The 'Other' Tragedy
The attack on the Pentagon left heroes, victims, survivors, Here's their story
They all remember the blackness. It formed a wall of inky, blinding smoke inside the Pentagon, and Isaac Hoopii ran right through it. He wore only his short-sleeved blue police uniform--no mask, no protective coat, not even a handkerchief over his mouth. "Is anybody in here? Anybody here?" From the darkness, frantic voices replied: "Help me! Help me! I'm over here." Hoopii called back, over and over: "Head toward my voice, head toward my voice! Come toward my voice!"
Hoopii's is a singer's voice, deep and mellow, even in small talk. On weekends, the 38-year-old Hawaiian K-9 cop sings in a wedding band called the Aloha Boys. On September 11, Hoopii used his voice to save lives. He was at the Pentagon when the big Boeing 757 slammed into it.
We are reminded often of the haunting images of that infamous morning, especially the strikes against the twin towers in New York and the heroes of United Flight 93, who perished in a Pennsylvania field. But there was, of course, another attack that day. Terrorists also hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and flew it into the west side of the Pentagon.
_ This is the story of that "other" attack. It is a story with its own distinctive collection of victims, heroes, survivors. We remember still the ghastly gash and the blackened facade of the famous five-sided building. For a while, the Pentagon was part of split-screen America with the World Trade Center. But attention quickly receded from Washington. So much so that sometimes we don't realize that more people died at the Pentagon--189--than in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Inner view. Since September 11, the gouge in the Pentagon has widened day by day, as the damage to the nation's symbolic fortress is far worse than first appeared. Demolition crews use an ultra-long-reach excavator (the only other one in the country is at ground zero, in New York) to remove the rubble, 5,000 pounds at a time. To look at the Pentagon today is to see a much different place, almost one without its geometric distinctiveness. The clean cuts on the edges of the building look as if they might have been part of the original design. Now the building's inner B ring is plainly visible, a view not possible when the Pentagon's construction was completed in January 1943.
In all, 400,000 square feet of office space will be rebuilt. Part of that area had been renovated recently, and that saved lives. Not all the offices were occupied that morning because of the renovation. In addition, the outer ring had been reinforced by floor-to-ceiling steel beams that ran through all five floors. Between them was a Kevlar-like mesh, similar to the material in bulletproof vests, which kept masonry from becoming shrapnel. Together, the beams and the mesh formed a citadel that kept the top floors from collapsing for about 35 minutes, time enough for some people to escape. New blast-resistant windows above the crash site didn't shatter. A new sprinkler system kept the fires from consuming the entire place.
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