Photo by Tyrone Turner
Ted Anderson arrived at the Pentagon before dawn.
Chris Braman prepped a kitchen for a prayer breakfast.
Patty Horoho rode in on the train and caught up on some reading.
Vanessa Calderon got ready for another day in fourth grade.
Tesia Williams chatted with colleagues in the Army press office.
Vincent Kam prepared a conference room for a meeting.
Jennifer Punches had just celebrated a birthday with her dad.
For seven people who were at the Pentagon on September 11 — or lost a family member there — the day was one of unspeakable trauma. It changed their lives forever. It tested them to the core. And though it’s now 20 years in the past, for them, the anguish never faded.
‘The oxygen sucked out of our workspace’
“September 11 started like just any other typical day,” Paul “Ted” Anderson says.
Army Lt. Col. Anderson, then 42, served in the Army Office of the Chief Legislative Liaison. He arrived at the Pentagon around 4:45 a.m. and headed for the gym. Afterward, he stopped by a snack bar for a cup of coffee and chatted with a couple friends, one of whom would not survive the day.
When he got to the office, several colleagues were gathered around a television watching the coverage out of New York.
“Lo and behold, a second airplane hits the second building. At that very moment, I got a very sickening feeling throughout my body,” Anderson says.
Anderson walked to his cubicle. He’d long worried about the safety of the building in the event of a terrorist attack. He got up from his desk to check with guards at a nearby security checkpoint, asking whether the building was on lockdown. It wasn’t. When he returned to his cubicle, his phone rang.
It was his wife at the time, hoping he could help explain the disturbing TV footage to her sixth-grade class. On speakerphone, Anderson proceeded to walk them through the concept of a coordinated attack and encouraged them not to “jump to conclusions.”
“No sooner [had] I finished that sentence, it felt like the entire foundation of the Pentagon came up off of the earth and slammed back down,” Anderson says. Flight 77, which had taken off from Dulles for Los Angeles earlier that morning, crashed into the west side of the building at 9:37 a.m.
A view of the west side of the Pentagon where the airplane crashed into the building.Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU
The Pentagon comprises five “wedges” with five rings of offices running through them, labeled A-E from the inside out. Ten corridors extend out from a central courtyard, as spokes on a wheel.
The plane barreled through the E, D and C rings between corridors 4 and 5, entering the ground floor at more than 500 mph. The power went out. Anderson yelled for his colleagues to leave.
“I felt the oxygen sucked out of our workspace,” Anderson says. “As the plane plummeted through the building and all of the jet fuel started to ignite, that jet fuel ignition required oxygen. And oxygen literally came from every part of that wedge of the Pentagon to fuel that fire.”
Anderson heard screams from the floor above. His colleagues sped down the stairwells yelling that fire was behind them. The paratrooper from Ohio ran to the outer ring of the building and kicked open the emergency doors, releasing a sea of evacuees.
Most ran toward the Pentagon’s north parking lot, but Anderson turned the other direction, toward the Pentagon heliport. He looked at the grass; what usually resembled “a putting green” was now strewn with bits of gray metal. He ran toward Route 27, parallel to the crash site. When he rounded the corner, two firefighters were spraying foam on the blaze. Army Staff Sgt. Chris Braman, a cook and general’s aide for the Army’s chief of staff, had just arrived at the scene. He and Anderson began an impromptu rescue operation.
“It wasn’t anything that we thought about. It wasn’t anything that we planned for,” says Anderson, who knew of Braman’s service as an Army Ranger. “It was immediate instinct.”
They located a shattered window on the first floor. Anderson threw his suit coat over the broken shards and asked Braman to hoist him over. Once inside, they crawled along the floor, struggling to see and breathe through the heavy smoke, screaming for people to follow them to an exit. They pulled a woman free from where she was trapped, guided her through the window, and Braman ran her away from the building.
They crawled again along the floor inside, trying to push pieces of wreckage out of the way as they searched for survivors. Braman yelled to Anderson that a man was on fire, and they smothered the flames.
“The entire front part of his body had been burned away. I could not tell whether he was military or civilian until I noticed that his shirt and suit coat were literally melted into the back of his neck, into his skin,” Anderson says.
The man screamed that others were trapped in the corridor behind him. Anderson and Braman carefully guided him out the window to safety and attempted to re-enter the building. But Arlington County firefighters held them back, fearing for their safety. Anderson was “incredulous.”
“We knew that we’re not going to leave our fellow comrades behind,” he says. “This is a battlefield. We’re at war. We’ve got to get our fellow wounded off the battlefield.”
Moments later, around 10:15 a.m., an area of the E ring around the plane’s entry point collapsed, with sections of the roof and the floors below it plummeting to the ground.
“Had we been in there, we would have all been killed,” Anderson says. “These firemen actually saved our lives.”
Anderson heard the shriek of a whistle. Someone yelled through a megaphone that another plane was heading toward the area.
We’d know later that the assistant fire chief of the Arlington County Fire Department had ordered a site evacuation after learning a plane was minutes outside D.C., as former Washington Post reporter Steve Vogel writes in his book The Pentagon: A History. Within minutes, F-16 fighter jets took off from Andrews Air Force Base and soared low over Washington. The inbound plane, Flight 93, never arrived. It had crashed in a Pennsylvania field shortly after 10 a.m.
Anderson, who logged 19 years as a combat soldier, described the scene as “an out-of-body experience.”
“I never in my life would have ever thought that I would be standing in front of the Pentagon with it on fire and a portion of the building collapsed. And see and hear an Air Force fighter aircraft flying close-cover around the Capitol,” Anderson says.
Later in the day, after helping firefighters make their way to the National Military Command Center — which was contending with smoke on the other side of the building — Anderson took a surreal Metro ride home and tried to get some sleep.
The phone rang around 1:30 a.m. His colleague couldn’t sleep and planned to pick him up in 20 minutes to head back to the Pentagon, in uniform. On the way, they stopped at a nearby convenience store; the clerk said they could help themselves to whatever they wanted.
“It was kind of that environment for the next four or five months all over town,” Anderson says.
As they headed up I-395, an amber haze appeared in the skyline, searing the darkness. It was the fire still raging on the roof of the Pentagon. Looking back on his response to the attack, he says the one thing he’s proud of is that he was one of thousands who showed up for work the next day, “in a burning building.”
Each time the anniversary comes around, Anderson prefers to be alone. He still gets pneumonia every winter; his left lung suffered damage from smoke inhalation during the attack. Anderson received the Soldier’s Medal for his courage on 9/11, which he was reluctant to take, and he refused to accept a Purple Heart. He didn’t feel like a hero, knowing there were people in the corridor that day he couldn’t rescue.
“One of the comforting things that soldiers have in their mind when they deploy into combat [is] they know that they’re going to get out one way or another. They know that somebody’s going to bring them out if they’re killed,” Anderson says. “But these people got left behind. And I just see it as a tragic failure, quite frankly.”
He feels for veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars who may have been too young to develop the coping strategies he acquired over many years of combat, Anderson says. He considers himself “one of the lucky ones” who has learned how to manage trauma, treating it like a large suitcase.
“I will take that luggage and put it up on its shelf, and I try to leave it there,” he says. “Every once in a while, I’ll smell something or hear something that reminds me of the event that day. I’ll have to take it back off the shelf, and I’ll have to deal with it a little bit. And then I put it back away.”
‘It’s either going to own you, or you’re going to own it’
Army Staff Sgt. Chris Braman spent much of the morning of September 11 buying supplies and prepping a kitchen in an Army mess hall for a prayer breakfast. He spoke to his wife a while later; she’d called him with alarm over the news in New York. He hung up the phone and almost immediately felt the plane smash into the building.
“I hit my cabinet that was right next to my office, and I just went into adrenaline mode,” Braman says. “I just said, ‘Get out, get out, everyone get out!”
Smoke pumped through the corridor as he exited through a nearby stairwell.
Sometime after the harrowing morning he had shared with Anderson, “the adrenaline surge from the day” caught up with him. He dozed off outside the building near a stack of medical litters. When he woke up, it was dark and the 33-year-old sprang into action. Another officer placed him in charge of a response and recovery team, and Braman took off to gather supplies from the FBI forensic team at Fort Myer (now part of Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall), on the other side of Arlington Cemetery. There, he grabbed tents, refrigeration trucks, flame-resistant suits, respirators and body bags.
