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Product Description: Amid all the stories of tragedy and heroism on September 11, there is one tale that has yet to be told–the gripping account of ordinary men and women braving the inferno at the Pentagon to rescue friends and co-workers, save the nation’s military headquarters, and defend their country.
Pentagon firefighters Alan Wallace and Mark Skipper had just learned the shocking news that planes had struck the World Trade Center when they saw something equally inconceivable: a twin-engine jetliner flying straight at them. It was American Airlines Flight 77, rushing toward its target. In his Pentagon office, Army major David King was planning a precautionary evacuation when the room suddenly erupted in flames. Arlington firefighters Derek Spector, Brian Roache, and Ron Christman, among the first responders at the scene, were stunned by the sight that met them: a huge flaming hole gouged into the Pentagon’s side, a lawn strewn with smoking debris, and thousands of people, some badly injured, stumbling away from what would become one of the most daunting fires in American history.
For more than twenty-four hours, Arlington firefighters and other crews faced some of the most dangerous and unusual circumstances imaginable. The size and structure of the Pentagon itself presented unique challenges, compelling firefighters to devise ingenious tactics and make bold decisions–until they finally extinguished the fire that threatened to cripple America’s military infrastructure just when it was needed most.
Granted unprecedented access to the major players in the valiant response efforts, Patrick Creed and Rick Newman take us step-by-step through the harrowing minutes, hours, and days following the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon’s western façade. Providing fascinating personal stories of the firefighters and rescuers, a broader view of how the U.S. national security command structure was held intact, and a sixteen-page insert of dramatic photographs, Firefight is a unique testament to the fortitude and resilience of America. Customer Reviews: Rating: 
Date: 2008-07-07
A firefighter's nightmare
The authors do a good job of capturing the turmoil, stress and confusion of firefighters coping with a true disaster. During the events of the day, many of us overlooked the firefight at the pentagon when faced with the realities of the towers and the plane in Pennsylvania. This book has a good feel for the magnitude of that day at the Pentagon. Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-28
Excellent Portrayel of Events
The authors do an excellent job of describing the events at the Pentagon following 9/11. I write for a blog on 9/11 conspiracy theories, and this book is a refreshing change from that nuttery, but that is not what this book is about. This book is about the heroism and professionalism of the military and the first responders. Every page will keep you interested, and inspire you with the strength of how these ordinary Americans got through this extraordinary and horrendous event. Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-23
A fuzzy video is the only "proof" offered by the government that Flight 77 struck the Pentago
Firefight is primarily about the heroic efforts of the firefighters at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. What is of interest to us is the attack on the Pentagon described by the authors, Patrick Creed and Rick Newman. They write:
- "The plane crossed Washington Boulevard, . . . traveling more than 500 miles per hour and was less than 30 feet off the ground."
- "the planes wings knocked over several light poles that line the road."
- "As the Flight 77 flew nearly to ground level, its right wing sliced into a 750 kilowatt generator . . . The plane's right engine ripped a hole in a fence near the generator . . . the left engine grazed the grass . . . Both wings began to break apart, hurling metal fragments into the air."
- "The nose of the plane hit the facade, . . . about 14 feet above the ground, going 530 miles per hour."
- "The airplane's tail, 45 feet tall, was still attached to the plane as it plowed into the Pentagon."
- "Along the outer wall, 21-inch-wide concrete columns, . . . stood every ten feet, . . . The impact of the plane knocked out eight of them completely, and severely damaged two others."
- "The body of the hijacker who had been flying the plane ended up in the D Ring about 107 feet from the point of impact."
- "The punch-out hole . . . was created by explosive energy".
In my article "What really happened at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001," published by The Wisdom Fund (twf.org), I debunk the theory that Flight 77, a Boeing 757, struck the Pentagon.
At the Dept. of Defense (DoD) News Briefing on September 12, 2001, the words "American Airlines," "Flight 77," "Boeing," "Dulles," and "passengers" were not mentioned.
