Pleading voices Flames, smoke and voices.
haunt Hawaii-born
Pentagon rescuer
By Rod Antone
rantone@starbulletin.comThat's what Isaac Ho'opi'i, born and raised in Waianae, remembered about what he saw inside the Pentagon Tuesday morning.
"Hearing the people cry for help ... I can still picture it," recalled Ho'opi'i, who has been a federal police officer at the Pentagon for the past five years. "I tried to find them, but all I could really see was smoke and fire."
Ho'opi'i, a dog handler for the Pentagon's Canine Bomb Squad, said he was on patrol with Vito, his German shepherd, and was a little over a mile away when he heard about the crash. They headed back to the Pentagon so fast that Ho'opi'i somehow blew out his patrol car's transmission.
"I have no idea how; I was flying," Ho'opi'i said.
When he arrived, Ho'opi'i said American Airlines Flight 77 had set the Pentagon ablaze and "black smoke from the jet fuel was choking everybody."
Because of the smoke, Ho'opi'i left Vito behind and looked for a way to get inside the Pentagon. Despite the flames and live electrical wires, Ho'opi'i said, he and other officers were able to gain entrance using doors and windows that had blown out upon impact.
He said he soon came across a woman who "was burned so bad her skin started peeling off. ... When I tried to move her, she was screaming in pain." Ho'opi'i later realized screaming was a good thing because it meant the victim was still alive.
"Another person I found, her clothes were burnt to her skin. Then I went and got another man, but I think he was gone."
Quietly he added, "I'm not a physician but ... I'm pretty sure not everybody I got out was still alive."
Ho'opi'i said he remembers something about each person he found, moments and images between the smoke that still linger in his mind.
"One lady, I tried to put her down. She wouldn't let go," he said. "Her hands were squeezing marks on my arm."I had no idea who she was. She was in shock and thought I was going to just leave her there."
Ho'opi'i said he thinks he pulled about 10 people out of the Pentagon, but he doesn't know how many were still alive.
"I was going to perform CPR on this other guy I found, but he opened his eyes, so I called for a medic and started going back inside."
Every time he went back inside, it was the same thing: smoke, flames and voices pleading in the dark.
"I went down this one corridor and I tried calling for people, and all I heard was screaming and yelling," he said. "I kept on saying, 'Walk to my voice, hey, talk to me,' and they kept saying, 'Help me, help me.'
"I thought about these people calling out for help and how they probably have families and kids and ... I had to find them.
"I didn't care about my life because this is my job. Serve and protect."
At some point, he said, he remembered to call his wife, who was at home watching everything on the news.
"My husband's alive, but there was an hour and a half that I didn't think he was," Gigi Ho'opi'i said. "It's taken a toll on me, but I'm not complaining."
Ho'opi'i's only complaint is that he did not do more and save more lives. For every voice he followed to a person, there were two others that were lost in the darkness.
"I am not a hero," he said. "There's other people out here that have given their lives. They're heroes."
His friends and family disagree, adding that Ho'opi'i is too modest to tell the whole story.
"He got warned not to go into the building, and the bruddah went inside," said Ramon Camarillo, a musician who performs with Ho'opi'i in their Washington, D.C. Hawaiian music band, The Aloha Boys.
"He ran into the fire, into the smoke, after his boss said don't go. That's the way he is."
Gigi Ho'opi'i said: "Isaac was ordered not to go into the building, and he went in. And he keeps on saying he should have been able to do more.
"Then it dawned on me that he's not going to be haunted by the nightmares of the grisly things he saw. He and the other officers all feel like they should have been able to do more.
"And they couldn't, they couldn't. They did all they could do."
