Gen. Jack Keane Remembers 9/11

KRISTOL: What, 9/11, where were you? You must remember that vividly. KEANE: I was in the Pentagon. It was a horrific experience. My Sergeant, Penny, ran into me. We all have cavernous offices, you know. She ran into my office and across the hall, across the length of the office and I had a television that was behind some closed doors and she opened it. She said, “Sir, something terrible is going on in New York.” And I looked at it, and the first plane that hit, I being a New Yorker, a clear, blue-sky day, I mean, I sensed it instinctively what had happened, that this was a terrorist act. I called down to my operations officer and told him to bring the Army Operations Center up to full manning. His name was General Peter Chiarelli; he eventually goes on to be a four-star general sitting in the very desk that I’m at. And then he gets into the Operations Center, and we’re having another conversation, and the plane hits the Pentagon. The second plane had already, obviously, had hit in New York, and I asked him, “Did you hear that?” And he said no. He’s five stories down. The Pentagon is actually a 10-story building, five up and five down. And so my office shook and some stuff fell down and I told Pete, I said, “Pete, that plane just hit us.” And I went out to my people and I told them, “Look, call your homes right now and make sure everybody knows you’re all right. And then I want you to all to leave the building immediately.” The – during the conversation that we were having before the plane hit the building, it was a pretty unusual conversation because Pete was telling me – he’s monitoring screens down there, big, wide screens – and he says, and he was monitoring the FAA net and he said, “Listen, I’ve got, there’s an airplane that has come up from I95 south towards Washington, DC, and it turned east and went back down and they’re tracking it.” He said, “I think this airplane was out in Ohio someplace and it turned around. It’s probably where they took charge of it and they haven’t been able to get ahold of it.” And so we’re having this conversation, obviously, concluding it’s heading for a building someplace in Washington, DC, and we’re having this conversation and I’m saying, “Well, what’s the plan to evacuate buildings in Washington?” He said, “I’ve already asked that question.” I said, “Well, what’s the plan to evacuate this building? Why isn’t it being evacuated?” And as we’re having that conversation is when the plane hit the building, right during that conversation, the plane hit the building. It was quite amazing. So the – I got, you know we all work out in the Pentagon, so I had some – I have a bathroom in my office, so I got some T-shirts and I told the guys, I kept my aide with me and my executive officer who’s a colonel, everybody else, I dismissed. I said, “Let’s get these shirts, T-shirts and let’s get some water on it, let’s go on down there and see if we can help some of these people.” So we did that for a while and then one of my colonels said, you know and appropriately so, he said, “General, look, you’ve got to take charge of the Army, so let’s get to the Operations Center. We’ll leave the recovery to other people.” And he was right, it was the right thing to do. But it was hell what we were dealing with there and the amount of human suffering that was taking place. It was quite extraordinary. Something people don’t know about that Pentagon is that we were renovating the Pentagon and when they built in the 40s, there was a steel shortage so there were no rebars in the pillars that held up the building, it was just cement without that steel inside of it. So when they rebuilt the – when they were renovating it, they had only done one wedge and that wedge had the rebars in it, the rest did not. Now, he hit that wedge, that terrorist airplane hit that wedge and what that did, the next morning I went down to see it, the chief engineer was down there, the fire marshal, etc. KRISTOL: How far was that from your – your office was – KEANE: Mine, it was about a football field around. And so I went down to see it and what had happened is the Pentagon had collapsed, the upper floors had collapsed down and you had this huge gape in it. The plane had come in on the ground level. The Pentagon is a series of wedges. So you have the outer wedge has windows on the outside and then inside of that it has windows with an alleyway, then there’s another wedge with windows outside, windows inside. And we call them the E Ring, the D Ring, the C Ring. So the plane had gone through the E Ring, the D Ring, and he showed me it went all the way to the inside of the C Ring and just punched a hole in the wall. And we were looking at something that I can only describe to you as like a parking garage that was completely seared black with debris all over the place. And I said, “Where is the airplane?” And he said, “Sir, it was consumed by a 1,000, 2,000 degree heat.” I said, “Where are all the desks and the computers?” He said, “Sir, all consumed.” And I said the obvious, “The people?” He said, “Sir, we’re walking around, we’re walking over all of them.” And so he took me to the inner wall and he showed me where the nose had hit and he said, “This is the only thing I have left of the airplane inside the building.” And it was the strut that held up the fuselage. So it was a piece of iron, of course, it had no rubber associated with it, that had all been consumed. And he said, “Sir,” he said, “you’ve got to understand something.” He said, “This structure held here for 40 minutes before it collapsed and as a result of that, the people on the upper floors, I am convinced most of them got out of that building.” And that’s some of the people we were helping. And he said, “The people where the plane hit, most