Standing in front of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Jamie McIntyre, CNN's senior Pentagon correspondent since November 1992, reported: "From my close up inspection there's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. . . . . The only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you could pick up in your hand. There are no large tail sections, wing sections, fuselage - nothing like that anywhere around which would indicate that the entire plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon. . . . It wasn't till about 45 minutes later . . . that all of the floors collapsed."
Arlington County Fire Chief Ed Plaugher, incident commander at the Pentagon on September 11, corroborates Jamie McIntyre's report. At the September 12, 2001, DoD briefing, when asked: "Is there anything left of the aircraft at all?" said: "there are some small pieces of aircraft ... there's no fuselage sections and that sort of thing."
Victoria Clarke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs - "presenter" of the DoD briefing, did not contradict Chief Plaugher.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who from her fifth-floor, B-ring office at the Pentagon, witnessed "an unforgettable fireball, 20 to 30 feet in diameter," was called for stretcher duty. She describes "a strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner. This visible evidence or lack thereof may also have been apparent to the secretary of defense, who in an unfortunate slip of the tongue referred to the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon as a 'missile'. "
Barbara Honegger, military affairs journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School, writes that NORAD's: "Gen. Larry Arnold, revealed that he ordered one of his jets to fly down low over the Pentagon shortly after the attack that morning, and that his pilot reported back that there was no evidence that a plane had hit the building."
Similar skepticism among the firefighters is noted by Creed and Newman.
They write in Firefight, "Denis Griffin . . . had been working in the aftermath of the attack all day, and seen wreckage that looked like it could be from an airplane, but there were so many wild stories going around that he wasn't sure what to believe."
Two statements in the book by Creed and Newman are striking:
- "FBI photographer Jennifer Combs (formerly Jennifer Farmer) went far out of her way to pull hundreds of photographs from archives and narrate all of them".
How did they get access to these photographs, when others have Freedom of Information Act requests pending for these photographs and Pentagon videos?
- "Plaugher came by . . . "We think it's al Qaeda," he said, citing a villain many of them had never heard of."
What would cause Plaugher, Fire Chief of Arlington County, to make such a statement so soon after 9/11? Plaugher was the incident commander at the Pentagon on 9/11. He now serves as "a key member of the IAFC Terrorism Committee."
It should be noted, that to this day, the only passenger lists made public have no Arab names on them, Bin Laden is not wanted for 9/11 at the FBI's Most Wanted, and the only evidence offered by the government to substantiate their claim of a Flight 77 having struck the Pentagon is a fuzzy video that proves nothing -- indeed the flight recorder data released by the government shows that a plane flew about 400 feet above the Pentagon. Rating:
Date: 2008-06-12
Remember the Pentagon
When you think of the horrendous events of September 11 2001, you can't help thinking of the towers of the World Trade Center, burning and then collapsing and killing thousands. The visual record of the events is enormous. The same goons that brought down the towers, though, were also responsible for the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. That act of terrorism is understandably overshadowed by what happened in New York, and more attention seems to have been paid also to United Airlines Flight 93 which was brought down in Pennsylvania, kept from hitting its target by brave and resistant passengers. Still, the Pentagon crash killed 59 passengers and crew and 125 people in the building. Evacuating the survivors and fighting the fire were huge tasks that were carried out with remarkable success. Over a hundred victims were transferred to hospitals, for instance, and only one of them died. Many of the rescuers were in serious danger, but none of them died. The success story is told in full in _Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11_ (Ballantine Books) by Patrick Creed, a firefighter, and Rick Newman, a journalist. This account is big, but through the almost 500 pages, there is enough heroism, conflict, skill, and necessarily grim humor to make it a fascinating look at rescuers at a "career fire", the greatest challenge of their professional lives.
