Inside the Pentagon on 9/11: 25 Years Later

 

By Col. Thomas Hueg, USAF (Ret.)

The morning of Tuesday, September 11 dawned in Washington, D.C., clear and crisp. The oppressive summer humidity had abated, and the day had all the promise of a gorgeous late-summer day. Everything seemed pleasant: the commuters driving in that morning seemed more polite than usual. The people I encountered coming into the Pentagon seemed friendlier.

I was an Air Force Reserve AGR (Active Guard and Reserve) assigned to the Joint Staff J-3 Joint Operations Division (JOD). Two years into the assignment, I was confident in the work I faced every day in the European Command branch and considered it the coolest job I’d had in my Air Force career, short of flying C-141s.

Our days were spent monitoring events in the U.S. European Command area of responsibility and coordinating actions throughout the Joint Staff, combatant commands and military services, sometimes all the way up to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Defense and President. In some small way, I was making an impact on national security decisions, and it felt good.

My focus that morning was a routine Tuesday conference call concerning U.N. operations against the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. My job was mostly to listen and summarize the meeting in a report.

As the meeting droned on, the first airliner hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

I could hear everyone on the phone call and others in the offices around me exclaim, “Oh, my God,” almost simultaneously. We took a “news break” for a few minutes and then resumed the call.

Fifteen minutes later, the same thing happened when the South Tower was struck. It was time to hang up.

I didn’t have a television near me, so after the first tower was struck I imagined it must have been due to bad weather or gross navigational error. Then I saw a replay of the second hit and could tell the pilots had made a deliberate maneuver into the South Tower.

Clearly, my day was about to become complicated.

“Go to DEFCON 3”

Within JOD, about 50 personnel worked similar jobs representing the combatant commands. We gathered in the JOD lobby to determine who would work day or evening shifts augmenting the National Military Command Center (NMCC), located across the corridor.

The NMCC was the 24-hour point of contact for the National Command Authority. Its staff was going to require our help as we began putting together military support for New York City—hospital ships, working dogs, security teams and more.

That’s when the Pentagon was hit.

We ran across the hallway into the NMCC. I grabbed an open desk where there was a binder containing contact numbers for each of the combatant commands.

On my boss’s order, I called each command and told the watch officer that the Pentagon had been struck and to increase the defense posture: “Go to DEFCON 3.”

At the time, I thought to myself, what a cheesy Hollywood line.

Once that task was completed, I called NORAD headquarters in Colorado to find out what they were doing. The officer who answered explained that they had shut down the entire National Airspace System only minutes before.

“You did what?”

The procedure was called SCATANA—Security Control of Air Traffic and Air Navigation Aids—a holdover from the Cold War. Essentially, NORAD could order airplanes out of the skies over Canada and the United States and shut down navigational aids.

Now, 50 years later, SCATANA was being implemented for the first time. FAA air traffic controllers were instructing pilots all over the country, in essence: Look down, find a runway and land. Now.

By the time I called, only a handful of airliners remained in the air. Around that time, United Flight 93 crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside.

Through process of elimination, we determined that American Airlines Flight 77 out of Dulles had struck the Pentagon.

We began calling the Army, Navy and Air Force command posts and learned the terrible scope of what had happened: 125 people had been killed inside the Pentagon.

Inside a Burning Pentagon

There wasn’t much to do from then on but monitor the situation and respond as events unfolded.

NORAD soon had Operation NOBLE EAGLE in the air, with fighter jets flying defensive orbits over major American cities and landmarks. We issued orders sending a Navy hospital ship toward New York City.

All this time there was the awful smell of smoke and the screeching, piercing alarm throughout the NMCC. Someone finally shut the alarm off around 2 p.m.

Around noon, I was finally able to get an outside line and call my wife, Teresa. She worked downtown at an architecture firm on K Street, three blocks from the White House.

Her boss had sent her to a nearby Radio Shack to purchase an antenna for better television reception. While there, she saw on about 15 televisions the smoke plume rising above the Pentagon.

She returned to the office but refused to leave until I called. Afterward, with Metro service and bridges across the Potomac shut down, she walked back to Arlington to pick up our children from school and retrieve the car.

Believing I was still inside a burning Pentagon—which I was, although the fire and carnage were across the building from the NMCC—Teresa made a decision of her own that day. She vowed to specialize in protecting buildings from terrorism as much as practical. She went on to help design stronger, more resilient buildings for the federal government and ultimately brought that expertise to the Department of State, where she continues that work today.

I stayed through the night helping prepare a briefing for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Around midnight, my boss sent me out to find a fire chief and learn what they could tell us. It was my first time outside the NMCC since 9:37 that morning.

I was amazed by what I saw.

Walking past the A-Ring windows overlooking the Pentagon courtyard, I saw fire trucks spraying water outward toward a raging fire. Outside the building, even larger trucks sprayed water inward.

Eventually, I found the Arlington Fire Department command post under an I-395 overpass. The fire chief told me the roof was still burning along the C-Ring.

“The building is so wide my trucks can’t reach from either outside spraying inward or in the courtyard spraying outward,” he explained. It was too dangerous to put firefighters on the roof.

They would have to let it burn itself out.

And it did, by early Friday morning, September 14. That is when you see the photographs of firefighters and soldiers atop the Pentagon and the enormous American flag hanging over its side.

September 12 and Beyond

I went home around noon on September 12 but was back very early the next morning, monitoring NOBLE EAGLE and helping answer a congressional inquiry that could essentially be summarized as: “How in the hell could this happen?”

Would you be surprised to know there were only 14 Air Force jets on alert on Tuesday, September 11? That’s what peace and the end of the Cold War had brought us after nearly 10 years.

We explained that Air Force interceptors were designed to look outward, not inward. Existing policy allowed them to escort hijacked airliners when requested by the FAA, but no one had planned for what occurred that morning.

The D.C. Air National Guard scrambled two F-16s to search for Flight 93, then presumed to be somewhere over Pennsylvania and heading toward Washington. But even if they had found it, what would they have done?

Shoot down an airliner full of Americans? Who would give the order? And what if they found it closer to Washington—over Rockville, Maryland, or Arlington, Virginia? What about the collateral damage?

There were no easy answers because no one had envisioned the questions.

Time went on. Work continued.

The smell of smoke lingered in the Pentagon until the corridors and closets were finally scrubbed in November. The J-3 Special Operations office began putting the finishing touches on what we now know as Operation Enduring Freedom, which launched October 7.

I continued working shifts in the NMCC with my JOD colleagues for months afterward, monitoring situations around the world.

The Reservists Who Answered the Call

There are many other Reservist and National Guardsmen stories from those days.

On September 13, two new Reservists joined us in JOD EUCOM. One was a Navy lieutenant commander who had been an investment banker in New York City and suddenly found himself without a job for a while. The other was a Navy commander who flew for United Airlines. He had been friends with the United pilots killed aboard Flights 175 and 93.

No doubt there were many other Reservists who were mobilized right then and there and reported for duty in uniform the next day or the day after.

My longtime flying buddy, Col. Paul Vining, was an Air Force Reservist who came to work at OSD Reserve Affairs. He created and maintained the mobilization spreadsheet tracking Reserve and National Guard mobilizations, deployments and demobilizations beginning September 12, 2001. It became an invaluable tool for Reserve Component chiefs, policymakers and legislative leaders—and for ROA.

Then there were Lt. Col. Marc Sasseville and 1st Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney, the D.C. Air National Guard pilots who scrambled in response to Flight 93.

Their aircraft were not armed. As they searched for the airliner, they discussed their attack plan. If they found Flight 93, their only option might be to ram it—Sasseville into the cockpit and Penney into the tail—most likely at the cost of their own lives.

Flight 93, of course, had already crashed in Pennsylvania.

And, of course, there is Lt. Col. Susan Lukas, a life ROA member. Susan worked at Air Force Legislative Liaison as a full-time Reservist.  We know her story, and, indeed, legislation to bring equivalent health care for Reserve forces who have lifelong health issues due to working the in the Pentagon in the immediate aftermath of the attack is named in her honor.

These stories illustrate something I have seen repeatedly during the 25 years since September 11: Reserve Component members continue to answer America’s call.

Years later, while participating in Yellow Ribbon events with Navy Reservists, I remember commanders asking Sailors how many deployments they had completed. Many were on their fifth or sixth.

Think about that commitment—not just from the servicemember, but from civilian employers, spouses and families.

These are the unsung warriors whose stories ROA should be championing: Reservists of all flavors who responded on September 12, 2001, and who are still answering America’s call 25 years later when things need to be done.

A New Generation Answers

One of those stories is especially personal to me.

My son, Army Reserve Maj. Patrick O’Connor, recently completed his second 10-month deployment, this time to Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa. His first deployment was in 2019–20 to northern Iraq, working to bring down ISIS in that part of the world.

Patrick was a seventh grader on September 11.

When Teresa arrived at school to pick up him and his sister that day, his first words were, “How’s Dad?”

He grew up vowing to fight terrorism. He initially planned to join the FBI but enlisted in the Virginia Army National Guard while majoring in criminal justice at George Mason University.

The proudest day of my life was getting to commission my son—twice. First as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, and immediately afterward as a second lieutenant in the Virginia Army National Guard.

He is serious about his profession and is doing what he set out to do 25 years earlier.

Remembering 25 Years Later

Two years ago, I attended a September 11 memorial ceremony at the fire station at RAF Croughton, where my wife and I now live.

The firefighters conducted a ceremony that honored the fallen 9/11 firefighters of FDNY, and the squadron commander spoke about the tremendous sympathy and support America received from friends and allies around the world, especially here in the United Kingdom.

After the bells were rung and the ceremonial fire call announced, that was it.

I couldn’t stand for this.

I raised my hand, introduced myself as a retired Air Force colonel who had been inside the Pentagon that morning, and reminded those gathered that there were many more people who lost their lives on September 11.

I asked them to remember the 125 people who died in the Pentagon—our brothers in arms and colleagues—and the passengers and crew of United Flight 93, who knew what was happening in New York and Washington and understood what was likely to happen to them.

In true American fashion, they improvised a plan and fought back, disregarding their own lives in an effort to save others.

Today, many of the young Airmen I encounter weren’t even born on September 11, 2001. Even many of their leaders were children or young adults at the time.

That worries me.

Twenty-five years later, I fear we are losing our sense of history.

September 11 isn’t simply something that happened a quarter-century ago. For a generation of Reserve and National Guard members, it marked the beginning of decades of service, mobilizations and deployments. Their employers adjusted. Their spouses and children sacrificed. And a new generation has grown up and answered the same call.

Those stories deserve to be told.

And they deserve to be remembered.