As he fled the Pentagon when it was hit on 9/11, William Layer looked out across the scene of devastation. “I saw a mushroom cloud,” he recalls. “I was thinking nukes.” It was only when he was back home watching television that he realised it was not a nuclear attack but had been caused by one of the four planes piloted by al-Qaeda operatives.
The attack on the Pentagon left 189 dead and destroyed part of the five-sided office complex that symbolises US military power. “I got off easy. I was lucky,” he says. But, as with hundreds of thousands of other Americans, the attack changed Layer’s life in ways he had not anticipated. Just over a year later he was in combat fatigues, off to war. Although a civilian employee at the Pentagon, he is also a lieutenant-colonel in the army reserve and was called up to take part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
American Airlines Flight 77, which left from Dulles, Washington’s international airport, crashed into the west side of the Pentagon about 30 minutes after the attack on the twin towers. One hundred and twenty-five Pentagon staff were killed. Layer, who has worked at the Pentagon since the 1999 in various roles that include historian, legislative affairs adviser and, at present, public affairs official, had been working on the side of the Pentagon that overlooks the Potomac river, the opposite side from the one that was hit.
‘We’re out of here’
“It had been a normal day. And then a friend called to say the Trade Centre had been attacked. I thought he was crazy. I did not quite believe him. He said, ‘Well look at the TV’, which I did.” Layer got on the phone to another friend in New York. “As I was on the phone I heard a tremendous explosion. I did not feel anything. I knew immediately that we had been attacked. I hung up the phone, closed my briefcase and got my jacket. One of my colleagues came out of the ladies’ room and said, ‘I don’t have my purse.’ I said, ‘Forget it. We’re out of here.'”
They escaped through smoke-filled corridors. “All these people were not running around like chickens without heads. People got out in good order.”
The Pentagon was not built to withstand an attack. The only part that had been reinforced was the side hit by the plane. The renovation had only just been completed and many of the staff had not yet returned to their offices. “If the plane had hit the river side, it would have taken out the entire leadership of the defence establishment,” Layer says.
On December 2002, he received a call to say he was being mobilised. He was in Fort Bragg military base later that month; in Kuwait in January 2003; and two months later in Iraq. He was in a convoy that was ambushed in central Iraq, in February 2004. He wrote in his journal: “My truck, hit by tracers in the gas tank, started burning … I almost didn’t make it. My seatbelt jammed and then the door stuck. It seemed an eternity.” He escaped with a bullet wound in the leg. An Iraqi interpreter died from a bullet to the head.
The Pentagon was repaired within two years, and a memorial garden was completed in 2008. Layer is not big on memorials and says he is not sure how he will spend the 9/11 anniversary. “I don’t dwell on it. I was angry. Who wouldn’t be? Ten years later, I don’t even think about it. They got the SOBs.”
Did the killing of Osama bin Laden help? “I think that is the wrong way to phrase it. He was a bandit and they got him. It took a while but they got him. There were those who made sure he would not do it again.” He adds: “I wish I could have pulled the trigger.” – guardian.co.uk