- 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.
As I got closer, there was
this enormous black plume.
In the middle of this
beautiful, blue sky morning
in Washington, you had 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 on impact,
but the fuselage blew
open a hole in the wall,
in the limestone facade of the Pentagon
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, 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 and everything.
This (mumbles) popped down,
we was kinda into that area
where everything had been shoved into.
Yeah.
- I left the building
through what's called
the Mall Entrance and the first thing
you could see obviously
was 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.
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 there before me were some
either dead or gravely injured
people laying on the ground.
(sirens)
