Evy Poumpouras - Becoming Bulletproof: Life Lessons from a Secret Service Agent

Nothing is, everything is becoming.

H eraclitus

It sounded like a garbage truck had dropped out of the sky. The rattling of a thousand pieces of metal and glass and concrete reverberated around us, piercing a hole into the quiet September morning. But neither I nor my colleagues in the United States Secret Services (USSS) New York Field Office had any idea of what was about to happen.

The Secret Service occupied the 9th and 10th floors of the forty-seven-story building that was World Trade Center 7. I had gone into work early that day to meet with our United States Customs Service liaison, Lenny, who I hoped would be able to help me apprehend a Frenchman I was pursuing for a fraud investigation. When the first plane hit the tower, truth be told, I was so focused on getting Lenny to agree to put my suspect on a watch list that I didnt even glance up at the sound. Hey, Lenny! Focus, I said when his head started to turn toward that distant boom. This is important.

Then there were gasps. Everyone around us, all the others who had come into the office early that day, slowly stood up or jumped to their feet. When we noticed everyone moving toward the windows, our conversation automatically paused. We got up and followed them.

As we gazed out at the World Trade Centers Twin Towers, the fire was incomprehensibly massive. Its flames poured upward from the gaping hole, engulfing the top of the building entirely. Unable to reconcile the sound we had heard with the destruction confronting us, my mind immediately sought out a mundane explanation. Maybe its an electrical fire, I thought.

A voice came over the buildings PA system, calm and authoritative. We are evacuating the building. Please head toward the nearest exit or stairwell.

No reason was given, no mention of the fire in the adjacent tower or the noise we had heard. As one, we all headed for the stairwell.

An eerie sort of silence hovered over everyone on the walk down. There were no voices, no anxious questions askedjust the sound of hundreds of footsteps descending through the building, and emerging into the crowded lobby on the ground floor. One by one we paused in front of the lobbys floor-to-ceiling windows. The scene that unfolded before us was like a disaster movie playing out in full color, surreal to the point of seeming fake. Car-sized chunks of burning metal rained down from above, detonating like bombs where they crashed into the ground. Toxic smoke and flames poured out of the gaping hole in the tower looming over us. The wreckage falling from the sky made escape through the main entrance of our building impossible, and so the security staff were directing everyone to the emergency exits.

My gun and my badgethe only two things I made sure to take with mewere useless at that moment. I didnt know that a plane had been hijacked and flown into the World Trade Centers North Tower between the 93rd and 99th floors. I didnt know that the second plane would soon strike the second tower, or anything else that would happen that day. I knew only that as a Special Agent, I needed to help, however I could.

As people streamed toward the emergency exits, I immediately started looking around for my fellow agents. I found some of them deliberating in a small group by one of the stairwells and rushed over. What are we doing? I asked.

Lets get the FAT kits, one agent said. FAT kits were the first aid trauma kits we kept in the field office, and which would undoubtedly be needed by anyone trying to escape the fire raging in Tower 1. Without hesitating, we ran back up the ten flights to retrieve them. The kits contained oxygen tanks, bandages, and a vast array of medical supplies and trauma necessities for helping people in the fieldessentially, an ambulance in a bagbut at about twenty-six pounds, the kits were heavy. I picked up my kit, knowing it would be a challenge to get these supplies to the people who needed them most, and looked at the others. There were six of us total. With more than two hundred agents, we were the largest field office in the country, but I had no idea where everyone else was. We headed back down to the ground floor, the cumbersome kits dragging down our shoulders and cutting into our hands.

Since there was no way to get out through the front doors, we used the side doors and ran as fast as we could toward the main entrance of the North Tower as burning metal relentlessly thundered down from above.

Thats when I heard it. A sound distinctly out of place, especially this close to the epicenter of New York with its high-rise office buildings and skyscrapers. Among the cacophony of destruction already unfoldingof twisting steel and shattering glasscame what I only later understood to be the engines of a Boeing 767 revving for maximum impact. A moment later, United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the South Tower.

And then hell got even hotter.

The force of its impact between floors 77 and 85 of Tower 2 instantaneously turned what was already unfathomable into Armageddon. As fire and heat and massive chunks of metal fell toward the earth from hundreds of feet overhead, I felt a strong hand grab my wrist and yank me back. It was my colleague Michael. I hadnt even seen the plane, but he had. We were out in the open and completely exposed. We knew we needed cover, so we broke out into a full sprint back toward our building.

There was confusion everywhere I looked. Some people were running. Others were walking. Some just stood there, frozen in disbelief. As I ran, I saw a man motionless, staring at the destruction above when something large fell on top of him. And then he was gone. Just gone. It still hadnt registered to me that it was now two planes that had flown into two towers, or how that was even possible, or what it meant. All I knew was we had to get to the people who needed help.

When we finally reached World Trade Center 7, Michael slammed me against the brick wall, forcing the breath out of my lungs as he tried to shield me with his body from the fire and fuel and glass and metal crashing to the ground. It felt like an eternity as we waited for the insanity of the massive explosion to slow. Our path now blocked, Michael and I zigzagged our way through the obstacle course of debris, trying to find our other colleagues and another way into the towers. We ran into a group of about fifteen agents and a supervisor huddled together.