Military and fire personnel unfurl a flag on the roof of the Pentagon on Sept. 12, 2001. Steve Helber/AP file photo
9/11 Documentary Recalls How Pentagon Employees Stayed On The Job During Disaster
Military personnel and federal civilians sent a powerful message to the world by keeping the Defense Department open for business during America’s deadliest terrorist attack.
Disasters teach us painful but valuable lessons about survival, leadership and community. They also reveal truths about the government agencies and employees tasked with protecting us.
On Sept. 11, 2001, American Airlines 77 flew into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., at 9:37 a.m., killing 184 people – one of four airplanes hijacked by terrorists that day. The new documentary 9/11 Inside the Pentagon offers moving first-person interviews of Defense Department personnel and emergency responders along with raw footage vividly recounting the horror and heroism born from that act of terror. Even 15 years after 9/11, those stories aren’t well-known outside of the Pentagon or the Washington, D.C., area.
The hour-long special, which PBS broadcast on Sept. 6 and Lone Wolf Media produced, reminds us that Pentagon employees not only tried to save each other, but they also kept working -- both during and immediately after the deadliest terrorist attack to date on American soil.
“The Pentagon had to keep functioning,” said Steve Vogel, an author and veteran journalist who covered the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon for The Washington Post . During the documentary, Vogel recalls that Arlington County fire officials wanted National Military Command Center employees to evacuate, but they refused. The office is the Pentagon’s communications and logistics nerve center that monitors and responds to crises, like 9/11.
They weren’t the only ones who stayed on the job as smoke and fire engulfed the world’s largest office building. Military and civilian employees rushed to the aid of their injured and dying colleagues, drew diagrams of the Pentagon’s layout to help firefighters navigate what essentially had become a labyrinthine pressure cooker, and facility maintenance crews helped make sure the inferno didn’t get any worse. “These were plumbers, electricians, ordinary, everyday people,” said Steve Carter, who was the Pentagon’s assistant building operations manager at the time. Not warriors or combatants. “They were just normal people who went to work,” Carter recounted. “Those were my heroes that day.”
There are roughly 20,000 people working at the Pentagon every day, and many of them continued to work on 9/11, 9/12, and the days after. Those employees and the federal government, through words and actions, sent a powerful message to the country and the rest of the world. As then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said to the press in the Pentagon briefing room shortly after the attack: “The Pentagon is functioning. It’ll be open for business tomorrow.”