What 9/11 was like at the Pentagon

Dakota Wood, during his service as a Marine, was working at the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001. As we approach the 15th anniversary, he shares his experiences from that day,

“I was a Marine Corps assistant to a director of a particular analytic office who worked for the secretary of defense. We actually had a meeting to attend, so I had escorted him out of the building to downtown D.C. About fifteen minutes later, we were informed that something had happened at the Pentagon”

“All the major buildings in D.C. were being evacuated. A lot of uncertainty, rumors of multiple aircraft in the air. New York had already happened. I, and about ten thousand other people, actually had to walk out of Washington D.C. and find our way back home. My car was in the south parking lot of the Pentagon so I couldn’t get to it. My wife picked me up at a subway station. We watched the news the rest the afternoon.”

“The next morning, I walked back into the Pentagon, stepping over fire hoses, debris and everything else. That was a pretty interesting day.”

Wood remembers the lives of those lost when the 9/11 hijackers flew the third plane into the Pentagon building.

“I had some good friends who worked in the Navy Intelligence and Operations Centers who saw the plane come in. Certainly, all those spaces were decimated. They had colleagues and friends they were working with who were killed in that attack.”

“An office that I had worked in just a few months prior was right above where the nose of the plane ended up penetrating (into the third ring). Some of my colleagues there were able to rush into the smoke and debris and help rescue people.”

“So for me, it was an indirect experience. The stories that came out of that were just inspiring because of the personal courage shown by the people directly involved, and also horrifying  with the deaths of the innocent people at the hands of terrorists.”

Looking back now, after 15 years of war against terrorism, we face increasing threats from vicious groups like ISIS. One question continues to surface: what have we learned from 9/11?

When considering the steps we could have been taking over the past decade to limit those threats, Wood believes today’s terrorism shows America’s policy of restraint has been less than effective.

“You’ve heard the cancer analogy: when cancer is detected in a body, the one thing you don’t do is treat it gingerly. You have to go in aggressively with treatment so that the cancer doesn’t metastasize and spread throughout the body.”

“That’s a great analogy for the terrorist situation that we see today. If we look at the Islamic State or ISIS right now in Syria and Iraq, if the U.S. had acted more aggressively, maintained a presence in Iraq to keep conditions from evolving that were favorable to these very violent terror groups, we wouldn’t have the problem we have today.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re invading every country, but you have to act confidently, aggressively, and you can’t half-step because the message is “the United States is involved, but they’re not being effective, therefore the U.S. is weak” and people are emboldened to be more aggressive than they would be otherwise.”


Dakota L. Wood, who served America for two decades in the U.S. Marine Corps, is the Senior Research Fellow for Defense Programs at The Heritage Foundation.

Learning from 9/11
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