Twenty-five years later, Durham Fire Chief Robert Zoldos can still be transported back to the Pentagon without warning.
Sometimes, it is a smell. Other times, it is the sight of a damaged building or a particular type of collapse.
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“In some ways, yeah, it seems like it's forever ago,” Zoldos said. “And then I'll think of something, I'll see something to remind me of it, and I feel like I just got back.”
Before becoming Durham’s fire chief, Zoldos was a member of Virginia Task Force One, a highly specialized urban search and rescue team trained to respond to major disasters around the world.
By Sept. 11, 2001, Zoldos had already deployed to disasters overseas, including the U.S. Embassy bombing in Kenya.
But nothing felt quite like the mission that brought him to the Pentagon.
“This one obviously meant the most to us because it was here,” Zoldos said.
A call to respond close to home
Zoldos was proctoring an exam for the Prince William County Fire Department when the planes struck the World Trade Center.
Firefighters around him began receiving orders to return to their departments. Initially, Zoldos said, his team expected to deploy to New York City. But by the time the call came, American Airlines Flight 77 had struck the Pentagon.
Their assignment changed.
“It was my shortest response time ever for a mission,” Zoldos said. “Previously, we flew to Kenya. Here, we drove really four miles.”
That proximity also meant there was little time to mentally prepare.
“When you fly to Turkey, you've got a day to think about it,” he said. “We had 20 minutes.”
‘A punch to the stomach’
Zoldos was a lieutenant and squad leader at the time.
His team traveled toward the Pentagon on buses, accompanied by tractor-trailers carrying the specialized equipment needed to search unstable structures.
Zoldos remembers the moment the Pentagon first came into view.
“When you think of the strength of America, you think of that building,” Zoldos said. “And to have to see a good chunk of it caved in, it's really a punch to the stomach when you first see that.”
Still, there was little time to dwell on what they were seeing.
His training took over.
Zoldos said one of the team's biggest jobs was making the Pentagon structurally safe enough for rescuers to search. They built massive supports out of heavy lumber, stacking pieces together to hold damaged floors in place and prevent more of the building from collapsing during search and rescue.
“You'd shore something, then search,” Zoldos said. “You'd shore something, then search to make sure it was safe.”
The work became so efficient that Zoldos remembers his squad eventually building one large support in roughly 24 minutes. Earlier in the mission, a similar job could take about an hour.
‘Everyone wanted to help,’ he said.
As the operation continued, Zoldos began seeing something else unfold outside the damaged building: an enormous effort to support the people working inside. More rescue teams arrived from across the country. Companies brought equipment. Zoldos remembers trucks from a home hardware company arriving with lumber.
“There were just people everywhere trying to help in some way,” Zoldos said. “They can't be a player on this particular team, but they can help the team.”
But Zoldos said it wasn't until he finally left the operation that he fully understood what had been happening across the country.
His wife picked him up after his team demobilized. On the drive home, Zoldos noticed American flags flying from cars and pickup trucks. His wife explained what he had missed while working.
“There is a fervent feel of patriotism right now that's just wonderful,” Zoldos recalled her telling him.
A battered helmet and memories that remain
Today, a physical reminder of the mission sits in Zoldos' Durham office.
Among a collection of helmets from his career is the lime-green rescue helmet he wore at the Pentagon. It is scratched and worn from years of rescue work. Stickers mark some of Zoldos' early deployments: the 1998 embassy bombing in Kenya, earthquakes in Turkey and Taiwan in 1999, and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Inside the helmet, Zoldos once kept a picture of his family. His daughter was not yet 2 years old when the attacks happened. His son was a baby. Twenty-five years later, the helmet is part artifact, part reminder of a chapter of his life that he considers closed but never far away.
Zoldos said he hopes a new generation, including young firefighters who weren't alive on Sept. 11, 2001, understands what he believes should be the enduring lesson of that day.
“I really hope that when we look at that day, we don't memorialize the attacks,” Zoldos said. “We memorialize the response.”
Publishing note: AI assisted in the formatting of this article. All reporting, research, interviews, fact-gathering and fact-checking were conducted by WRAL journalists.