The Living and the Dead by Paul Hendrickson

Author:Paul Hendrickson [Hendrickson, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5337-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

A WITNESS. Major Richard V. Lundquist is coming out of the eighth-corridor entrance on the Potomac side. He’s on his way to an economics class in another building. Someone behind a retaining wall is yelling. This person has a child.

Lundquist, remembering three decades later: “I looked up and expected to see a long-haired, unkempt, young person, but instead I saw a well-dressed man with a child in his arms.”

Lundquist: “You hear a jet go overhead and you look up and see a Piper cub. You do a double take.”

In Pentagon dusk, the major sees flames shooting up the left side of the man behind the wall. He starts running. People behind him are running. The officer climbs over the wall and discovers the child on the ground. She’s on a path, in blue coveralls. He’s the first to reach her. He picks up Emily and carries her some distance away, to the back of the garden, where he hands her either to a woman who has a blanket or to Pentagon guards.

Lundquist, remembering: “I’m not a doctor. The whole thing is happening in seconds. But when flames go up past your nose and mouth, it doesn’t take very long for them to cut off your oxygen, and you lose your ability pretty fast to stand or hold on to something.”

A second witness: Lieutenant Colonel Charles S. Johnson, then of North Venice Street in Arlington. In November 1965, he’s working in mid-range planning in the office of research and development. He’s come upon the vision from a different angle.

Johnson, remembering three decades later: “The child was knocked out of his hands,”

Interviewer (startled): “Who did the knocking?”

Johnson: “I did.”

But then, several minutes into this memory, the certainty is slipping away: “Going back to square one. I looked up and saw this man flaming with a child.” A minute later: “On second memory, maybe the child was on the wall when I got there.”

Down in the trench, Colonel Johnson risks his life trying to pull a man’s head down out of the flame. When it is over, he goes to the Pentagon dispensary. There are burns on his hands and face. He calls his wife and says he’ll be home a little late. She has already heard the radio flash.

A third voice: Sergeant Robert Bundt is standing outside the building, waiting to be picked up by Russell Banks and his wife, Sue. Bundt always rides home with the Bankses. They’re getting their car at a lower entrance and will pull around up front. Sergeant Bundt got back from Greenland two years ago, and they posted him here to the Pentagon. He works in war-game theory for the Air Force. He and his wife, who’s pregnant, have a place off Columbia Pike near Bailey’s Crossroads.

He’s on the sidewalk when a man with a baby brushes past him. The man is carrying a package of some kind in his other arm. He’s in street clothes. Bundt doesn’t think anything of this. Thousands of people in the Pentagon wear civvies.

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