Remembering the Day the Pentagon Was Attacked
A new memorial park honors the memory of the 184 people who died there on 9/11
The door was less than 100 feet from the conference room. At least one other person had opened the door, seen fireballs blazing down the hallway, then slammed it shut and gone the other way. But Glatz knew from interviews with the DIA survivors that the thick, toxic smoke didn't just reduce visibility to zero; it also dramatically slowed the brain's reaction time. It could easily have taken the two men 15 minutes to get to the door, especially if they had to crawl on the floor and feel around to find it. And once through that door, their fate was sealed: Fire consumed the hallway in both directions.
Joyce began to realize she might never know why her husband turned right, toward the fire, instead of left, toward safety. Some Army colleagues pressed for a valor award for Johnson, Long, and others, believing they were the types of soldiers who would have plunged deeper into danger, to save others. But the only people who knew for sure were dead, and without proof, there could be no award.
Then Joyce learned another detail: Stephen Long had recently undergone arthroscopic knee surgery. That raised another possibility. "I believe he was trying to help a comrade get out of the building," she says. "There's no way to get 100 percent proof, but that's what I have to believe."
Stephen Long's family prefers another explanation. Long's former wife, Tina, says her husband had nearly recovered from surgery by 9/11 and had biked 10 miles just two days before. Long worked in a separate building and had walked without crutches to the meeting. And he was an Army Ranger who had broken his back in a helicopter crash during the invasion of Grenada yet pulled himself from the wreckage and completed the mission. "Steve was the soldier that any other soldier would want beside him," says Nancy Burcham, Long's sister.
Burcham thinks her brother must have sprung into action, as he did when pinned under the burning helicopter, and gone looking for others to rescue. There were, in fact, many victims down the hallway, in the direction the two men went. And like Johnson, Long lived long enough to mount a rescue effort.
Some closure. Pentagon officials, however, have never been able to explain why Long and Johnson went where they did. So family members have filled in the blanks in ways they can live with. Nancy Burcham will be standing beside her brother's bench on September 11, convinced he died a hero. "I think he went back in trying to save people," she says.
After dealing with her husband's autopsy report, Joyce Johnson decided to get a master's degree in thanatology, the study of dying and grieving, and now she works with grieving children. Her daughter Cassie, now 23, just got married. Dennis's father, Robert, walked her down the aisle.
Joyce and her family have already visited Dennis's bench at the memorial, gazing into the E ring offices adjacent to the spot where husband, father, brother, and son died. Joyce and her daughter Dawn will be there on September 11, too, when each victim's name will be read aloud, followed by the ringing of a bell—a variation on the annual recitation of victims' names in New York. Joyce knows that when they get to Dennis M. Johnson, all of the sadness will rise, but that there might be a kind of relief, too. Because he will have a place. Even if it's not the place she wants, next to her.
Rick Newman is coauthor of Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11 (Ballantine, 2008). An excerpt is at usnews.com/firefight.
Reader Comments
Where were you on 9/11/01?
Unlike most Americans I had just gotten back to my apartment at King Fahd hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. As usual I turned on CNN to watch the news nothing much going on I napped only to awaken just after the first plane had hit thinking I was dreaming I watched in disbelief has the second plane hit. I called one of my coworkers whose parents lived near the center, but even before we finished talking the buildings started to collapse! Indelibly etched in my mind forever was the faces caught on camera's has they tried to outrace the collapsing buildings. Many of the Americans left Saudi after finding out that so many of the perps were Saudi, after hearing the blame game start in the papers and the ineffectual attempts to supposedly correct what was obviously a deep rooted problem which had been around for decades. Anyone who thinks the Saudi's are our friends should have heard them laughing behind closed doors has many of the dayshift Americans did, or heard them cursing an disparaging Bush when we invaded Afghanistan and again when we invaded Iraq, funny how short memories are since if it hadn't been for us Saudi Arabia would now be part of the Iraqi republic. To this day most of the changes promised by the goverment have never been instituted!
"...The man who killed Osama bin Ladin" -Bhutto, former head of Pakistan
Why do 120+ Senior Military, Intelligence Service, Law Enforcement and Gov’t Officials, 310+ Engineers & Architects, 70+ Pilots & Aviation Professionals and 200+ Professors all question the offical story of 9/11?
On September 10th, 2001 Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon had 2.3 trillion dollars of undocumented adjusts, meaning the money is missing.
The accountants responsible for tracking down the missing money happened to be in the section of the Pentagon that was destroyed, thus killing them along with their investigation.
***WTC 7
Symmetrical collapse would require all 58 perimeter columns and 25 core columns to be cut at precisely the same time.
Professionals require computer-controlled detonators to achieve this precision.
Fire and Police personnel were warned to get people back because the building was about to collapse or “blow up”, as one police officer can be heard saying to a CNN reporter. What officials made this determination, and how?
Building 7, The Solomon Brothers Building, contained numerous government offices, including the CIA, FBI, FEMA, and some offices of the SEC commission.
Many files relating to the Enron and MCI WorldCom nvestigations were destroyed in the collapse.
***PHYSICS
If Hani Hanjour was incompetent at flying a single engine prop-plane, then how are we to believe he maneuvered a commercial airliner - making a 270° turn at 400 mph all while dropping 7,000 feet in two minutes - and hitting the Pentagon inches above the lawn?
Construction Steel has an extremely high melting point of 2800°F and NIST reported that the fires only got to a max temp of 1800°F for 15 minutes. Why did firefighters describe a “foundry” of molten steel at Ground Zero?
Pakistani ISI Agent, Saeed Sheik, wired $100,000 on September 10th to Mohammed Atta at the instruction of Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of the ISI.
Interestingly enough Mahmoud Ahmad was also in Washington meeting with the future head of the CIA, George Tenet on the morning of 9/11. This was not investigated by the 9/11 Commission.
Over 12 different military exercises were happening on that fateful day. Some involved simulations of airliners crashing into WTC and other targets.
6 weeks before 9/11/01 Larry Silverstein purchased the WTC complex including an insurance policy that specifies coverage against a terrorist attack.
The company in charge of security at the WTC was called Stratesec, which includes Marvin Bush, the president’s brother, as a principal owner. It was also involved in providing security for United Airlines and Dulles Airport (where flight
77 took off from).
See "loose change" "terror storm" "fabled enemies"
A Spreading Stain on America!!!
The events of 9/11 were appalling yet the events since 9/11 have been leveling for the American psyche and spirit. First we attacked Afghanistan soundly defeating all opposition, failing to locate Bin Laden then abandoning the Afghanistan effort to focus upon Iraq. After destoying Iraq, parading the bodies of Saddam Hussien's sons in front of the world, humiliating our military in Abu Ghraib, ensuring the execution of Saddam, murdering the national treasury with war funding demands and completely destroying our financial system with a combination of inflation and profit taking by a greedy administration we have absolutely nothing to show for ourselves except a grandstanding mission accomplished statement, a world record national debt and a grinning idiot continuing to threaten a perplexed world. I fear we haven't enough bleach with which to attack this spreading stain upon America!!!
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