Arkansas veteran, 9/11 survivor recounts working in the Pentagon when tragedy struck

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A central Arkansas veteran was one of many working in the Pentagon during the tragedy of 9/11.

John Hoffman was 25 years old and was enlisted in the US Army as a specialist E-4 working for military intelligence at the Pentagon on the day Flight 77 was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon.

“That was my first day at work at the Pentagon,” John Hoffman said.

He woke up that morning and took the metro station into the Pentagon to work with his civilian counterparts building a new conference room on the second level of the Pentagon. The room had no radio and no TV.

“We were literally standing behind a rack in this projector room that was all blacked out when there was a huge explosion, and we got knocked to the ground,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman remembers the whole ceiling structure falling in on him.

“We were locked in from the outside,” Hoffman said. “After getting lost we had to go back through basically low crawl our way out to the other side away from the impact.”

Hoffman heard voices crying out, and his military training kicked in to help, finding them as they searched for their way out.

When they exited the loading dock at the Pentagon, Hoffman learned of the attacks on the Twin Towers.

At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center; as evacuations began, Flight 175 hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.

As they walked to the evacuation zones at the Pentagon, Hoffman said he remembers seeing parts of a plane as well as the smoke and fire.

Hoffman then drove nine miles home, taking seven hours. He said the shock had still not set in before getting home and watching hours of TV to try to come to an understanding.

It was later determined that it was hijacked Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.

A fourth flight, Flight 93, crashed at 10:03 a.m. in a field in Pennsylvania.

“That was when it sunk in, and then we just didn’t understand how to react because it was something that was so unprecedented,” Hoffman said.

According to Hoffman, the whole country seemed frightened, but patriotism rose more than he’d ever seen.

Then, the guilt set in for Hoffman.

“It was a place that I almost didn’t come out of, you know, being so close and then being able to walk away, you have that guilt of what I could have done better that day,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman returned just two weeks later and started to clean and rebuild the Pentagon.

“It’s pretty unnerving to remember that, to go back into places and just have that instant rush of pain and hurt and memories,” Hoffman said.

While Hoffman continued to work for years at the Pentagon, he has since returned to his home state of Arkansas as a veteran, visiting the Pentagon Memorial on anniversaries and when he can to pay his respects to the lives lost.

“There was a bench for every person that died on the airplane and in the Pentagon,” Hoffman said. “It’s a very somber place for people like myself, military, to go into a place and see the heroes and the actions of those heroes.”

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