By Deborah Grigsby | The Denver Gazette
For many years after the Sept. 11 attacks in Washington, D.C., Mark Schoenrock said he could still smell the burning jet fuel from American Airlines Flight 77.
“It was just such an overpowering sensation,” Schoenrock, a former Lone Tree resident and survivor of the Pentagon crash, told The Denver Gazette. “You know, all of your senses are just totally overpowered.”
Although he said he’s eventually “gotten over” it, he still remembers the day clearly — and the split-second decision that saved his life.
Schoenrock was an active-duty Army officer serving as the inspector general for the state of Colorado when he and 13 others from the Colorado National Guard arrived by military aircraft in the nation’s capital on Sept. 10 for official business.
On the morning of Sept. 11, the tall, slender Nebraska native walked the halls of the Pentagon where he had once been an executive officer in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army and helped plan the renovation of the Pentagon’s first wedge, which had just been completed.
The other passengers that Schoenrock had accompanied to Washington had meetings elsewhere in the city that day.
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