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Hispanic Hero Recalls Experiences



 
 
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Old September 30th 03, 10:02 PM
Otis Willie
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Default Hispanic Hero Recalls Experiences

Hispanic Hero Recalls Experiences

(EXCERPT) By Rudi Williams American Forces Press Service

"For a brief moment, you could see the body of the plane sticking out
from the side of the building. Then a ball of fire came from behind
it." -- Sept. 11 hero Air Force Reserve Senior Master Sgt. Noel
Sepulveda

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30, 2003 - Many courageous military and civilian men
and women have been honored for their actions after the Sept. 11,
2001, terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.

But only one member of the Air Force received the Airman's Medal, the
nation's highest award for heroism not involving combat with an enemy.
He also received the Purple Heart for his injuries.

Senior Master Sgt. Noel Sepulveda, 53, a Hispanic- American member of
the Air Force Reserve, was a medical inspector at the Air Force
Inspection Agency, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. But on Sept. 11,
2001, he was working at the Pentagon as a reserve program manager in
the Air Force Strategies and Policies Office.

On that Tuesday morning, Sepulveda -- who was the office's first
sergeant as an additional duty -- went to nearby Washington's Bolling
Air Force Base, just as he did every Tuesday morning, for a first
sergeant's meeting. He needed to be back at the Pentagon to take a
test at 9:30 a.m., so he left the meeting early, revved up his
motorcycle, and headed back to the Pentagon.

Heavy traffic delayed his arrival until about 9:25 a.m. Since he was
running late, he didn't have time to cruise the huge Pentagon parking
lot looking for a parking space, so he asked a DoD police officer for
permission to park closer to the building. The officer told him to
park, By a light pole in an open area near Route 27 that parallels the
Pentagon.

Rushing toward the building, Sepulveda called the testing center on
his cell phone to let instructors know he was en route so they
wouldn't lock him out. To his surprise, he was told that all testing
was cancelled for the day.

The woman who answered the phone said, "Haven't you heard? The World
Trade Center in New York has been hit!" He told her a radio report
he'd heard made it sound like a small aircraft hit one of the twin
towers by accident.

"No, no, no!" the woman exclaimed. She told Sepulveda it was a
passenger jet, it was no accident, and now both towers had been hit.
"We think we're under a terrorist attack," she said.

When the startled sergeant reached the door to the second corridor, he
was told the Pentagon had gone on alert. "As I started running back
towards my motorcycle, I could see the plane -- another plane --
coming down," said Sepulveda, who is now noncommissioned officer in
charge of the Fit to Win/Wellness Clinic at the Pentagon's Dilorenzo
Tricare Health Clinic.

As he reached his motorcycle, Sepulveda noticed the aircraft wasn't
following the normal flight path down the Potomac River for Ronald
Reagan Washington National Airport. Instead, it was coming over a
distant hotel, headed in the direction of the Pentagon.

"It seemed like the pilot was scrambling to keep control, and I
watched as he dropped lower and lower," Sepulveda said. "Then he
dropped his landing gear and started coming down even faster and
lower.

As it came down, the plane was hitting light poles, the sergeant said.
"Then the right wheel hit a light pole and the plane popped into a
45-degree angle. The pilot tried to recover -- go back vertical * but
he hit some more light poles.

"He dipped the plane's nose slightly, and then smashed into the
building," said Sepulveda, who was presented the Airman's Medal and
Purple Heart by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper at the
Pentagon April 15, 2002.

Sepulveda said the wings disintegrated, and then disappeared. "For a
brief second, you could see the fuselage sticking out of the side of
the Pentagon," Sepulveda recalls. "Then, all of a sudden, this ball of
fire comes out from inside. It looked like it was just coming from
inside the building, engulfing the fuselage. And then the fuselage was
all gone."

Sepulveda said the sweltering heat felt like it was engulfing his
body. "Then, suddenly, it felt like somebody grabbed me, put their
hands on his chest, picked me up and threw me back against the light
pole I was standing by," he said.

"The back of my head, my back, and all that hit the pole," he said.
"Small pieces of shrapnel from the airplane hit my motorcycle."

When he managed to get up a few minutes later, he ran to the impact
site to try to help people trapped inside the building.

"I went up to one of the windows that had been blasted out and started
screaming, 'Is everybody out? Is there anybody in here?'" Sepulveda
said.

He saw a man, his hands and chest badly burned, staggering toward him.
That man was the first of about eight people, including a 2-month-old
baby, the sergeant pulled out of the burning building.

A man wearing a torn, blue shirt with bloody sleeves was walking
around outside, seemingly in a daze. Sepulveda asked him if he was OK
and the man said, "Yes. We just needed to get people out of there,"
Sepulveda recalled. "So, I went back in and started pulling people
out. He would take them from that point out to the side."

While inside, he met up with Pentagon police officer George Coldfelter
near Corridor 5, and they started working together getting people out
of the devastated area. Coldfelter handed Sepulveda what he thought
was a bundle of rags, but what turned out to be a baby.

"When I opened the bundle, the baby was limp -- didn't have any life
at all," he recalled sadly. "So I started doing CPR (cardiopulmonary
resuscitation) as I'm running out towards the window to hand him to
paramedics.

"I slapped the baby on the back one last time, and suddenly, he
started crying," Sepulveda continued. "That made me feel a helluva lot
better, because I was handing out a boy (who) was alive and crying.
Apparently, one of the young ladies had come in that day to register
her baby for the daycare, and had brought him into the office so that
her friends could see him. She was just coming back from maternity
leave, and she wanted folks to see her baby."

He waded back through the debris to pull the baby's mother to safety.
"We kept pulling people out until the fire department arrived and told
us to get out because the building was unstable," Sepulveda said.

As he and other rescuers were coming out of the burning building, a
fuel bladder near the heliport exploded. Shortly after that, a fire
engine was aflame. Sepulveda speculates that the gasoline tank
exploded, shaking the building even more, which made that area
collapse about 30 minutes after the airplane slammed into it.

Told to stay out of the building, Sepulveda ran to another section of
the damaged area where he'd heard that people were coughing and
screaming, and couldn't get out. "So we made like a human chain -- me,
a couple of state police officers, and several Army and Navy folks
over there," he explained. "We made a human chain by grabbing onto
each other, walked up the stairs and led people out.

"Then they told us we had to leave that area because there's another
plane possibly inbound," he said.

Sepulveda and other rescuers rushed to a nearby tunnel and set up a
triage area for potential victims in case of another terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, people kept telling them another plane was 20 minutes out,
10 minutes out.

"By about noon, I was on U.S. Route 27 above the tunnel with a
bullhorn, trying to get everybody organized," the sergeant said.
"Everybody wanted to help, but nobody had taken time to organize
anything."

With his voice amplified by the bullhorn, he asked how many doctors,
nurses and people with medical experience were in the crowd. "I told
the first person in line to get the names of every person with medical
experience and tell me how many people we had," Sepulveda said.

Suddenly, he heard a voice saying, "Sergeant, get over here," said
Sepulveda, who turned in the voice's direction and saw Air Force
Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Paul K. Carlton.

"I said to myself, 'Oh my Lord!' I'm in deep trouble now," the
sergeant said. "The general says, 'Sergeant, will you tell me what the
hell you're doing?'"

Sepulveda explained that he'd set up red, green, blue and yellow
areas, each color representing the severity of injuries. For example,
the red area meant people were seriously injured and needed treatment
and to be transported as quickly as possible. Yellow meant the injured
people could wait a bit for treatment.

"The general asked me, 'Where the hell did you learn that?'" Sepulveda
said. "I said, well, sir, I was a medic in Vietnam and during
Operation Desert Storm, so I have a little bit of experience in this
area."

