built is the Pentagon—thought it was caused by “furniture on a pallet rolling over an expansion joint.” Others heard the sound as a muffled “thwoom.”
Flight 77, still with some 5,300 gallons of fuel in its tanks, had hurtled into the military nerve center of the United States at a speed later calculated to have been about 530 miles per hour. The plane struck the west side of the Pentagon just above ground level, going on in diagonally at an angle of about forty-two degrees.
To Penny Elgas, watching petrified in her car, the airliner seemed to “simply melt into the building. I saw a smoke ring surround the fuselage as it made contact with the wall.”
“I saw the plane,” another driver, Rebecca Gordon, said. “It was there … Then it was gone … it just vanished.”
“I expected to see the tail sticking out,” recalled Sheryl Alleger, a naval officer who saw the crash site afterward. “But—nothing. It was like the building swallowed the plane.”
As the airplane pierced the structure, a great mass of flame blossomed above the Pentagon’s roof. There were explosions. The carnage and destruction covered a ragged area of more than an acre of the vast complex.
A total of 189 people, 64 on the airliner and 125 military and civilian staff of the Defense Department, were killed—many instantaneously, more within minutes. Some of the Pentagon’s dead would be found still seated at their desks and conference tables. Forty-nine people suffered injuries sufficient to warrant admission to hospitals.
Christine Morrison, a survivor, described vividly what happened to her. “From the back of the room there was a heatwave-like haze … moving. Before I could register or complete that thought, this force hit the room, instantly turning the office into an inferno hell. Everything was falling, flying, and on fire, and there was no escaping it … I felt the heat and I heard the sizzling of me … Oxygen disappeared; my lungs felt like they were burning or collapsing. My mind was like sludge and thoughts took forever to form and longer to reach the brain, and even longer to make use of them … Everyone lost his or her sense of direction.”
Morrison would emerge into the daylight relatively unharmed. Juan Cruz Santiago was terribly injured. In the words of the official Defense Department history, he was “engulfed by fire. Most of his body was scorched with second, third, and fourth-degree burns.… Hospitalized for three months, Cruz underwent some thirty surgeries, including skin grafts to his face, right arm, hands, and legs. He was left with cruel damage to his face, eyes, and hands.”
Louise Kurtz, who had been standing at a fax machine, was—in her words—“baked, totally … I was like meat when you take it off the grill.” She lost her ears and fingers, underwent multiple skin grafts, and spent three months in the hospital.
Astonishing escapes included Sheila Moody, in the accounts department, who had been seated near the outer wall of the building. Instead of calling out when she heard a rescuer close by—she was stifled by smoke and flames and unable to make a sound—she had been able only to clap her hands. A staff sergeant heard her and got her to safety. Thirty-four others in the department died.
April Gallop, in information management, had brought her two-month-old son to work with her because the babysitter was sick. After the plane hit, and waist-deep in debris, she was horrified to see that the infant’s stroller was on fire—and empty. She found the baby, however, curled up in the wreckage and virtually unscathed, and both were rescued.
The crash site being the Pentagon, trained military men were on hand at once. Marines—doing “what we’re supposed to do,” as one of them put it—went into