When we remember Sept. 11, 2001, we can’t help but think in haunting visuals: a jet bursting into a fireball as it impales a skyscraper; office workers falling from the tallest windows of the towers; New Yorkers so covered in dust they look like statues.
The images of what happened at the Pentagon never left the same imprint. There’s no footage of American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the western side of the behemoth office complex. The Pentagon is 6.5 million square feet spread horizontally, so even the explosion of an airplane looked almost minor compared to the wreckage in the Financial District.
Maybe that’s why documentarians haven’t examined the events in Arlington, Va., the same way they’ve parsed what happened in New York or on United Flight 93. But Emmy-nominated filmmaker Kirk Wolfinger wanted to. When a television network that shall remain nameless approached him about making a 9/11 documentary, he pitched a story about the attack on the Pentagon. The response was unequivocal: If he wanted to make the movie, it had to be about the World Trade Center.
“This is certainly not a competition for who had the greatest tragedy,” Wolfinger said over the phone recently. The death toll in New York was obviously higher than the 184 killed in Arlington. And yet, there were stories worth revisiting from the Pentagon that day. If he wasn’t going to tell them, who would?
Wolfinger’s take on the tragic day eventually found a home. His one-hour special, “9/11 Inside the Pentagon,” executive produced by Wolfinger and directed by Sharon Petzold, premiered Sept. 6 on PBS and re-airs Sept. 11 and 12.
Wolfinger can understand why some filmmakers might shy away from the Pentagon story. A documentarian’s work relies on access, and the U.S. military may not seem like an easy culture to penetrate. Even so, he was surprised to hear that he was the first filmmaker to present a credible request for the Pentagon’s assistance on such a project — “and by that I mean one that didn’t deal with conspiracy theories,” he said.
“They placed no restrictions on me,” he said. “They just said, ‘please tell our story, because nobody has told it.’ ”
The movie features interviews with military personnel who were near the crash, first responders, the building’s assistant operations manager and its structural engineer. Stories of what happened on the ground are interspersed with accounts of what happened in the sky, thanks to the memories of an FAA air traffic controller.
The tales are harrowing: people crawling through rooms pitch-black with smoke; workers trying to break through shatter-proof windows that had just been installed during a recent renovation; staircases so hot they burned people’s feet through their shoes.
The question remains: Is the American public interested in what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11?
Retired Navy submarine captain Bill Toti, who survived the Pentagon attack and is featured in the movie, says he can understand why many people focus on New York. But “just like Korea is the forgotten war, the Pentagon is the forgotten 9/11.”
He offered up a couple of theories why during a recent phone conversation. The first is the one he’d prefer to believe:
New York happened on live TV while the world watched, and it was visually shocking in ways the Pentagon wasn’t. The Pentagon, though it housed as many people as the World Trade Center, proved to be a less vulnerable building; many more people walked away from the Pentagon than did from the Twin Towers.
He has another theory, too, though it leaves him less comfortable:
“I’ve had some indication that there are people in the country who think: At the Pentagon, they’re military, so it’s kind of their job to die,” he said. “Although nobody has ever said that to me straight-out, I do sometimes think that the loss of life of a civilian who’s not a combatant is more profound than somebody who is a combatant.”
And yet, ironically, most of the people who were killed at the Pentagon were civilians. That was one of the big surprises for Wolfinger. This wasn’t a military story at all. About 20,000 people work at the Pentagon, and a lot of them aren’t in uniform.
Toti has a lot of other stories, too. So does everyone else that was there. Tragic tales and heroic ones. Stories you wouldn’t believe. If only someone would ask.
