ARKANSAS, USA — “It was a moment of panic,” Ray Taylor said. “We all panicked.”
Taylor is a 21-year air force veteran. He currently serves as the Director of Construction Technology at the Northwest Arkansas Community College (NWACC).
He said he was an intern at the Pentagon when it was struck by a plane on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
“We were all watching on television and what was going on in New York, and somebody joked and said, ‘Well, I'm not going outside today,’ you know, because we're sitting in a pretty big target.”
Taylor had already been in the service for a decade. An officer at the time, he said he was looking to get a master’s degree in organizational management, which required internships at the Pentagon.
He had served as an intern for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force Directorate and was working in the office of the Secretary of Defense when the building was struck.
“It was 9:43 in the morning,” Taylor said. “The building shook, and I was leaning against the door when it happened, and they said, ‘Ray, go see what happened,’ and I ran out in the hallway, and people were running toward me.”
Once outside the building, Taylor said he and a few other members of his internship program quickly began getting to work.
“I didn't even own a cell phone,” Taylor said. “As we met and ran into people in the parking lot, we started writing down names of who saw whom. You know, ‘Hey, I saw Kathy, she's okay,’ and then we'd write down everybody's names, and then first one to get home was going to call all the other spouses.”
In the aftermath of the attacks, Taylor put his construction background to use. He said he answered the call once again to help with repairs on the Pentagon.
“The next three days, we were on the roof, and the furring strips on the roof were still on fire in many places, and we had contractors up there, and we were kind of overseeing the contractors and helping out, busting up the tiles that were on the roof, and just making sure that we could put tarps down over the concrete,” Taylor said.
But his mission didn’t stop there.
Taylor said he and the Woodworkers United for America helped distribute American flag cases, made of American hardwood, to more than 750 families of victims of all three attacks that were perpetrated on 9/11.
He said the project not only was a way to give back to the families who lost so much, but in a way, helped Taylor and the others find closure from the events.
“They would ship them to the Pentagon, to the casualty assistance office, and I would help make sure they got to the office, and then distributed it to the families on all three sites,” Taylor said.
Today, Taylor is able to use his construction and civil engineering background gained in the Air Force to help teach his students at NWACC. He said he does so, never forgetting the lives lost on 9/11.
“I got to go home and kiss my wife and hug my children,” Taylor said. “There were a lot of people that didn't.”
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