On September 11, 2001, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore superintendent Scott Tucker was awakened by a plane going 500 mph over his house after a day of working at the National Mall as a first responder.
“I was five miles from the Pentagon. That plane traveled at five miles in less than one minute. I didn’t think anything of it.
I thought it was kind of strange, kind of weird. Five minutes later, I received a phone call from my father in Colorado, who wanted to know where it was,” Tucker said.
As a first responder for the National Park Service at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Tucker called the office and told them not to come in; they were evacuating during the fog of the September 11 attacks.
Tucker called his old friend, and both met at the local firehall, maybe an hour after the first plane hit the Twin Towers.
By 10:15 a.m. Tucker, along with hundreds of other first responders, was pulling up to the Pentagon.
Still, at that point, the Pentagon had not yet been evacuated, with 20,000 people inside.
“I spent the next eight hours running here, running supplies, treating firefighters for fatigue exhaustion,” Tucker said. “The moment of chaos came full circle at 2 p.m. when I was approached by a group of FBI agents who asked me to go and help start flagging debris. I was looking across the field that I had been standing in for hours.
There was a fog for most of the day. We walked that field, we tagged luggage, we tagged shoes, we tagged pieces of the airplane. I entered and exited the Pentagon a dozen times that day.”
In his office, an American flag sits in a case, with no symbolism on it.
But, in reality, that flag flew over the Washington Monument on September 11, 2001.
“I look at that flag every single day. I look at it when I get a call, when I hear the radio that one of our officers is responding to something in the park,” Tucker said. “The other piece in my office, which almost no one sees, because I have to set perfectly in the view of my eyes from my desk, is an image of the Pentagon with first responders ... Every day, the dedication of those who are with me during every decision.”
According to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes on September 11, 2001, deliberately crashing two of the planes into the upper floors of the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center complex and a third plane into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The Twin Towers ultimately collapsed because of the damage sustained from the impacts and the resulting fires. After learning about the other attacks, passengers on the fourth hijacked plane, Flight 93, fought back, and the plane was crashed into an empty field in western Pennsylvania about 20 minutes by air from Washington, D.C.
The attacks killed 2,977 people from 90 nations: 2,753 people were killed in New York; 184 people were killed at the Pentagon; and 40 people were killed on Flight 93.
