Five current and former soldiers share their stories of where they were in the Pentagon when it was hit on September 11, 2001.
When he learned that two planes hit the Twin Towers in New York City on Sept.11,2001, Gerry Kitzhaber called his wife. Kitzhaber, then a colonel at the Pentagon working in the Army’s collective training division, told his wife to turn on the television at home and see if she could find out what was going on. They hung up as he was getting ready to leave for a meeting downstairs from his office at the Pentagon. He had been delayed for one reason or another, but as he was just about to walk out the door, his wife called him back. They spoke for a few minutes about what she was seeing, and ultimately decided they’d cancel their dinner that night. It was his birthday. “She asked me if I was okay there, am I safe in the Pentagon,” Kitzhaber recalled to reporters this week. “And of course I said well sure, nothing happens here.” As he hung up the phone and turned around from his desk, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the west side of the building, hitting exactly where Kitzhaber would have been walking to his meeting. Kitzhaber, now the deputy for training, readiness, and modernization to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, is just one of several veterans and soldiers who recounted the events of September 11,2001, this week ahead of the day’s 20th anniversary. One hundred and eighty four people were killed at the Pentagon in the attack. On that beautiful fall morning in 2001, Army Lt. Col. Marilyn Wills was in a conference room preparing to give her part of a presentation when the plane hit. She was blown to the other side of the room, and in the pitch-black darkness she helped lead another woman to safety as they crawled on their hands and knees. At one point the woman said she couldn’t go any further. Her nylon stockings were melting to her legs, Wills recalled. “She said ‘Colonel, I can’t go any further.’ I said ‘Oh yes you can. Get on my back, I’ll carry you,’” she said. The two women eventually got to a window which they broke with the help of a soldier and her chief of staff, another colonel, by throwing a printer against it and repeatedly kicking the frame. When the woman Wills was with and the other soldier were evacuated out of the window, Wills and the colonel tried to find any other survivors lost in the dark and heavy smoke before they also got out through the window. “We yelled and screamed, but no one came,” Wills said. “Col. McNair at that point said ‘Colonel, you will get out of this window right now.
