John Donovan sat forward in his cream-colored armchair and rifled through an issue of Soldiers magazine, dated October 2001.
He pointed to several photo spreads of a Pentagon building in ruin, with first responders in the midst of the wreckage. The cover of the magazine, he explained, came about when soldiers and firefighters were flown to the top of the Pentagon and unraveled a garrison flag in an act of defiance.
Then he got to the end of the issue, where all 125 victims in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon were listed. Donovan took a beat to scan the list. He saw the names of the colleagues he talked to every day at work and the “brothers and sisters” he spent late nights with during times of conflict.
“Altogether, I lost 35 people that I had worked with and knew well,” he said. “That was overwhelming when I learned that.”
Donovan, a Loudon resident who worked as a public affairs officer in the Pentagon for 22 years, remembered the sudden boom, the violent vibrations and the panic that set in across the campus on Sept. 11, 2001. Twenty-five years later, he contributed his perspective in a soon-to-be-published book commemorating that day through collected memories.
Before working in D.C., Donovan grew up in Concord and reported on local sports with the Concord Monitor. While studying at the University of New Hampshire, he went to the Kansas City Star as an intern on scholarship. After completing his degree, he enlisted in the Army and served in the Vietnam War.
After returning to the United States a few years later, he went back to work at the Star. Then, he rejoined the Army when he was offered a job at a local newspaper near White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Donovan eventually reached the Pentagon and worked there until 2007.
The Pentagon was the “most wonderful place in the world to work,” he said. With well over 23,000 people operating in the building every day, it was a “city,” per his description. He would often visit years after he ended his time there.
“It’s like you kind of live there,” he said. “You spend most of your day there … It’s at least a 12-hour proposition, and I did that for 22 years and enjoyed just about every moment.”
When Donovan described the day of the attacks, he set out a scene of a perfect early fall day with no clouds in the sky. His department had finished their prep meeting around 9:30 a.m. and had already been made aware of the attacks on the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center. Donovan was in the middle of another meeting when he heard explosions.
“We knew that we had been hit, and we knew what was happening when the towers were hit,” he said. “So we knew it was going to be catastrophic.”
He said the building is so large that it was impossible to tell where noises came from most of the time — something could sound very close but, in actuality, may be a distance away.
He aimed to make it to the public affairs office, get his belongings and leave as quickly as he could while also keeping his colleagues safe.
Less than a minute after the impact, Donovan happened to look out of his chief’s office window. Through the glass, he saw pieces of American Airlines Flight 77 fall right before his eyes.
He and his colleagues escaped the building through the sixth corridor near their office.
Donovan recounted stories he heard from others who were closer to the impact, crawling on their hands and knees to find safety while hearing the screams of those who couldn’t be reached.
“I didn’t come in the next day,” Donovan said. “We were told not to come in, but I did the second day, and it was that day or soon afterward when they gave the list of the dead.”
That’s when he learned about the deaths of those 35 close colleagues.
Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives that day, from the Twin Towers to the hijacked flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
Donovan said the casualties in the Pentagon could have been far worse if it weren’t for the updated infrastructure a few years prior.
The building was made entirely of concrete when it was constructed in the early 1940s. Foundations started to crumble, and updates were sorely needed — so engineers took one section of the building in the 1990s and reinforced the concrete with spiral rebar. The plane happened to hit the newly constructed section, where most offices were still vacant.
“If that plane had gone into any other part of the building that didn’t have rebar — and none of it did — my guess, it would kill about 10,000 people at least,” Donovan said.
It took a year for the damaged side of the Pentagon to be rebuilt. The 130-person staff of Donovan’s public affairs team couldn’t live out of the temporary office anymore, so his boss suggested moving to an office right where the attacks took place. He lost access to his list of contacts and had trouble entering and exiting the building.
Donovan recalled a general he worked with, Bob Laychak, losing his son David to the attacks. When he asked Laychak about how he could come back to where his son died, Donovan recalled his response: “Dave saw a bright light, and he stepped into heaven.”
“We had to go into where so many people we knew had died, just so we could be together and continue the mission,” Donovan said.
He said the Pentagon observed 9/11 every year. When he retired to New Hampshire in 2007, he continued honoring the victims of the attacks at an annual local remembrance ceremony.
In current times, Donovan said it’s more important than ever to remember 9/11.
The not-yet-published book including his memories has been worked on since February by Colonel Richard Breen and Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Yantis, also survivors of the attacks. They are compiling people’s experiences into a single volume.
Donovan’s chapter strives to honor the people he lost that day, as well as the immediate aftermath.
“I lose it sometimes because I was so close to them,” he said. “It’s one team, one fight. You all work together. There were times when I needed them, and there were times when they needed me.”