of those people died immediately because of the concussion.” What happened to the occupants is they had the initial shock of the blast, so you had a blast like an explosion followed by a fireball and then black acrid smoke. And that’s what was coming down the hallway to us. Smoke did fill our offices before we left and then as we would move down to help the people, that black acrid smoke was getting worse and worse. But that building held. Now, just think. He said we had, we only had put 2,000 out of the 5,000 people in there because we didn’t have all the furniture for that new renovated wedge. So I said, “Well, what if he had attacked someplace else, what would have been –” He said, “If he attacked one of the other wedges, we would have had about 5,000 people in there, the upper floors would have collapsed immediately.” He said the casualties would have been on a par and comparable to what took place in New York City. Of course, we didn’t know the scale of New York City at the time until later where 3,000 people had been killed. So as sad as all that was, I lost 85 people that day, and I think attended somewhere around 40 funerals, which was just absolutely remarkable. But the stories of heroism. I left my guys that night at around 11 o’clock and I had gathered them together in the Operations Center and I said, “Let’s just put together a work plan for going to war and what kind of schedule. I want to take one step towards this enemy tonight, given what they did to us.” I said, “This is – we’re going to go to war. We’re going to go after the al Qaeda, they’re going to be in Afghanistan. Let’s just make that assumption and how we’re going to support Central Command from an Army perspective. Let’s just take a step towards that direction tonight.” The – I went out to see the wounded in the hospital and they were spread around Washington, DC. And I ran into these three women who were laying in a hospital bed, and I said hello to them and I was about to leave and one of them said, “You can’t leave until you hear our story.” So she told a story about this lieutenant colonel who was a woman of about 5 foot 3, 5 foot 4, slight frame, and she was with her. And what had happened, they’d had the blast, they had the fireball. The fireball came into their offices. She wound up on the floor, she was on fire. And the other, the lieutenant colonel was not and she put the fire out on her and that woman is heavy. And she – you couldn’t see because of the smoke, it would kill you to stand up but she tried to move her anyway. And she couldn’t move her, so she actually put her on her back and crawled with her down the hallway. Now, down the hallway is black, and there’s all sorts of debris in the hallway. And she goes somewhere in the neighborhood of about 75 yards till she’s clear where she can breathe. She takes her computer and smashes the window and pushed this heavyset woman – this is on the second, second floor – pushes her out on the ledge and then shoves her out. And she breaks her leg. But she heard another woman when she was moving in that direction who was whimpering in her office. So, now this is, she probably wouldn’t have been decorated, in and of itself, for the first event, but she was decorated, for sure, for the second one because she was breathing fresh air, she knew she was going to live. Now, she decided to go back and get the other woman. Then her life was absolutely in danger at that point – I’m not living. So she went back and got that other woman, pushed her out too. She did break her leg. And then she jumped out, and she didn’t break anything. And so I saw three, those three women in there that night. I had a ceremony about three weeks later because I had recognized, just as in New York and it was so wonderfully captured with the first responders and how brave they were, we had similar acts of bravery that day. And so I told the military historian to bring some people over here and document, one, this history of what took place. I said, “This is the first battle of a war, it happened to be in our headquarters and so let’s capture this.” And then also when you come into acts of bravery, let’s get it documented properly, and we’ll recognize those who should be recognized. And no general officers will be decorated. I said that’s – just leave it at that, their rank is enough, they don’t need that kind of personal recognition. So I had a ceremony. It was the strangest thing I’ve experienced, and I’ll never forget it. I had somewhere of 50 to 60 people being recognized and when I went out there to look at it, I mean, obviously, I had seen the list of people ahead of time but when I saw the visual that was in front of me, it was an absolute representation of what worked in the building. So here in front of me, I’ve got old people and young people, I’ve got civilians and military, I have active duty military, National Guard and Reserve, I’ve got people in great physical condition and I’ve got people who are overweight. I had everything that was – that worked in the building was represented out there in terms of bravery and it reminded me that courage – personal courage, willingness to give up your life for somebody else is what we’re talking about here – it doesn’t have a sex, it doesn’t have a race, it doesn’t have an age group, it’s just, it’s something that’s in your heart. And that’s what I was doing that day. And it was an overwhelming experience for me. I have decorated soldiers for heroism before, and it was always such an honor to do it. And I never felt more honored than to be at that ceremony and decorate those people for what they had done for each other that day. It was a – it was a day that obviously nobody in America will forget and certainly we who lived it so vividly could never forget it either.