9/11 Inside the Pentagon

VOGEL

I mean, this is the military's command center. You have a building that needs to swing into action to start dealing with this new war. As a reporter, your instinct is to go to the scene. And as I got closer, there was this enormous black plume. In the middle of this beautiful blue-sky morning in Washington, you had this-- this ugly plume of black smoke. From where I was standing, you could see these Navy personnel who had come to help pull people out of the damaged area, which was the Navy Command Center. You could see the water between ankle and half-calf deep. It wasn't occurring to me it was jet fuel. The plane struck the building right at about a 40-degree angle. The wings pretty much disintegrated upon impact, uh, but the fuselage blew open a hole in the wall, in the limestone facade of the Pentagon, and--and the rest of the aircraft followed in and continued all the way through the E Ring, the D Ring, the C Ring. When the plane came through it, if you can imagine a room full of partition furniture, and you have this force coming through there. It's taking all of that furniture and people-- people and everything. This hole where it popped out was kind of into that area where everything had been shoved into. Um... yeah.

CAPT. TOTI

I left the building through what's called the Mall entrance, and--and first thing you could see obviously is smoke and flame. And as I get closer and closer, I see bits and pieces of something littering the grass, the field. And the first thing that was recognizable was a big piece of the fuselage. Um, it was white with a big red A on it. American Airlines. And then I came around the outbuilding, and then it was like a dream sequence, because, uh, there before me were some, um, either dead or gravely injured people laying on the ground.

sirens blaring