A few hours later, Braman helped lead a recovery team in and out of the burning building to start gathering remains. They navigated corridors filled with twisted steel and water that was sometimes knee-deep.
A member of the forensic team had given Braman some Bengay to apply under his mask. “Apparently, it helps with the smell of death, and the smell of human carnage when it’s burnt,” Braman says.
As Braman and his teammates recovered the remains of those who had perished, they made every effort to keep them aloft.
“My rule of thumb was they were never going to touch the ground again, because they died with honor and they were going out with honor,” he says.
A few chaplains stood outside the building, administering final blessings to each body as it passed, Braman says. Over the course of some 60 hours, he rescued three individuals, one of whom survived, and recovered the remains of 63 others.
In 2008, a memorial to the victims of 9/11 opened at the Pentagon, just beside the crash site.Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU
On the Friday morning after the attack, Braman returned to the Pentagon. He had gone home the night before, reuniting with his wife and attempting to get some rest. Yet sleep wouldn’t come.
“In the darkness of the room was the Pentagon,” he says. “I was awake but I was seeing the crash site and everything that I was doing — it was just playing in slow motion.”
He hopped in his Jeep and headed back to the charred building, pulling over along the way to regain hold of his emotions. As he walked down a Pentagon hallway, those moving past him looked stunned.
“Apparently, my eyes had sunk in; I had a thousand-mile stare,” he says. Military personnel advised him to go to the clinic for his physical injuries, and also led him to a group therapy session. About a dozen survivors were in the room.
“These people were complaining that they couldn’t do enough, or that they didn’t do anything; they ran that day,” he says. When it was Braman’s turn to speak, he “let them have it.”
“I go, ‘How dare you?’ I go, ‘You had the opportunity to help, but you chose to run,” Braman says. “Every one of you in here are cowards.’”
Mental health staff members quickly pulled Braman aside, alarmed by his comments. Braman eventually learned that individuals respond to danger in different ways, such as fight or flight, he says.
The onetime Army Ranger — who sustained chronic injuries, including industrial asthma, from his rescue and recovery efforts on 9/11 — continues to deal with his post-traumatic stress disorder. One thing that helps is talking to others about it as a motivational speaker for the Department of Defense, a role he took on shortly after the attack. The decorated veteran (He received a Purple Heart and Soldier’s Medal after the attack) shares what he has learned with younger soldiers also struggling with the mental toll of combat.
“I ask them questions when I’m out, I go, ‘How you doing? … Are you drinking? Are you doing any recreational drugs? What are you doing? How are you fixing this?’” Braman says. “I say, ‘Listen, it’s either going to own you, or you’re going to own it.’”
A ‘sense of camaraderie’
On her ride to the Pentagon from the Vienna station, Patty Horoho, then an Army lieutenant colonel, felt cheerful and “balanced.” The sky was “Carolina blue” and she’d been digesting If God Was My CEO on the train. When she got to the office, she headed down a corridor, but something told her she should turn the opposite way. Horoho stopped by the congressional liaisons’ office where her colleagues were gathered around the TV, absorbing the distressing news.
“I looked at them, and I just said, ‘There’s going to be a series of attacks across the United States, and we’re next.’ And it was just this incredible calmness that came over me,” said Horoho, then 41.
“I walked out of their office, and I took one step into my office and the whole building shook. And I thought, ‘This is it — we just got attacked.’”
Horoho told a coworker where her team could find her, then sprinted toward the crash site. When she got outside, she found a quickly intensifying fire and “gaping hole” in the side of the Pentagon. Wreckage from the plane’s facade was scattered all around her.
“It was this eerie silence. I just remember how silent everything was and felt,” Horoho says.
The trained trauma nurse from North Carolina spotted a colleague outside, and the two set up a triage area near a tree. Horoho had treated burn victims after another plane crash before. In 1994, she was the head emergency room nurse at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina during an aircraft collision known as Green Ramp that killed 24. She called on that experience now.
As the day wore on, Horoho and her colleagues treated several dozen people at the triage site, which moved a handful of times throughout the day in response to possible air threats. Around dusk, she felt a “sober feeling” descend upon her.
“I remember standing there thinking, ‘No one else is going to come out alive,’” she says.
