Then Came the Fire: Personal Accounts from the Pentagon, 11 September 2001 by Stephen J. Lofgren (review)

Popular culture has come to represent the tragic events of September 11^th, 2001, by the image of the crumbling twin towers of the World Trade Center. The concurrent attack on the Pentagon was no less traumatic to the nation—a strike at the heart of our military, an attempt to destroy another iconic symbol of American power—but the building and its inhabitants withstood the assault, and the military moved so quickly to restore a sense of order and readiness that the details of the attack are not widely known compared to the World Trade Center or the saga of United Airlines Flight 93. This book is an important step towards filling that gap in our understanding of what happened inside and around the Pentagon on that fateful day.

In Then Came the Fire, Stephen J. Lofgren has compiled an anthology of sixty oral history interviews from among the hundreds of interviews conducted by fourteen historians, both military and civilian, assigned to or affiliated with the Histories Division of the U.S. Army Center of Military History. Just two days after the attack, on September 13^th, 2001, military oral historians began interviewing Army survivors of the attack at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Virginia, and continued over the next year. A few of the accounts collected in this anthology are written recollections submitted to the project.

In his preface, Lofgren notes that the oral historians provided a floor plan of the Pentagon during many of the interviews, so that interviewees could point out where they had been when the plane hit and how they had made their way out of the building. The book includes some maps of the building and of office spaces to clarify interviews, photos of the damage and of some of the interviewees, a list of abbreviations (very useful when dealing with military interviews), and an index. Lofgren describes the interviews in this anthology as “lightly edited” to retain the oral character of the testimonies. He has not tried to gloss or edit the impressionistic nature of some of the interviews, thus allowing the reader to experience this traumatic event as the narrators recalled it. He marks substantial deletions from the interviews with four asterisks. While he does not mention it specifically, it would seem that some of the interviewers’ questions and interjections were edited out to allow each interview to flow without interruption. Each interview is preceded by a brief paragraph identifying the interviewee by name, rank, and duty assignment at the Pentagon; the interviewer’s name and affiliation; and the date of the interview.

It is a truism that readers cannot know what is missing from edited interviews, even when the editor’s goals are explicit—we see only the end result. The success or failure of any book of oral history depends on the power of the story it tells, and the editor has succeeded here in weaving together a compelling, multi-faceted story of the events at the Pentagon on 9/11. The interviews themselves are archived, and researchers who wish to consult the full texts have access to them, which ameliorates the concerns with reading edited oral histories.

Lofgren has organized the interviews so that the reader moves temporally and spatially through the events of that day via the memories of the narrators. The collection of interviews opens with Brigadier General Clyde A. Vaughn’s recollection of being on Interstate 395 and seeing the plane fly over on a collision course for the Pentagon. The next interview is with a firefighter who was at the heliport adjacent to the impact. In succeeding interviews the recollections move from the far side of the Pentagon towards the site of the plane crash and on into the offices immediately around and directly over the impact site. The narratives then take us outside the building to...