Book review: ‘Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11’ - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Book review: ‘Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11’

“This is gonna suck.”

Cmdr. Craig Powell, a Navy SEAL, barely got the words out of his mouth before a very large woman fell on him from a window one story above. It was Sept. 11, 2001, and both were escaping from the Pentagon after American Airlines Flight 77 hit the south side of the building.

As she fell, firefighters from D.C., Virginia and Maryland were converging on the lawn outside, preparing to fight what would become the fire of their lives.

It was going to suck, indeed.

In their new book, “Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11,” Patrick Creed and Rick Newman tell the story of that day through the eyes of firefighters, FBI agents and many others who were there trying to save lives and preserve military communications.

The authors’ information-gathering skills are top-notch, and “Firefight” reads like a surgical extraction from the tree rings of American history. Drilling down into granular detail — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld inexplicably kept taking his jacket off, putting it on, taking it off, for instance; and firefighters Allan Wallace and Mark Skipper, stationed at the helipad outside the south entrance, had to duck out of the way of the plane to avoid getting hit — no detail seems to have escaped Creed and Newman.

However, all the witnesses and details rarely allow the reader an emotional grasp of the tragedy. Most of the time, except for firefighters cursing, it reads very clinically, never letting itself get whipped up in the frenzy of that day.

There are visceral moments, likely due to Creed’s career as a firefighter, that evoke shudders of dread for the job those professionals had to do that day.

Early in the book, when news of the Twin Towers begins to break, members of the Arlington Fire Department are watching the coverage in a firehouse and discussing the complexities of fighting that fire. “How would the New York crews put out the fire?” they say to each other, seeing the carnage in New York unfold from afar.

At times, the book focuses on the perspective these firefighters had. They were bound by duty to clean up this mess. And while others watched, they had to leap into the smoky, smoldering mouth of fear. Although the book lets it bubble to the surface only a few times, it’s something the rest of us need to see.