As the Pentagon Burned: Leadership and Human Excellence in the Face of the 9/11 Attack

5 Star Review

Click HERE to Purchase Your Copy Today!

Editorial Book Review:

By Sebastian C

Matthew Klimow was in the National Military Command Center when Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. He was the Executive Assistant to General Richard Myers, the man who would become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When the building shook and the smoke started rising, he didn't watch it on television like the rest of us. He watched it from the inside, in real time, with the weight of the country's military response sitting in that room with him.

That vantage point is what makes this book unlike anything else written about that day.

As the Pentagon Burned is not a retrospective. It doesn't have the comfortable distance of history looking back on itself. It reads like a man sitting down and finally telling you what it was actually like to be in that room, with those people, making those decisions, when every protocol ever written was suddenly insufficient and improvisation wasn't optional. The tension Klimow describes between established procedures and the need for immediate action is not an abstract leadership principle here. It is a lived, breathing, terrifying reality that he navigated in real time.

What elevates the book beyond memoir into something genuinely useful is how honestly he examines the human element underneath all the military structure. Senior leaders suppressing their own fear to project the calm that the people around them needed. The moral weight of decisions made without enough information and without enough time. The way discipline and training either hold or don't hold when everything familiar collapses. Klimow has thought deeply about all of it, and his reflections carry the authority of someone who has spent decades in the highest levels of military leadership and diplomacy since that day.

The lessons he draws connect 9/11 not just to military strategy but to anyone who has ever had to lead through chaos, any kind of chaos, and discovered that the person they were before the crisis was not quite the person the crisis required.

This is essential reading for leaders. And for anyone who wants to understand what leadership actually looks like when it matters most.