One of the Pentagon’s two fire trucks was parked only 50 feet from the crash site, and it was “totally engulfed in flames,” Anderson says. Nearby, tanks full of propane and aviation fuel had begun igniting, and they soon began exploding, one by one. As Anderson ran closer, he saw the three firemen on duty at the Pentagon firehouse pull the second truck out of the garage. “Just three guys trying to put out this huge fire—but they very heroically pulled their truck closer to the fire than they probably should have.”
Pat Wingert

THE GRASS IS ON FIRE’

Alan Wallace usually worked out of the Fort Myer fire station, but on Sept. 11 he was one of three firefighters assigned to the Pentagon’s heliport. Along with crew members Mark Skipper and Dennis Young, Wallace arrived around 7:30 in the morning. After a quick breakfast, the 55-year-old firefighter moved the station’s firetruck out of the firehouse. President Bush had used the heliport the day before: he’d motorcaded to the Pentagon, then flown to Andrews Air Force Base for a trip to Florida. Bush was scheduled to return to the Pentagon helipad later on Tuesday, Wallace says. So Wallace wanted the firetruck out of the station before Secret Service vehicles arrived and blocked its way. He parked it perpendicular to the west wall of the Pentagon. Wallace and Skipper were walking along the right side of the truck (Young was in the station) when the two looked up and saw an airplane. It was about 25 feet off the ground and just 200 yards away—the length of two football fields. They had heard about the WTC disaster and had little doubt what was coming next. “Let’s go,” Wallace yelled. Both men ran.

Wallace ran back toward the west side of the station, toward a nine-passenger Ford van. “My plans were to run until I caught on fire,” he says. He didn’t know how long he’d have or whether he could outrun the oncoming plane. Skipper ran north into an open field. Wallace hadn’t gotten far when the plane hit. “I hadn’t even reached the back of the van when I felt the fireball. I felt the blast,” he says. He hit the blacktop near the left rear tire of the van and quickly shimmied underneath. “I remember feeling pressure, a lot of heat,” he says. He crawled toward the front of the van, then emerged to see Skipper out in the field, still standing. “Everything is on fire. The grass is on fire. The building is on fire. The firehouse is on fire,” Wallace recalls. “There was fire everywhere. Areas of the blacktop were on fire.”
Debra Rosenberg
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Contractors could simply move workers, seal off a wedge, and install new features like reinforced steel columns and two-inch-thick blast-resistant windows. Fraunfelter, a 24-year-old who studies architecture part time at Northern Virginia Community College, had long been fascinated by the Pentagon. When his firm, Amec Construction, won the general contract for Wedge 1, he plunged into the job eagerly, anxious to explore every square inch of the physical structure.

On Sept. 11, the contract officially complete, Fraunfelter was finishing up a few last punch-list items. He arrived on-site at 7 a.m. to prepare for an 8 a.m. tenant meeting. It was a routine job-completion task, a meeting where tenants handed over a list of final fix-it items: touch-up painting, leaking pipes, etc. After the meeting, just before 9:30 a.m., the young engineer grabbed a subcontractor to help him repair a damaged ceiling grid on the third floor of the Pentagon’s E-Ring. The two were in the middle of the job when a strange sound ripped through the room. It lasted just a split second, says Fraunfelter, “A strange sucking, whirring sound, like a loud vacuum cleaner.” Then the sound stopped, the building shook violently, and the lights went out. He ran into the corridor and saw smoke coming from about 100 feet away. The smoke was so thick he couldn’t see anything, but he could hear people screaming. He grabbed his flashlight and headed down the hall


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