Mark Joseph Mongilutz - Voices of the 9/11 Pentagon Recovery Effort: Essays from the U.S. Armys Old Guard

Voices of the 9/11 Pentagon Recovery Effort

Also by Mark Joseph Mongilutz

Solemn Duty in the Old Guard: From Arlington National Cemetery to the Pentagon on 9/11 in Americas Oldest Regiment (2018)

Voices of the 9/11 Pentagon Recovery Effort

Essays from the U.S. Armys Old Guard

Edited by Mark Joseph Mongilutz

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Je f ferson, North Carolina

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Names: Mongilutz, Mark Joseph, editor.

Title: Voices of the 9/11 Pentagon recovery effort : essays from the U.S. Armys Old Guard / edited by Mark Joseph Mongilutz.

Other titles: Essays from the U.S. Armys Old Guard

Description: Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2020 | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020020178 | ISBN 9781476680439 (paperback : acid free paper ) ISBN 9781476639475 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United States. Army. Infantry Regiment, 3rdHistory21st century. | September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. | Pentagon (Va.)History21st century. | Operation Noble Eagle, 2001History.

Classification: LCC UA29 3d .V65 2020 | DDC 975.5/295044dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020178

British Library cataloguing data are available

ISBN 978-1-4766-8043-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4766-3947-5 (ebook)

2020 Mark Joseph Mongilutz. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,without permission in writing from the publisher.

On the cover: The Pentagon the evening after terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the building on September 11, 2001 (Everett Historical, Shutterstock); Personnel sifting through debris inside the Pentagon following the attack on September 11, 2001, Arlington Virginia (FBI: The Vault).

Printed in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640

www.mcfarlandpub.com

Editors Note

The work of editing a manuscript is at turns taxing and rewarding. It is a process requiring equal parts literary sensitivity, artistic instinct, and grammatical knowledge. And lets not leave out patience. One needs a good deal of that to visit and re-visit the same bodies of material as often as the process demands.

Editing the words of soldiers and veterans alongside whom I served so many years past was nothing short of an honor. It was also amusing at times. I was very often able to hear the precise inflection of a given contributors authentic speaking voice; ensuring their written words wholly maintained possession of that authenticity was my guiding priority. To that end, I was careful to avoid reworking certain passages to my own liking if doing so would in any way disfigure a given contributors communication style.

These essays adhere to convention on the whole but read in large measure as they were submitted. Minor corrections were expected by all who contributed, and I have done my part in that regard. Otherwise, the words youll read are the words they wrote.

Table of Contents

Preface

I am unworthy of the honor and goodness which jointly circulate in and around this literary undertaking. That much is only true.

Collecting, editing, and sequencing the reflections, memories, and stories of so many good and extraordinary men has amounted to a relentless exercise in humility, one whose attendant labors have necessitated my coming to intimately know the wounded face of my foremost shortcomings its every line, scar, and blemish.

But the work needs to be done. It does.

It does.

Though seemingly having befallen our nation an abbreviated eon past, the events of September 11, 2001, seem almost immediately current when their images find purchase upon our eyes, when the trauma they yielded resurfaces from the soil of suppressed memory, when the toll they exacted assumes personal, rather than monumental, form.

For reasons both understandable and inevitable, the colloquially termed 9/11 attacks are most symbolically linked to the World Trade Center and, by extension, to New York City itself. The Pentagons destruction was chronicled to a lesser degree via televisual broadcast than were the streets surrounding the World Trade Center, and the brutal collision it absorbed was not (to my knowledge) captured via civilian camcorder.

Again, for reasons as understandable as they are inevitable, the Pentagon tends to exist somewhat on the periphery of our nations collective 9/11 memory. With several exceptionsthe men and women, military and civilian both, who took part to one degree or another in the recovery effort, in extinguishing the hostile fires, in tending to the wounded, in supporting the first responders and the tireless laborers. And to this should very much be added those servicemembers and government workers who were present in the Pentagon when it was struck, but whose lives were spared by virtue of not occupying, in that fatal moment, the area of impact.

The stories herein collectively capture a specific chapter of the Pentagon recovery effortthe one enacted by soldiers of the 3rd United States Infantry Regiment (the Old Guard), the Armys oldest infantry unit still operating in an active duty capacity.

I closely chronicled my individual account of the Pentagon Recovery Effort in my memoir Solemn Duty in the Old Guard and did so with the aim of conveying elements both emotional and narratively factual for the readers benefit. And while I would not change so much as a syllable of my writings therein, they capture the thoughts of but a single soldierone man, one limited perspective, one crop of memories.

But the hunger for a more complete picture of the recovery process far exceeds the yield of a single crops finite harvest.

So it is that I have enlisted the hearts and recollections of several of my Old Guard brothers, some of whom I served immediately alongside during the effort, some of whom I saw infrequently if at all until our part in the process had come to an end. The collection serves as a literary dais from which these regimental veterans will impart upon you what they remember, relate to you what they have learned, and render themselves emotionally unarmored throughout.

They will do so functionally in succession, but spiritually in unison. Theirs are voices harmonized in service to a tale worth immortalizing, to pain worth acknowledging, to camaraderie worth celebrating, to sacrifice worth honoring, to truth worth embalming, to wisdom worth echoing, to innocence worth resuscitating, to a national unity worth reclaiming.

These are the voices of my brothers. Hear them, as I have, and come away better for it as I have.

Introduction

Mark Joseph Mongilutz

Was any of it real? Any of it?

The answer, of course, is yes. It was much too real. It just wasnt what we had expected. Not one among us. How could we? How could anyone?

Like so many of those with whom I served in the Old Guard, I had joined the Army during the tail-end of Bill Clintons presidency. And while the 1990s were not necessarily a halcyon period for all human beings, they were certainly such a period for many middle-class Americans. Prosperity and happiness were effectively our republics co-consuls throughout the final years of the 20th century, the occasional small-scale crisis and aberrational act of domestic terrorism notwithstanding.