The general said, "Great!" and called over the civilian healthcare
director and told him, "Here's my on-site medical commander,"
according to Sepulveda. Then, the general told Sepulveda, "Sergeant,
you're going to be my on-site medical commander and coordinator with
the civilian forces with everything that goes on here."

From that point on, Sepulveda said, he coordinated all the medical
assets at the site from the 11th to about the 22nd of September, when
the building was turned back to the building engineers and the FBI
closed everything down.

Everything was happening so fast, and his adrenaline was pumping so
strongly, Sepulveda said, that he didn't realize he was injured. That
afternoon, he told a Navy doctor, "I've got this wicked headache, and
I'm having problems from time to time focusing." The doctor told him
he should get checked out after they finished helping people injured
in the terror attack.

"I had a knot on the back of my head and everything else," Sepulveda
noted. "Apparently I had what's called a subdural hematoma, which is
pooling of blood in the head," he explained. "It wasn't something that
happened quickly. They told me I had probably had a pinched vein, and
just a little bit of blood was dripping out at a time. That was about
a month later when I went to the flight surgeon's office and he
discovered that I'd had a subdural hematoma."

Sepulveda said he doesn't remember passing out, but medical
professionals told him he had to have lost consciousness, at least
briefly. "They said with the wallop I received, there's no way that I
wouldn't have at least lost consciousness for a brief moment," he
said.

Sepulveda was born in Sangerman, Puerto Rico. When he was 9 and his
mother came to New Jersey, he went to Spain to spend time with his
grandparents. He joined the Air Force on April 12, 1969, when he was
19 and living in Passaic, N.J.

Arriving in Vietnam in February 1970, the sergeant returned to the
United States on a litter in July 1972. He was wounded while serving
as a medic with the Army's 1st Cavalry Division. "The Army didn't have
enough medics to put on their Huey helicopters," he noted.

The Huey he was assigned to was hit while hovering about 50 feet over
what the crew thought was a wounded American soldier. "It bothered me
when I looked down and saw people putting the patient on the litter
face down," Sepulveda said. "Secondly, they scurried back under the
canopy, and that wasn't right. Usually, you put a patient on a litter
on his back and one person looks up at the winch operator, so they can
signal the operator if the litter starts spinning."

He told the pilot, "I don't like what I'm seeing here, something just
doesn't wash right." The pilot asked him what he wanted to do, so
Sepulveda opened the winch mechanism and let the litter drop a little
bit.

"When the litter dropped, the person on the litter rolled and looked
up at me," he said. "That's when I saw that the man was laying on a
weapon. He was trying to come up to the helicopter with a weapon.

"I said, no he ain't, and dropped him," the sergeant said.

That's when the enemy started firing mortar rounds at the helicopter,
and one hit the tail rudder. "Since I was at the door and didn't have
my safety harness on, I fell out of the helicopter," Sepulveda said.

"I was hitting tree branches on the way down and broke my right hand,
busted the lower part of my left leg and some ribs," he said. "I was
in pretty much of a mess."

Falling out of the helicopter actually saved his life. "Because I fell
out of the helicopter, I was the only one that survived," he said.
"When the helicopter was hit, it exploded, and no one aboard survived.
So, if I had taken the time to be safe that day, I wouldn't be here
talking with you right now. I guess God wasn't ready for me."

The other helicopters in the formation opened fire and cleaned the
area. "I guess somebody dropped down and brought me back up, and then
we took off," he said.

Sepulveda spent about five months in the hospital at Yokota Air Base,
Japan, before being flown to Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu
and later to Travis Air Force Base, Calif. It took him about a year to
fully recover.

During Operation Desert Storm, Sepulveda served with the 822nd
Aero-medical Staging Squadron, now called the 920th Rescue Wing, at
Patrick Air Force Base, Fla.

NOTE: This is a plain text version of a web page. If your e-mail
program

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Sep2...200309303.html

---------------------------
Otis Willie
Associate Librarian
The American War Library
http://www.americanwarlibrary.com
 




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