Horoho remained at the Pentagon through the night. She ran into her husband, a reserve officer also working at the Pentagon, outside the building.
“We looked at each other and just gave a big hug. And he handed me keys, and he said, ‘Here are keys so that you can go home,’” she says. “He said I love you, and I said I love you.’ And he went to work and I went to work.”
Life at the Pentagon in the days and weeks that followed were markedly different, Horoho says. Security tightened, with a heavier armed guard presence and metal detectors stationed around the building. She and her husband worked from desks at the National Guard Bureau while they waited for their Pentagon offices to become habitable. And there was a new “intensity” in the air as she and thousands of others logged grueling hours.
“It was very mission-focused,” she says. “People were very laser-focused on what needed to be done and getting ready for war.”
Those preparations — for what became the country’s longest war — were made against a “backdrop of tremendous grief,” Horoho says. The lieutenant colonel had lost two officemates in the attack. She recalls scanning the printouts of newly identified victims and hoping she didn’t see a name she recognized.
“There was this sense of camaraderie, this shared understanding of just being able to look in someone’s eye and not say anything,” Horoho says. “And you conveyed the same sentiment and the same story and the same understanding of the pain, the heartache, the anger that, to be perfectly honest, the anger that our country was attacked and that innocent lives were taken.”
A couple of months after the attack, Horoho rode out to Burke Lake in Fairfax Station to deal with some of her pent-up anger.
“I sat there, and I just wrote everything I felt. And I said it out loud, and I got it out of my system. And I then I thanked God for the blessing of being able to live another day,” she says. “And then I was fine. But if I hadn’t done that, I think I would have held that anger in and it probably would have come out in an unhealthy way.”
Horoho went on to serve as Surgeon General of the Army from 2011 to 2015. Every September 11, her children text her a thoughtful message. Both her son and daughter adopted the family mission of service, taking on roles of their own in law enforcement and the military. After 9/11, Horoho says she and her husband altered aspects of their parenting; as survivors, they now understood more fully the “value of being present.”
“It made us realize the importance of decisions we make every day and the importance of living in the moment, and never going to bed angry,” she says. “And never leaving the house without saying, ‘I love you.’”
‘I want for this to never happen again’
Vanessa Calderon, 10 years old at the time, woke up unusually early in the Annandale apartment where she lived with her parents and younger brother, Jose Jr.. Her father, Army Sgt. First Class Jose Orlando Calderon-Olmedo, had served since 1982, including a deployment in the First Gulf War. Around 5 a.m., Vanessa found the 44-year-old, Puerto Rico native ironing his uniform and watching a taped novela.
“I told him, ‘I don’t want to go to school today.’ And he said, ‘You have to go to school, Vanessa. You have to get that education,’” Calderon says. She asked him to take the day off, but he said he was filling in for someone else that day and needed to report to work. He tucked her back into bed.
“I hugged him, and I said, ‘I love you.’ And he gave me a kiss on my forehead. And he said, ‘I love you too,’” Calderon says. When she woke up a couple hours later, her father was at the Pentagon.
Calderon waited most of the day to be picked up from school. Class was canceled for she and her fellow fourth-graders at Woodburn Elementary, and they passed the time coloring and playing inside their classroom trailer. Some of the staff who knew of her father were staring at her, she says, but she wasn’t sure why. A staff member asked her to walk a friend down to the office for dismissal. There, the friend’s father hugged Calderon.
“[He] said, ‘It’s going to be OK. You’re going to be OK,’” she recalls.
Jose Calderon Jr. had a tattoo made from a June, 2001 photo of him and his father at a park in Annandale, Va.Left photo courtesy of Jose Calderon Jr. / Right photo by Tyrone Turner/DCist/WAMU
When she got home later that day, Calderon started to piece together the day’s trauma in New York, D.C. and Pennsylvania from the coverage she saw on television. Her mom, Gloria, paced back and forth while on the phone. She’d called area hospitals to see if her husband had been admitted, but couldn’t get a clear answer. And she’d tried calling his office again and again.
“We would call and call his office the whole day, the whole night, and it would just ring and ring and ring,” Vanessa says. “The next morning, it just stopped ringing. His phone just went dead.”
For two months, Calderon waited for word on her father’s fate. Her family was in denial that he had died, she says, and continually checked with friends, hospitals and jails for any information on his whereabouts. In late November, casualty assistance officers arrived at her apartment doorstep.
“I was very excited; I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, they found him. He’s alive,’” Calderon recalls. Family members ushered her and her younger brother to another room while the officers spoke with her mother. When they left, she found her mother in the living room, in tears.
“I told her, ‘Let’s go, come on,’” Calderon says. “And she said, ‘No, Vanessa. They found him, but they found his body. He’s not here with us no more.’ So it was very hard, very hard, because I always had the hopes that he would come home.’”
Over the next few months and years, Calderon felt “embarrassed” to not have a dad. She recalls Christmases when she watched her friends’ fathers play with them in the snow, something her father often did with her and her little brother. In fifth grade, her class took a field trip to the Pentagon on 9/11. Calderon stayed home.
“The next day, everybody knew, but I just didn’t want to talk about it. I would isolate myself,” she says. “I didn’t want to accept to the world that I lost my dad.”
In 2017, Calderon earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and is now pursuing a master’s degree in science. When she graduates, she’s considering a career with the FBI or as a police officer at the Pentagon.
“I want to help. I want for this to never happen again,” she says. Another part of her motivation, she says, comes from her father’s perpetual willingness to serve others.
“If someone needed help, he was always there — no matter if he was tired or maybe he didn’t want to. But he was always there, and always with a smile,” Calderon says.
‘Limped along for years’
Tesia Williams and her colleagues in the Army press office usually got to work around 7 or 8 a.m. The public affairs specialist from South Carolina, 23 years old at the time, was relatively new to the Pentagon that fall and remembers chatting with staff members about what assignments they might take on for the day. A small office television blared the morning news.
“I just recall one of the aircraft hitting the Twin Towers in New York,” she says. When a second plane hit about 16 minutes later, an Army officer darted out of their office. “We were all just in shock, just staring at each other, staring at the television, thinking, ‘What is going on? This couldn’t have been an accident. One plane is an accident, but two can’t possibly be an accident.”
About a half-hour later, Flight 77 barreled into the building. Williams and her colleagues gathered their belongings and left through the nearest exit in an “orderly” fashion. As she made her way toward the Metro stop at Arlington National Cemetery, she passed people walking by the side of the road, looking “dazed, confused, hurt.” The trains were packed, and passengers only moved out of the way when her colleague yelled, “We need to get on this train!”
That evening, Williams could smell the smoke of the burning Pentagon from her Crystal City apartment. Her cell phone wouldn’t work, and she couldn’t get through to her parents for a good while. The day’s events gave her pause about her new job.
“It’s very difficult to deal with the situation, especially so young. And you’re thinking, ‘Did I make the right decision choosing this career?’” Williams says.
For that night, and many that followed, Williams couldn’t fall asleep without the TV or radio on.
“I didn’t want it to ever be silent,” she says. “I needed to hear voices all the time.”
One of Williams’ first duties when she reported for work on September 12 was to visit the crash site. She toured the smoldering wound in the building again and again in subsequent weeks, at the request of reporters.
“I am taking journalists through the crash site and seeing that time stopped — the clock is on the wall, and you see the time in which things just stopped,” Williams says. “You see where parts of the office looked somewhat untouched, and then the other side of the office is just burned. You can still smell the fuel.”
A view of the west side of the Pentagon.Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU
Williams’ days were filled with casualty updates and sit-downs with reporters who sometimes asked rather uncomfortable questions of survivors. She felt she had a duty to ensure they were treated with “dignity and respect,” she says.
“Here, the survivor is sitting with bandages all over their body, on their face, on their hands, and the journalist may ask a question that just seems so out of — it wasn’t appropriate,” Williams says. “We’re not going to engage in an interview if you’re going to ask about who’s responsible for this attack.”
Listening to survivors recount their trauma on a daily basis began to take a toll. Williams developed fatigue and bouts of dizziness. Her hair started falling out. And she had migraine-level headaches. Though a doctor prescribed antidepressants, she didn’t take them.
“I limped along for years,” says Williams, who at the time didn’t think she had a right to express her stress at work.
“There was this culture at the time [in which] I didn’t want to speak up; I didn’t want to say, ‘I feel sad every day,’” she says. “I didn’t want anyone to think that I was weak, in comparison to all these other people who day in and day out were putting their life on the line.”
