A story about September 11th that very few people know ...submitted by Joe Carfora 1962

 

A chaplain, who happened to be assigned to the Pentagon, told of an incident that happened right after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon on 9/11. A daycare facility inside the Pentagon had many children, including infants who were in heavy cribs.  The daycare supervisor, looking at all the children they needed to evacuate, was in a panic over what they could do.  There were many children, mostly toddlers, as well as the infants that would need to be taken out with the cribs. There was no time to try to bundle them into carriers and strollers.

Just then a young Marine came running into the center and asked what they needed.  After hearing what the center director was trying to do, he ran back out into the hallway and disappeared.  The director thought, "Well, here we are, on our own." About 2 minutes later, that Marine returned with 40 other Marines in tow.  Each of them grabbed a crib with a child, and the rest started gathering up toddlers.  The director and her staff then helped them take all the children out of the center and down toward the park near the Potomac and the Pentagon.

Once they got about 3/4 of a mile outside the building, the Marines stopped in the park, and then did a fabulous thing - they formed a circle with the cribs, which were quite sturdy and heavy, like the covered wagons in the Old West.  Inside this circle of cribs, they put the toddlers, to keep them from wandering off.  Outside this circle were the 40 Marines, forming a perimeter around the children and waiting for instructions.  There they remained until the parents could be notified and come get their children.

The chaplain then said, "I don't think any of us saw nor heard of this on any of the news stories of the day.  It was an incredible story of our men there.  There wasn't a dry eye in the room.  The thought of those Marines and what they did and how fast they reacted; could we expect any less from them?  It was one of the most touching stories from the Pentagon. It's the Military, not the politicians that ensure our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It's the Military who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag.

If you care to offer the smallest token of recognition and appreciation for the military, please pass this on and pray for our men and women, who have served and are currently serving our country, and pray for those who have given the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.

This is a good read and displays one of the many good deeds that Americans did during that terrible September day sixteen years ago. However, this is a wives' tale in context only. United States Marines rush in where others fear to tread...you know "the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli". The Marines stationed at or near to the Pentagon were more concerned with a rescue mission near the impact point of American Airlines Flight 77 and concentrated on that. Their effort unfortunately turned into a recovery mission since 189 people died at the pentagon, 125 employees and 64 civilians on the plane.

A scouring of news stories from the days immediately following 9/11 through the next few months uncovered no news accounts about a cadre of Marines rescuing children from a daycare center near the Pentagon, or indeed of members of any other branch of service snatching up kids and cribs then making a protective corral of the cribs and standing guard over it. This is not a story that would have gone unreported, because even if the Marines in question had kept their peace about their actions that day, the kids, the daycare workers, and the parents of the kids certainly wouldn't have.

The tale about 40 Marines charging to the rescue (which began its online life in September 2008), possibly resulted from a mishearing, misunderstanding, or just plain exaggeration of the actions taken that day by Army colonel Dave Komar and his staff and rangers from the National Park Service to assist and protect those who had evacuated children from the Pentagon's daycare facility. Seven park rangers were dispatched to assist the group of evacuees, reaching it at approximately noon. Once there, the park rangers set up a protective perimeter around the children and blocked one lane of westbound traffic on the George Washington Memorial Parkway to increase safety. They then persuaded the driver of an empty tour bus to help transport the kids to a Virginia Department of Transportation (DOT) facility where they could better watch over and care for the tots until parents came to claim their children.

The park rangers did not magically appear just as the youngsters needed to be moved from the threatened daycare (they joined up with the evacuated group a couple of hours after it reached the open field), nor did they cart heavy cribs full of kids out of a building, nor did they form a ring of cribs "like the covered wagons in the West" and then stand guard outside it to keep the children from getting loose. However, they were involved in protecting a group of children moved from a daycare after the attack, with this protection involving (at least at one point) the establishment of a protective perimeter around their small charges. It's enough of a similarity to have potentially served as the kernel for the much embellished tale involving 40 Marines and a ring of baby cribs.

The most interesting story having to do with the Pentagon's daycare facility that day wasn't primarily about the children or even the evacuation, but one of the parents. That morning, Col. William Stoppel of the National Guard dropped his 9-month-old son at daycare, then continued on to his office in the Pentagon's inner ring, where he was assigned to the Department of the Army's G-1 Office processing promotion packets. News of the attacks in New York prompted this dad to want to check on his son, so at the time the plane hit the Pentagon, he was in the daycare facility on the other side of the building (and thus helped to move kids to the field spoken of earlier).

Unknown to him as he helped shepherd kids, Stoppel's office had been one of those that sustained a direct hit. Many of his co-workers had perished in the attack, including the man with which he had shared a cubicle. Stoppel himself was presumed dead for the better part of the day.