Бывший агент ФБР, работавший на руинах Пентагона после терактов 11 сентября, связывает свой рак с последствиями катастрофы

Stanley Meador had a premonition after 10 days of sorting through the burned-out rubble of the Pentagon to collect evidence of a terrorist attack on the heart of the United States military establishment on Sept. 11, 2001. As an agent for the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control  in Northern Virginia, Meador had been "sifting through anything and everything in the rubble pile," breathing foul air whenever he took off his mask. The clothes he wore sometimes became so filthy that he refused to wear them again.  He told the others working with him, "We're going to get sick from this." Fifteen years later, as an FBI agent, Meador had undergone grueling treatment for a large cancerous tumor in his colon, only for the cancer to return and wrap around one kidney and ureter, advancing to Stage 4 in severity. "What is happening?" he asked himself. "How did I go from this to this? "It just hit me," he said, snapping his fingers. "I was sitting at my computer, and I thought about 9/11. Then I remembered. I stood there and told myself, 'You're going to get sick from this.'" Twenty-five years after he rushed to the Pentagon from his office in Alexandria, Meador serves as Virginia's secretary of public safety and homeland security. He's responsible for some of the same state agencies that responded that day in Arlington County. He's witnessed the timeless lessons that a national tragedy taught about what it means to show up to respond to disaster. "I live with side effects," he said. "I live with challenges. And so, in my experience, you don't really ever leave it." The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, killed 2,977 people, not including the 19 members of Al-Qaida who had hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, then the Pentagon and finally, after passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 fought back, a farm field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  The dead included 125 employees at the Pentagon and 59 passengers and crew members of American Airlines Flight 77, hijacked after its departure from Washington Dulles International Airport in Loudoun County. The airplane, fully loaded with jet fuel for a transcontinental flight to Los Angeles, slammed into the Pentagon's western wall at more than 500 miles per hour at 9:37 a.m. About 20,000 military and civilian employees were working at the Pentagon that day, but the plane struck a portion of the massive five-sided building that was nearing the end of renovation, so not all of its offices were filled with employees. The worst casualties were in the U.S. Navy Command Center, where 27 employees died. Had the attack happened two weeks earlier, Navy Capt. James "Ros" Poplar would have been one of them. He had taken a new job in a different part of the Pentagon after the death of his wife, Helene. Poplar, who lives in Shenandoah County near New Market, will speak to the Sons of the American Revolution in Roanoke on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the attack. He calls remembrance "one of my missions in life — I was spared." "It's sort of my duty to keep their memories alive as long as I'm alive," he said. Poplar also carries proud memories of how people responded that day. "For me, 9/11 brought out the best in people," he said. "I saw people literally risk their lives to go into that inferno to rescue people." Jim Schwartz was Arlington's deputy fire chief when he arrived at the Pentagon, 11 minutes after the crash. On the spot, Fire Chief Ed Plaugher made him incident commander in what became a national model for unified response to a disaster, as Arlington firefighters fought to bring the fires fully under control and prevent the building from collapsing, with help from other localities, the state and the federal governments. Schwartz, who later served as Arlington fire chief and deputy county manager, now teaches about crisis leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Last spring, he was lecturing students at George Washington University about what happened that day when he realized, "None of the people in that room were alive on Sept. 11." "For them, it's a historical event," he said in an interview. "For me, it's a lived experience." In addition to the professional firefighters and other emergency responders who showed up at the Pentagon, Schwartz said, "People without training or protective clothing did a lot to save lives that day." Ron Carlee, a longtime Arlington employee who had become county manager earlier that year, said at a recent remembrance ceremony, "The first, first responders are the victims." None of the firefighters, police and others who responded at the Pentagon were killed that day. New York City lost 441 first responders, including 344 firefighters, which the 9/11 Memorial & Museum calls "the greatest loss of emergency responders on a single day in American history." But that's not the whole story. "While we did not lose anyone in 9/11, we have lost several people to occupational diseases that have been judged attributable to 9/11," Schwartz said. Robert Gray was a fire department captain who led the heavy rescue team that went into the Pentagon that morning. They fought the fire for three days and worked for two weeks to shore up the building so it wouldn't collapse. Gray said the fire department has lost "three or four" members to cancer, he attributes to 9/11, and several others to suicide. "I've got four friends right now who are battling cancer, and a few of them were on my collapse team," he said. Firefighters wore masks and goggles, but they weren't perfect. "I was chewing grit, because it gets in," he said. "When I came out, I could feel it in my teeth." A Virginia congressman has introduced legislation to allow military service members who returned to work at the Pentagon after the attack to qualify for healthcare and other benefits under the PACT Act, which then-President Joe Biden signed into law two years ago. Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-10th, who was just shy of his 15th birthday when the Pentagon was attacked, introduced the Susan E. Lukas Servicemember Fairness Act last year to extend PACT Act benefits to people such as Lukas, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel who lives in Loudoun County in his congressional district. She was working at the Pentagon the day of the attack and returned to work the next day, even as Arlington firefighters worked to extinguish the blaze.  "There are so many service members who witnessed the devastating attack on the Pentagon on 9/11 and then bravely reported for duty soon thereafter to keep our country safe, exposing themselves to harmful toxicants that forever impacted their health," Subramanyam said. (The legislation, introduced with bipartisan support from three other Virginia congressmen, is pending in a House committee.) The World Trade Center Health Program serves more than 125,000 people who responded to the terrorist attacks in Virginia, New York and Pennsylvania, as well as survivors of the toxic cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan after the twin towers collapsed. The program has identified 70 forms of cancer that it considers attributable to that exposure, as well as a broad range of other physical and mental conditions. Lukas isn't eligible for the program's benefits because "she's not considered a victim," Subramanyam said.  "It's not their fault," he said. "They were doing their duty." Meador, Virginia's secretary of public safety and homeland security, formally joined the World program in 2017 after he was certified as eligible to receive benefits because of the cancer he attributes to his work at the Pentagon after the attack. It's been 13 years since his cancer symptoms first appeared, and he takes nothing for granted. "I don't think I'm ever in a place where that is not a thing in my thought process," he said. But Meador does not look back with regret on the role he played in responding to the attack on the Pentagon. He had just pulled into the ABC office in Alexandria and was watching the television coverage of the attacks in New York when "the radio lit up." By the time he reached the Pentagon, thousands of employees were streaming out of the building. He went to its north side and recruited emergency medical technicians to try to reach the crash site through the building, which was a maze. During "that chaos, of who can do what," he said reports came of a possible second plane, which later proved false, but required responders to take cover. Meador ended up on what he thinks was the first "evidence line" to collect anything that could help in the investigation. "It was bagging and tagging and picking up everything you could find," he said. In the days that followed, he recalled, "You stand there in the rubble pile, you're trying to breathe. It's hot. You're sweating, you're dripping, you're soaked in your clothes." "You've got a mask on, goggles, but even when you take that stuff off to breathe and get five minutes of air, you're sucking in anything and everything," he said. Meador, a Galax native who had worked at ABC for more than five years, joined the FBI the year after the terrorist attacks. He spent 23 years at the FBI, including four as special agent in charge of its Richmond Field Office. "There are so many people, young people, who weren't even alive at 9/11," he said. But the lesson of that day for him was the partnership he witnessed among the people who responded to the disaster. "I think that one of the things that unites us across public safety, whether you're fire or police, is the fact that it doesn't matter what your title is or what your rank is or what the challenge is, everybody knows the importance of showing up," Meador said. "Everybody shows up." "If there's one thing we all have in common is that we show up," he said. "We show up for each other, we show up for community." Michael Martz (804) 649-6964 [email protected] Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter.