him once they found a way out. Then they made a train, Karen crawling behind Thurman with a hand gripping his belt. They stopped every few feet to lower their heads and breathe, then make their way over more debris. The heat was unimaginable.
As Thurman led the way, he could hear Karen praying. They got to a door that had its bottom hinge broken off. Thurman put his hand through the crack and immediately pulled it back. The room on the other side was nothing but flames. They moved back to Ruth and found him unconscious. Thurman tried to think of another way out, then realized Karen had fallen silent and let go of his belt. He could feel sleep trying to come over him too. But in the haze he remembered an email that morning from his father. His younger sister’s water had broken. She was going to have a baby. It occurred to him that he couldn’t let his parents lose a son on the day their first grandchild was born. With a burst of adrenaline he pushed on alone.
He made it to one of the corridors that span the Pentagon like spokes on a wheel, propping the door open with one of his shoes so it wouldn’t lock behind him. Thurman pleaded with a group of officers to let him take them to where he’d left Karen and Ruth, but by then black sheets of smoke were billowing through the cracked door from floor to ceiling. There was no way anyone inside was still alive.
It's strange the way history moved so fast after a day when time stood still. Nearly 3,000 people died in the September 11 attacks, 125 of whom were working in the Pentagon. Fifty-five of those were military personnel, including Karen Wagner and Naval Petty Officer 3rd Class Daniel Caballero, who grew up in Houston. The two were the only Texans identified as active-duty casualties at the Pentagon. Two weeks later President George W. Bush declared a global war on terror, and within two months, a coalition led by American forces would take Kabul, Afghanistan. In March 2003 the U.S. would lead a similar coalition into Iraq.
On the second anniversary of 9/11, the gym at Walter Reed was renamed the Karen J. Wagner Sports Center. By the third anniversary, in 2004, Army med had started giving an annual Karen Wagner Leadership Award to standout human resources officers, and the following year kids back in Converse began attending Karen Wagner High School. Kim, Warren, and Karl went to as many of the dedications and ceremonies in Karen’s honor as they could. They grew close to the families of others who died that day, going on occasional vacations with them. And they talked to survivors to try to piece together Karen’s last moments. Mattie, who stayed in Converse after Bill died, in 1995, attended the events for a while but eventually stopped going. Sometimes the answers and awards are just too much.
The Army moved quickly after 9/11 to honor soldiers whose actions in the aftermath merited special recognition. Augie Schomburg was one of them. He’d been on the phone at Walter Reed when he heard that the Pentagon had been hit and had sprinted across the campus with Major Berthony Ladouceur, Karen’s replacement as brigade executive officer, to start setting up their EOC. They knew the hospital would be a key component in the medical response to the attack, that Walter Reed docs and nurses would be needed at makeshift trauma stations at the Pentagon, that Walter Reed beds would be needed for the injured. As hospital administrators, they’d be responsible for managing those resources.
Schomburg stayed at the EOC for four days straight, gathering information for General Timboe and getting his orders out, never once taking a break. When traffic prevented a busload of doctors and nurses from getting out of Walter Reed, Schomburg arranged for National Guard helicopters to ferry them to the Pentagon. The EOC sent oxygen, portable anesthetic, and every supply they could find that might help treat burns. Psych teams were dispatched to support the survivors and first responders. A nuclear-biological-chemical response team was sent, just in case. Time was a blur, and at some point Schomburg learned that Karen had been killed. But it wasn’t until the EOC stood down on Friday, and his long drive home took him by the Pentagon, that he finally started to grieve for his mentor.
In June 2002 he received the General Douglas MacArthur Leadership Award, presented each year to a handful of junior officers deemed to represent the future of the Army. At a ceremony in the Pentagon’s center courtyard, General Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, presented him and 25 others a bust of MacArthur. During a quieter moment, he also gave each of them one of his commander’s coins.
A year later, Schomburg made his first trip to San Antonio since 9/11, for Army med’s annual five-day conference at Fort Sam. When he found some downtime, he and Captain Michael Dake, another of Karen’s old company commanders, went to visit her grave.
The July sun was high and hot, but they parked in the shade of some live oaks and walked a long row of matching granite headstones until they found hers. The first thing they noticed was Saundra’s marker next to it. They weren’t ready for that. For a moment, they simply stood there, thinking about the mother back together with her daughter.
Then Schomburg knelt down, pulling Shinseki’s coin out of his pocket. In his mind he put Karen back at Walter Reed. Every time she had brought a new commander’s coin into her office, she had slapped it down on her desk like an old man playing dominoes. He looked at Shinseki’s coin, then placed it flush against the base of her headstone and pushed it into the ground with his thumb. “I didn’t get this on my own,” he said softly.