The account starts with three firefighters on station, those who had the dull assignment of being at the Pentagon's helipad where nothing ever happened, and suddenly, "The plane was flying straight at them from the west, rapidly filling the sky like some kind of surreal 3-D video game." The plane, almost 100 tons including 11,000 gallons of jet fuel, slammed into the side of the Pentagon at 530 miles per hour and expended all its kinetic energy within eight tenths of a second. The fire at the Pentagon was more complicated than a comparable fire at, say, a warehouse or apartment building would have been. It was a work location, with thousands of employees within, and there was no way just to shut down the work for the day and evacuate. Another problem peculiar to the Pentagon was that there were so many secret documents and gadgets within. Some papers were just floating away in the winds. Others remained in safes that had melted closed so documents could not be retrieved, or they were sealed in safes that require two people to open, when one of the two might be dead or missing. A particularly difficult problem was that fire got under the thick slab of concrete covering the roof, with these flames proving the most intractable because they were inaccessible. It took three days to make sure all these were out, by the exhausting cutting of trenches in the roof as fire breaks. The roof housed the satellite linkages for everything the Pentagon does. If that electronic equipment had been touched by the fire, the Pentagon would have been cut off completely. It is a long, tense fight to get the roof fires under control. The problem of high-ranking brass was compounded by the White House, which wanted to show scenes of firefighters marching directly into the most dangerous areas of the disaster for debris removal rather than working from the most stable outer areas inward as safety dictated. This dangerous micromanagement was stopped only after a debate with White House officials.
There were plenty of other bureaucratic conflicts during the huge operation. Firefighters in the middle of keeping the blaze under control, were amazed to see an FBI agent run up to them and yell, "This is a crime scene! Don't touch anything!" Eventually boundaries were drawn, and the cooperation became admirable, between firefighters who were used to breaking in and doing fast rescue work, FBI agents who wanted pristine evidence, and even eventually contractors who worked on the demolition of the mess and the reconstruction of the building. _Firefight_ reads well as an account of many motivated professionals with diverse individual goals working toward one big one. It also has plenty of grim descriptions of the dangerous work those inside the building had to do. One section deals with a firefighter inside, carrying his hose, who "... had trouble keeping his footing, tripping over debris every time he tried to turn. There wasn't a flat surface anywhere, and he felt like he was fighting a fire in a junk heap." There are many descriptions of finding bodies, or even more often, body parts: "There were only parts of skeletons, with no evidence of arms or legs. The bones almost looked as if they had been stacked in a pile - like cordwood, it seemed..." There is also some comic relief, as when a military officer, requested to find some Gatorade for the firefighters, borrowed a sledgehammer and went to a vending machine, yelling "This is a national emergency!" smashing the machine and liberating all the drinks. There are many memorable scenes in this fine book which adds an important dimension, often an inspiring one, to the history of that terrible day.
Rating:
Date: 2008-06-04
Incredible tale of the firefighters, FEMA, and the FBI efforts at the Pentagon Sep 11 - 21, 2001
"Shoes. Bits of clothing. Wallet-size photographs. A suitcase. They were routine objects, unremarkable in ordinary life, yet it was hard to look at them. He felt a confusing mixture of sadness and anger that had been simmering inside, rapidly coming to a boil. As he sat on the bucket, engrossed by the sight of the everyday belongings on the ground in front of him, Titus realized that his feet were still dry. He was grateful for the small comfort." Patrick Creed and Rick Newman describe a FEMA worker's observations of the FBI evidence recovery operations on September 12, 2001.
Patrick Creed's firefighting background and Rick Newman's writing talent combine to provide an incredibly detailed look at the efforts of the men and women who fought to save the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building.
The story begins from the perspective of the Arlington County Fire Department, the "first responders" for the Pentagon. Fire Chief Ed Plaugher, the initial incident commander, quickly finds himself coordinating efforts in four different sections of the Pentagon, the largest low-rise office building in the world. To add to the confusion, the FBI arrived to investigate the crime scene; FEMA arrives to aid in the recovery efforts; and the incredible outpouring of individuals and organizations who simply want to help. By 6 pm on September 11, almost nine hours after the attack, the command structure is announced and the first signs of synergy among the various agencies finally emerge.
The tales contained in this book range from the heart-wrenching to the downright humorous. Even with such a tragic event unfolding, it's hard not to laugh when you read of Nero the rescue dog who almost snaps at a wasp flying around Vice President Cheney's hand.
The book's 463 pages go very quickly, as the book is very well written, although readers with a weak stomach should be prepared for some gruesome descriptions in the book. This book is an outstanding tribute to the men and women in blue who led the rescue and recovery efforts for the Pentagon. |
