She returned to work the day after 9/11, and Susan Lukas says toxic exposure now shapes her life. A bill bearing her name could help others like her.
9/11 Pentagon survivor says toxic exposure led to disabilities
A 9/11 Pentagon survivor and Air Force veteran says toxic exposure led to lasting health problems. She’s been fighting for years to be acknowledged.
Please take care as you read, as this article mentions suicide and other forms of trauma. If you need help, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month.
Black soot coated the hallway’s linoleum tiles, so thick Susan Lukas could see her footprints.
Her throat burned as she climbed the stairs to her office. Hot, stinging tears rimmed her eyes. When she got there, a layer of dust and debris blanketed her desk. She wiped it away, sat down and began to work. By lunchtime, her head throbbed.
On the opposite side of the Pentagon, emergency responders searched through rubble for victims. They fought jet fuel-flamed infernos smoldering along the building’s roof.
During her drive in along Interstate 395 on Sept. 12, Lukas caught an unwanted glimpse of the site where American Airlines Flight 77 had struck the Pentagon the day before, killing all 64 people onboard and 125 inside.
She tried to push the image out of her mind – tried not to remember the feeling of the plane’s impact, the uncannily quiet evacuation and the dazed woman in the parking deck.
Speaking at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the world that the United States government was “functioning in the face” of the horrific terror attacks. The Pentagon, he said, would be “back in business” the next day.
Nobody knew whether the building was safe to occupy. Rumsfeld said it was “not possible to give guarantees,” but commended Pentagon workers for being “brave people.”
Lukas’ two children begged her on Sept. 12 not to go back to the office. But she had to. Then a major in the Air Force, she was not about to disobey orders.
Twenty-five years later, Lukas believes she’s paying the price.
She is among thousands of current and former service members whom the Reserve Organization of America estimates are suffering toxic exposure-related health consequences from working at the Pentagon in the days following 9/11.
While Congress provided health care for 9/11 responders through the World Trade Center Health Program and expanded benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits through the PACT Act, the Reserve Organization of America says Pentagon personnel who breathed toxic air after 9/11 have been left out.
Lukas is the begrudging namesake of a federal bill aiming to change that. The Susan E. Lukas 9/11 Servicemember Fairness Act would extend Department of Veteran’s Affairs health care and disability benefits to those who went back to work inside the still-burning building.
“It affects my life every day,” Lukas said during an interview at her home in Gainesville, Virginia. “People don’t understand that. They think you were exposed, you had problems, you got over it. It doesn’t work that way.”
The day the Pentagon shook
Sept. 11 started like any other day for Lukas.
Inside the Air Force Office of Legislative Liaison on the northeastern side of the Pentagon, she kept one eye on the tiny corner television as she prepared for the day’s meetings on Capitol Hill. Lukas was escorting commanders from Barksdale Air Force Base. They had to be ready for questions from federal lawmakers on the latest headlines.
That meeting never happened. Lukas looked up at about 8:50 a.m. and asked her colleagues when CNN began broadcasting movies.
On screen, black smoke billowed from one of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City. CNN anchor Carol Lin said an aircraft had flown into the building. The Air Force officers knew something was off: A plane would not have accidentally veered that far off course. Minutes later, they watched United Airlines Flight 175 crash into the South Tower.
“I don’t understand why they hit the Twin Towers and didn’t hit us,” Lukas remembers saying to her colleagues as she left for a meeting down the hall. “We’ve got all the leaders.”
At 9:37 a.m., a thunderous boom echoed through the conference room, followed by a violent, earthquake-like shake. Lukas was the only person who could see the window. She watched a plume of black smoke begin to rise outside.
“We’ve been hit,” she told the room.
They’d never practiced evacuations. The Pentagon is a maze of hallways – 17.5 miles of them – all interconnected.
They had no way to know which side of the building had been hit, or which pathways were safe. They had watched a second plane fly into the World Trade Center. Was another coming for them?
Lukas navigated the group of out-of-town commanders to the closest door. They walked past the expansive concrete parking lots, toward the shopping complexes of Pentagon City, at least a mile to a Starbucks. