In the days after terrorists attacked the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, families began arriving at a hotel in Crystal City, Virginia, carrying questions that often had no answers. Some still hoped their loved ones might have survived.
The FBI was collecting toothbrushes, hairbrushes and other personal items that could provide DNA. A hotel ballroom became a briefing room. Families waited as victims were identified. And Bonnie Carroll was there.
Carroll, founder and president of the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS, had been in Alaska when the attacks occurred. An Air Force reservist assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of National Security and Emergency Preparedness, she returned to Washington as quickly as she could.
When she reported for duty, her colonel asked a simple question: Where could she do the most good?
I said, I need to be with the families, Carroll recalled in an interview with Military.com.
She would spend the next six weeks with them.
A Hotel Became a Lifeline
The Pentagon Family Assistance Center (PFAC) opened at the Sheraton in Crystal City less than a day after American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon. It would ultimately directly assist 170 victims’ families, according to the Navy’s official history of the Pentagon attack.
Carroll remembers families streaming into the hotel once air travel resumed.
At first, the FBI occupied a table collecting items that could be used to identify victims through DNA. As that operation wound down, Carroll said, TAPS quietly moved into the space. The transition reflected what was happening emotionally inside the hotel.
Hope that a missing loved one might still be found alive was increasingly giving way to “fear, resignation, potential loss,” Carroll said.
Carroll put out a call to TAPS peer mentors around the country. The organization could provide rooms and meals, she told them, but volunteers would have to pay their own way to Washington.
She planned rotations of roughly 10 to 12 volunteers per week. The roster filled almost immediately.
A core group, including Carroll, remained for the duration. TAPS and the American Red Cross were the two private organizations that remained in the center throughout the period, Carroll said.
What emerged was an early test of something that would become fundamental to TAPS: people who had already experienced profound loss accompanying those who were just beginning it.
‘I Deal in Facts’
One of Carroll’s strongest memories from those six weeks is Lt. Gen. John Van Alstyne, the Army officer placed in charge of the Pentagon Family Assistance Center. He conducted briefings twice a day.
Carroll remembers the three-star general introducing himself to families with an unmistakably direct message. “I am not a public affairs officer. I’m an infantry officer. I deal in facts,” she recalled him saying.
Then he delivered them. He told families what officials knew. He explained what was happening. As victims were identified, their names were shared. There was no attempt to make unbearable information sound better than it was.
People needed facts, Carroll said. They didn’t need speculation or things sugarcoated.
Afterward, Van Alstyne invited questions. Not easy questions. Hard ones.
Carroll remembers one woman struggling so badly to speak that Van Alstyne left the stage, walked to her and knelt beside her. She whispered her question. He answered her there, then returned to the stage and repeated the information so everyone could hear it.
For Carroll, it became a lesson in what grieving families need from leaders during catastrophe: truth, presence and the willingness to stay when the answers are painful.
Going Back to the Pentagon
About a week after the attack, another difficult question emerged. Some families wanted to see the Pentagon. Others worried visiting the place where their loved ones had died would be too traumatic.
Carroll believed families who wanted to go should have that choice, but they needed to understand exactly what they would encounter. They were prepared for what they might see, hear and smell, she said. They could change their minds at any point. Those who went later told her the experience had been healing.
For Carroll, who had previously visited the remote Alaska crash site where her own husband died, there was something important about allowing families to confront the physical place of loss on their own terms. “It has been more of an almost spiritual event,” she said of such visits.
The experience also bound people together. Some of the Pentagon families Carroll met during those weeks remain close to her a quarter-century later.
“They became family,” she said. “You spend six weeks, 24/7, with a group of people, and we just really were bonded in a very unique way.”
The Final Briefing
Six weeks after the attack, the Pentagon Family Assistance Center was preparing to close. At his final briefing, Carroll remembers Van Alstyne acknowledging an uncomfortable reality. America was going to war.
The military could not promise that the extraordinary concentration of people and resources assembled after Sept. 11 would remain indefinitely. Then, Carroll said, Van Alstyne directed the families’ attention toward the TAPS volunteers in their red shirts.
These are the people you will turn to, Carroll recalled him saying, and they will be there for you.
For Carroll, it was a handoff. “And we’ve been with those families ever since,” she said.
Twenty-five years later, the scale is dramatically different.
Carroll said TAPS had the capacity to serve roughly 500 people during the Pentagon response. Today, the organization has thousands of trained peer mentors and can handle many more cases now. But the principle forged inside that Crystal City hotel remains much the same.
People facing devastating loss may need benefits information, casualty assistance and answers from government officials. They also need someone willing to sit beside them.
For six weeks after Sept. 11, amid FBI evidence collection, military briefings and families waiting for news they desperately hoped would never come, that was what Carroll and the other volunteers tried to do. They stayed.
And, for many of those families, they never really left.
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