James Poplar

[Excerpt from The Northern Virginia Daily] QUICKSBURG — Navy Capt. James R. “Ros” Poplar III was working at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into his office.

Only a couple weeks earlier, he had accepted the job of executive assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy Hansford T. Johnson. The job removed Poplar from the fifth-level Navy Command Center that was ground zero when Flight 77 crashed and burst into flame, killing 27 of his friends and coworkers.

Instead, as the fire alarms sounded, Poplar, who was 48 at the time, was in a meeting with Navy leadership.

“The fire alarms go off in the Pentagon all the time like any other large building,” Poplar said. “We didn’t pay any attention to it until about 10 minutes later I started to smell smoke and sort of the unique odor of jet fuel.”

Although they were only about 200-250 feet from the point of impact, Poplar said he and his colleagues were initially oblivious that anything had happened.

The Pentagon was constructed in five wedges, Poplar said, so while the plane struck one wedge, they didn’t hear anything from their meeting room in the neighboring wedge.

“I stepped in the hallway, looked to my left, and immediately you could see the flames and the smoke rolling down the hallway,” he recalled.

People were running away from the fire, while others were removing oil paintings of previous operations chiefs from the walls.

Poplar recalled grabbing his boss and directing his colleagues to evacuate the building.

“When I walked out I noticed — and it was just this odd detail — I looked at the highway that runs adjacent to the Pentagon and one of the light poles had been knocked over,” Poplar said.

Wondering what could have caused that, he noted that smoke was billowing from “this huge gaping hole in the Pentagon.” Two Air Force fighter jets zoomed overhead at about 150 feet, breaking the sound barrier and carrying live ordnance missiles.

“We knew something bad had happened,” Poplar said.

The jets, he later learned, were headed toward Shanksville, Pennsylvania, but they didn’t make it before Flight 93 crashed.

Meanwhile, outside the Pentagon, “It was purely pandemonium,” Poplar recalled.

Still uncertain what had happened, he and others speculated about a possible bombing or a cruise missile strike.

First responders hadn’t arrived yet to help those who were injured.

“You could see the casualties through the hole,” he said. “You could see parts of the aircraft. And then after a while, we sort of put two and two together. We knew that the Pentagon had been struck by an aircraft.”

With Navy leadership under threat, Poplar said one of his main concerns was getting his boss to the alternate command post in an annex at the northern end of Arlington National Cemetery.

Cellphone service was out because too many people were trying to call each other at the same time. But desperate to let his family know he was OK, Poplar recalled climbing over a cemetery fence and tearing his uniform while in search of a landline.

“I’m still alive,” he remembered telling his son. “No, the Porsche is not yours yet.”

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Two months earlier, Poplar’s wife had died following a long battle with stage 4 cancer. He had learned of her diagnosis while deployed to the Mediterranean Sea on a six-month command of Amphibious Squadron Four/Commander Task Force 61 consisting of USS Saipan, USS Ashland and USS Austin.

“You need to come home,” she had told him in a phone call.

“Within a matter of an hour, I had turned over command of the squadron and was on a helicopter back to Naples, Italy, and caught a flight back to Norfolk,” Poplar recalled.

Over the next year, his wife received intense treatment at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth. The doctors thought the cancer was in remission, so the couple moved back to Northern Virginia, where Poplar took a job as a strategic planner in the Naval Command Center at the Pentagon while his wife received treatment at Walter Reed Medical Center.

“Unfortunately in the spring, as cancers sometimes do, the cancer came back with a vengeance, and she fought the good fight but there was really nothing that she could do,” Poplar said.

She was placed on hospice before she passed away on July 29, 2001.

“She had been with me in the Navy for 26 years,” Poplar said. “She had raised all of our kids. This was going to be my last deployment, so after that, essentially I was going to retire and move out [to Shenandoah County].”

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About three weeks later, Poplar returned to work and learned about an opening to work for Johnson.

Initially he balked, thinking it was too much, too soon. But he reconsidered after he dreamed his wife told him to stop feeling sorry for himself and to take the job.

After interviewing and landing the job, he began in the first week of September.

“All was well,” he said. “And then on the morning of Sept. 11 … it was just one of those beautiful, sort of fall crisp Northern Virginia days.”

Sitting in the conference room, he didn’t know about the first two planes that had hit the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, and he wasn’t standing around the new plasma TV in the newly renovated Naval Command Center with his former coworkers watching the news of the attacks.

“If it had not been for her death, I suspect that I would not be here,” Poplar said.

“I would be in my old office, probably drinking a cup of coffee, standing there with my other coworkers and shipmates watching TV,” he said.

After letting his son know he was OK, Poplar recalled walking up the hill to the Navy annex, where an ad hoc command center had been formed.

“Even then, we didn’t know what was going on,” he said.

It was there that they started working with staff to plan the initial troop deployments to Afghanistan, he recalled.

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Looking back, he said some of that day remains in a fog.

About 11 p.m., he walked to the Metro station in Crystal City to return home to Springfield, “and you could still smell the smoke and the jet fuel.”

“That’s the only time I ever remember on the Metro, even though it was packed because there were a lot of people like me that were stuck in D.C., nobody uttered a word. I mean it was dead silence,” he said.

“For about a year afterwards, the country came together during what was a great sense of patriotism and pride,” he recalled.

“I don’t know what it will take to get back to that as a country.”

In 2004, he retired from active duty and became a contractor, joining the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton and supporting the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of the Navy on site for 10 years.

Later he was deputy branch head, Shipbuilding Conversion Navy on the chief of Naval Operations staff, providing critical shipbuilding programming and budgeting information to the Secretary of the Navy and Chief of Naval Operations.

Now retired and living with his second wife Joanne in a renovated 1749 farmhouse in Quicksburg — Poplar often sits in his Navy Room, where he keeps his awards and a plaque with signatures that he received when he left the Naval Command Center in August of 2001.

Two weeks later, “I can see just by looking at it a number of those that signed were no longer with us,” he said.

Though it’s been 20 years since the terrorist attacks, Poplar said he only recently sought professional help for mental health issues that grew during his career.

“My message would be to any vet that suspects or thinks they have PTSD, there’s nothing unmanly about sort of admitting that you have it and seeking treatment,” he said. “If you think you have issues, rather than taking matters into your own hands, you really need to seek professional help.”

Following the attacks, he said the Pentagon initiated safety measures to protect against other emergencies, issuing all employees an emergency escape breathing apparatus, installing fluorescent strips to help people find their way in the dark, and adding hallway fire curtains to prevent anyone else from succumbing to smoke inhalation.

The Pentagon has also moved all its command centers underground, Poplar said, and the military now has fighter pilots closer to the capital than Langley Air Force Base in Hampton.

“You always say, what if there were fighters at Andrews that would have been able to intercept [Flight 77] before they hit the Pentagon?” Poplar said.

“As I understand it, there’s always a couple fighters on standby at Andrews Air Base.”

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Following a 30-year military career, Poplar said he’s glad for some downtime, though he still keeps busy.

Being president of the New Market Rotary is almost a full-time job, he said. He also volunteers at Open Door Food Pantry and the New Market Historical Society and participates in various county historical groups.

“Life is precious, life is short. Don’t take life for granted. Don’t wake up one day assuming you’re going to be around the next, because you may not,” he said.

“On that day, over 3,000 Americans gave their lives,” said Poplar.

“Many people went into work thinking this is going to be my typical workday. I think by me being spared, one of the missions of my life is to ensure that those people never are forgotten.”