Fayetteville Veteran Recalls 9/11 Attacks from Inside the Pentagon

Valencia Applewhite, known by friends as Val, was in the second ring of the Pentagon 11 years ago this week when the building was attacked.

As a Fayetteville resident for 12 years, Val first arrived to Fort Bragg in 1994 because of the U.S. Air Force. After retiring from active duty in 1999, she relocated to Maryland in early 2000 to accept a position at the Pentagon. She returned to Fayetteville in 2005.  

Every year, Val and her former co-workers 'ping' each other on 9/11 as a show of support and to check-in with one another, a sign of solidarity after the shared experience of that dreadful morning.

Q: What was your position at the Pentagon? 

I was assigned to the Air Force Pentagon Communications Agency as the  Headquarters USAF Information Assurance Manager. I was employed at the Pentagon from May 2000 until July 2005.

Q: When the attacks happened, what were you doing? And can you describe the immediate actions that took place to evacuate? 

I was briefing my staff on issues of the day and preparing to leave the building for an off-site meeting.  I received a call from my husband asking if I had heard about New York. I had not. I worked in a vault, an office designed specifically for classified operations, no radios or televisions were allowed. I went to another office that had a TV to check it out, but quickly returned to my vault to continue my day. I received a second call from my husband and he asked me to leave the building and come home. I told him not to worry and that I was very busy. I tried to calm his fears by saying, "Don't worry, I'm in the Pentagon, there is no safer place." The rest is history.

Q: Whom did you call first and can you share a bit of that conversation? 

After impact I had to act quickly. It was the fuel smell that signaled to me something was wrong. I made the decision to evacuate. We had no central intercom system in the building at that time and didn't really know what was happening. I didn't make the connection to what happened in New York, but I knew something was terribly wrong. I directed my staff to implement procedures we'd practiced time and time again. It was precision. Everyone knew what to do, what to take, and where to go. I tried to call my director, who worked in Rosslyn, Virginia, once we were safely out of the building – to let him know we were safe, but cell phone towers were jammed.

Q: How long before you resumed work inside the Pentagon? 

We set up alternate operations in Rosslyn, Virginia, for about two weeks. My office had only suffered smoke and water damage through the vents from the fires that burned for a day or so. It was hard returning to work and not seeing some of the familiar faces of workers you would pass each day. Then the hard truth hit me, they were gone.