As Williams progressed through a series of media relations roles with the Army in the years that followed, the stories she helped tell moved from September 11 victims to veterans of the war on terror that the attack precipitated.
“After 9/11 happens, so many people … volunteered to put their life on the line to serve their country,” Williams says. “These young people — 18, 19, 20 years old — some of them didn’t make it back. And so now I’m telling that story.”
Three years ago, Williams started getting treatment to help her process nearly two decades of accumulated stress. Over the years, she says she witnessed a change in attitude toward mental health treatment in the military.
“I do the believe the tide has changed. And you can see it; they recognize that if you get the treatment, then perhaps that makes you a better soldier, a better airman, a better sailor and so forth,” she says. “Folks are definitely encouraged to seek that treatment now.”
Finding new ways to ‘heal’
Army Lt. Col. Vincent Kam was preparing a meeting on the morning of September 11. The Army branch chief, then 44, was a civil engineer who had recently served in a counterterrorism unit at the Pentagon. As Kam began the meeting near the Pentagon’s west side, a thunderous boom suddenly shook the room, knocking dust from the ceiling. The power went out. And a large fireball rocketed toward the window. He saw thick black smoke as he looked out.
“There’s a distinct smell that I can never forget, [a] smell I’ve never encountered,” Kam says. “This turned out to be the smell of burning jet fuel.”
When Kam and his colleagues walked into the hallway, dense smoke met them.
“I knew something was really drastically wrong. But I had no idea the plane had hit the building,” Kam says.
The plane entered the building just below Kam’s conference room. He was standing in Wedge 1 of the building’s five wedges, the first to be renovated in a long-anticipated building-wide project to make the nearly 60-year-old structure safer and more secure. During the Wedge 1 renovation, which began in 1998, thousands of employees relocated to temporary offices, while their former workspaces were gutted and outfitted with sprinklers, fire-suppression doors and blast-proof windows.
One of the few items recovered from Kam’s office, which was right above the impact area, was this 1992 personal photo of him and his spouse, Cynthia Kam. The document describes the photo.Courtesy of Vincent Kam
By September, thousands of employees had yet to move back into their refurbished offices in Wedge 1 and thousands more had relocated in Wedge 2 — sections of which the plane also passed through — for the next stage of the renovation. Rather than some 9,500 workers who potentially could have been present that day, roughly 4,600 were in those wedges on September 11, Steve Vogel writes in The Pentagon.
Kam had been instrumental in many of those decisions to improve the building’s safety; after leading teams to assess the damage of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. Air Force members, he helped develop construction standards for the Pentagon that could withstand terrorist assaults.
Shortly after the attack, Kam and his colleagues made it to the inner courtyard of the building, and then filed out the Metro entrance. He ran into a colleague from the counterterrorism unit at the south parking lot. They tried to assess the situation when the crowd was diverted under I-395 toward Pentagon City Mall. Amid the chaos, they lost each other. He couldn’t find her again.
Outside a restaurant window, Kam caught glimpses of that morning’s news coverage from a television inside.
“There was no information coming forth from the Pentagon that can tell us what’s going on,” Kam says.
Though he and others who had evacuated to the Arlington mall were safe for the time being, they had yet to find a ride home. Kam had left his personal belongings in his office and asked others nearby to call home and try his wife, Cynthia, at work. But cell service was spotty, and the calls wouldn’t go through or the line was busy.
About four hours after evacuating, Kam boarded a crowded bus connecting to a VRE station in Woodbridge.
It took a few days before Kam could return to his post at the Pentagon. The Army Transformation Office had sustained fire and structural damage. He had lost two colleagues in his unit. The funerals began.
When he returned, he and his team were energized, temporarily setting up shop in the Pentagon food court. In the coming weeks, they worked 10- to 14-hour days, preparing for war.
“The whole Army Staff changed to a war-footing overnight,” he says. “We changed the uniform of the day from the normal office attire into the battle dress uniform. Twenty years after 9/11, we still see the field uniform [as] the dress code for the Pentagon unless we are visiting Congress.”
