Woman recalls 9/11 attack on Pentagon
Janet Horton was an Army chaplain at the time.
OCALA — Retired U.S. Army Col. Janet Horton displayed a mix of emotions as she sat at her dining room table and reflflected on her 28 years in the military. Horton frowned over the multiple rejections she faced after being commissioned to the chaplaincy. She smiled at the way God worked good out of all the negativity. And she wiped away te ars as she t alked about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, when hijackers plowed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing of her co-workers.
“You go back and t o a degree you rel ive i t al l , ” she said. “It was amazing to me to see God’s presence and love healing everything. Time after time, you see love in the face of hate.”
On the table before her lay a spread of graphic photos showing the aftermath of the attack. Horton paused now and then to regain her composure while pointing out places of signifificance — the site of the impact, the section of the building blocked by fifire and debris, the center courtyard where the injured were laid out, the location of Horton’s offiffice on the south side of the building, dangerously close to where the plane went in, and the dental offiffice in the back where Horton had been called away for X-rays.
“They called me in that morning,” she said. “In order to be deployable, you had to have panoramic X-rays. They were supposed to be taken on my birthday, Aug. 11, but someone misplaced my file. I was waiting for them to release me when the fifirst plane went into the tow- ers. About 20 minutes later, somebody came running in and said we had to evacuate the building.”
Horton believes she would have been killed or seriously injured had she been sitting at her desk.
“When I got in my offiffice the next day, big chunks of the ceiling were down on my desk and debris was everywhere,” she said. “My desk was a little way in, but my secretary’s desk was at the door. She felt the impact and saw the fifireball coming toward her. She was able to run down the corridor ahead of the dust and debris. When the plane hit, there was so much fuel and it was burning so hot, the rescue workers had to go in from the back side and pull out people who were still alive.”
Within seconds after the attack, numerous acts of heroism began to unfold.
“What people did to save someone else was the most inspiring thing I ever saw,” Horton said. “One of the women was on fifire. Three or four people saw her and took offff their jackets and put them on her to smother it. You weren’t thinking about yourself at all. The thought was, what can I do to help the fifiremen or the next casualty? By late afternoon, the fifiremen had been working for hours and were hot and tired. Three of us broke into a concession stand. A twostar general got down on his knees and scraped up ice for them.”
The injured were moved to the courtyard fifirst, then were transferred to ambulances outside the complex. Horton convinced the guards to let her and two other chaplains through the barricade to minister to the injured.
“We j u s t k n e l t b e s i d e them,” she said. “Every one of them would cry immediately when we started to pray.”