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That night (June 25, 1996) Guerrero arrived on the rooftop around
10 p.m., as he watched a large gas truck, followed by a car, make
its way to the building he was on.
That same car and truck
was also spotted by then-1st Lt. Michael Harner, who was inside the
building beside Guerrero. Harner, who had only been on station for
several days, had just returned to his room, opened a sliding glass
door and stepped out onto his balcony. Before the truck made its way
to Guerrero's building, Harner noticed it parked in a parking lot
next to a mosque that was under construction. Days earlier, there
had been no vehicle traffic through the parking lot.
“I
watched as it drove right in front of me, and the lights from the
compound shone, so I could see the people in the truck, and there
was actually a vehicle following the truck,” Harner said. “I thought
that was very unusual to see that, and I didn't know quite what to
do about it, (because) nobody's shooting or nobody's doing
anything.”
The truck then parked beside Guererro's building.
Two men got out and hurried into the car, which sped off. At that
moment, it clicked for Guerrero that this wasn't normal and
something bad was about to happen.
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Alfredo Guerrero sits in front of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency building at Fort Belvoir, Va., on June 10, 2016, where he works as the anti-terrorism program manager. Guerrero was on top of Bldg. 131 of the Khobar Towers complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996, when he spotted a suspicious large gas truck drive toward the building. When the truck parked and two men jumped out and got into a car that had been following them, Guerrero and two other Airmen immediately began evacuating the building. A short time later the truck exploded, killing 19 Airmen and injuring more than 350 people. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Christopher Gross)
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“I got on the radio and called the control center to tell them
what was going on, and, before I finished my first transmission, I
thought about the people in the building and realized, ‘Well, if
this is what I think it is, this building is going down,'” Guerrero
said. “And so, before I finished my first transmission, I told them
I was beginning to evacuate the building.”
The Airman with
Guerrero overheard his radio transmissions and rushed into the
building to begin evacuating. Guerrero got the attention of another
Airman on the other side of the building and the two of them also
began evacuating the eight-story building.
The explosion
Guerrero only
made it down a few floors before the blast went off.
“I was
fortunate enough to be behind an interior wall and so most of the
overpressure from the bomb went right behind me. So, I was kind of
in a protected area,” he said. “It just spun me around; it didn't
knock me down or anything.”
Not all were that lucky. The
explosion killed 19 Airmen and injured more than 350 service members
and civilians. It was so powerful that all of the windows in a
2-mile radius were blown out.
Sitting near the balcony door in the dorm's common room, Harner
recalled seeing a flash of light before the door was blown apart.
“I ate that sliding glass door,” Harner said, as he described how
the glass shredded his face, shoulder, arm and leg.
Both
towers were dark. As Harner tried to feel his way around his dorm,
he made his way back into his bedroom. He remembered yelling out of
the hole in the wall where his window once was, “Is there anybody
out there?
“It was dead silence,” he said. “And it was
probably one of the most eerie feelings I have ever had in my entire
life.”
Over in Guerrero's building, an entire side of the
building had completely collapsed.
“The next thing I knew,
everything was pitch black. I couldn't hear anything or see
anything,” he said.
After he collected himself and was aware
of where he was, Guerrero immediately began assisting the injured.
After helping an Airman down the stairs and out of the building, he
headed back inside to the second floor. It was there he saw a few
Airmen lying motionless under some rubble.
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Nineteen Airmen died and hundreds were injured in the terrorist
attack at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996.
The front of Bldg. 131 was blown off when a fuel truck parked nearby
was detonated by terrorists. (Courtesy photo)
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“Everything was kind of blurry and surreal,” he said.
Soon
after, his leadership arrived. He briefed them on what he had
experienced and was sent away to get checked out and cleaned up.
‘Life left his body'
Right before the explosion,
then-Staff Sgt. Selena Zuhoski was watching a movie in the
recreation building with fellow Airmen.
“I remembered the
lights flickered, and then I heard a deep ‘boom.' And then I
remember ... dust billowing in,” she said.
Zuhoski would later
learn that she had been knocked unconscious.
As she regained
consciousness, she and a group of people headed outside, where they
saw a mushroom cloud around the site of the explosion. When they
headed toward the damaged building, she said she saw people coming
over the fence. Her first thought was that they were under attack.
The people hopping the fence were locals, coming to help.
After reaching the building, Zuhoski heard “there's a guy dying
on the fourth floor. He's going into shock.” With a flashlight in
hand, she and others headed upstairs.
“There was a man there
in a puddle of blood and there was a door that had been blown off
its hinges,” she recalled.
The group utilized the door as a
makeshift gurney and carefully loaded the injured man onto it and
carried him downstairs and outside, where they put him on a table
until paramedics arrived.
As the group headed back into the
building, Zuhoski waited with the man until more help arrived.
“I held his hand and I was covering this wound on his chest,”
she said. “I was saying, you know, ‘Hold on, it's gonna be OK.' His
hand was really cold and he was saying ‘Oh, God. Oh, God.' And I
said ‘Please. Please hold on.' And then ... I could tell the instant
that the life left his body.”
Paramedics arrived and took the
man away, loading him onto a bus. Zuhoksi then went back into the
building to help more victims.
Post-traumatic stress
Harner, who at the time was a
pavements engineer for the 4404th WG, suffered deep wounds from
broken glass, along with PTSD. After being transported to a local
hospital, they cleaned him up and packed him full of gauze,
concerned that sewing him up with glass left inside of his body
could lead to infection.
Harner, who was deployed from
Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, was medically evacuated the next
day to Germany, where he spent two days before being sent back
stateside.
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Col. Michael Harner, the associate director of civil engineers at
the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., points to a spot on a map June 9,
2016, where the terrorist attack occurred on the Khobar Towers
complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996. Harner was inside
a building next to Bldg. 131, which was destroyed by a truck bomb.
The attack killed 19 Airmen and injured more than 350 people,
including Harner. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Christopher Gross)
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He would go on to receive the Purple Heart, and for the next
decade, shards of glass would continue to work their way out of his
body.
Harner, now a colonel, serves as the associate
director of civil engineers at the Pentagon.
Along with him
and others, Zuhoski also suffered from PTSD.
“I probably
didn't even realize the impact that this would have on me as far as
being like a lifelong ... traumatic event,” she said. “I thought that
... it would eventually fade, but it hasn't. It's gotten worse. I have
nightmares, I have guilt. (I) wish I would have been able to do
more.”
With the support of her husband, Zuhoski said she's
been able to use art as an outlet. Her husband set up a studio for
her in their home about a year ago. “It's really been therapeutic
for me,” she said.
Zuhoski said talking openly to others who
experienced the same tragedy has also helped.
With every
tragedy, policies, procedures and ways of thinking are updated to
help prevent another one.
Guerrero, now the anti-terrorism
program manager at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at Fort
Belvoir, Virginia, said one point he hits hard on when giving
anti-terrorism briefings is to know the enemy.
“You have to
know who you're dealing with and how far they're willing to go, what
types of targets they're looking for,” he said.
He said
there are no front lines anymore, and it's everybody's
responsibility to be vigilant.
“I think we've come a long way
for protecting our folks. We're teaching other countries how to do
it,” Guerrero said. “My hope is that we've learned enough on where
we can stop the next one, and so that's what scares me -- the next
one. What is the next one and how far are they willing to go.”
By U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Christopher Gross
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2016
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