In 2008, a memorial to the victims of 9/11 opened at the Pentagon, just beside the crash site. There, 184 stainless steel and granite benches — one for each victim at the building or aboard Flight 77 — rest above rectangular reflecting pools that illuminate in the evening. Several dozen crape myrtles dot the landscape, offering shade to visitors.
Vincent Kam walks through the Pentagon Memorial.Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU
Kam, who retired from the military in 2003 and now serves in a civilian capacity as an Army branch chief, visits the memorial each year for a service marking the anniversary of the attack.
“The crowds might have thinned out a little bit more each year, but I can still see the same faces,” he says.
September 11 began a new phase of service in Kam’s life. He raises funds for the families of wounded veterans at Walter Reed. He became a licensed acupuncturist and now volunteers his time treating patients at a clinic inside the Pentagon. Volunteerism is one way he helps others, and himself, work through personal pain.
“This is part of what I call the healing,” he says.
‘The worst lottery in the world’
The fall of 2001 was shaping up to be a great season for Jennifer Punches. She’d just landed a promotion and a corner office at work. And she’d begun dating the man she’d eventually marry. She saw her dad, Navy Capt. Jack Punches, on Sept. 10 — he’d come over to belatedly celebrate her birthday. The next morning, Jennifer, then 24, was at work near Fair Oaks Mall when her boyfriend called. He was working at a Red Cross office in Rosslyn and saw a plume of smoke emerging from the Pentagon.
“He said, ‘The Pentagon is on fire,’” Jennifer says.
Jennifer called her mother, Janice, to urge her to call Jack. Earlier that morning, Janice and Jack had spoken after the first plane hit the Twin Towers, Jennifer says, and Jack told her he was headed into the Navy Command Center. When Janice called him after the plane hit the Pentagon, he didn’t answer.
Punches had gone home mid-morning, with her mother, brother and boyfriend soon joining her.
“We just all sat together for a while,” she says. The idea that her father might have perished in the attack wasn’t yet a real possibility. “We were concerned, but there’s no way that this is happening. … It’s winning the worst lottery in the world.”
In the first week after the attack, Jennifer and her family didn’t leave the house. Food kept arriving, but she wasn’t hungry. Journalists hounded them, but her family didn’t want to talk. She knew her father had likely passed away, yet Jennifer held out hope that he might have survived within some safe crevice of the damaged area. Eventually, she and a large group from her family visited the crash site.
“I’d seen it on TV, obviously, but seeing it in person — you realize there’s not a pocket in there [in which] somebody would have survived,” she says.
In late September, before they had received his remains, the family held a large memorial service for Jack at a Centreville church. Jennifer’s great-grandmother, Marie Punches, attended the service in a wheelchair. In November, she died at age 90 from a heart attack.
“I always thought her heart was just broken,” Jennifer says. “That always angered me — how could this woman that had lived through so much, why did she have to bury her grandson?”
Navy Capt. Jack Punches, seen in this family photo from 2000, had celebrated Jennifer’s belated birthday the night before the attack. From left, Jennifer Punches, Jack Punches, Janice Punches, and Jeremy Punches, Jennifer’s brother.Courtesy of Jennifer Punches
About two years after her father died, Punches sought the help of a therapist. She had attended some family therapy sessions in the immediate aftermath of the loss, but stumbled on a new challenge when planning her wedding.
“I remember thinking, ‘There’s no way I’ll make it down the aisle,’” she says. With a counselor, Jennifer (now Jennifer Punches Botta) prepared for a wedding day without her dad by her side.
Jack Punches, who was 50 at the time of the attack, had grown up in a small town in Illinois called Tower Hill. He was the valedictorian of a class of 12, and as the only boy, took 11 girls to his senior prom, Jennifer says. As a father, he coached baseball, volunteered at school, and did his best to make sure he was home for dinner.
“It’s hard for me to wrap my head around how much he actually was present,” says Jennifer, who now has two kids of her own. She named her son Jack.
When the 9/11 anniversary arrives each year, Jennifer likes to be by herself. In the past two decades, she has been hesitant to share her experience with others; you could be close friends with her for years without knowing she lost her father on September 11, she says.
“I found when I talk about it, I spend a lot of time comforting [other] people,” she says. “I just withdrew from discussing it with people because it was hard for me to take on their grief.”
This story originally appeared on dcist.com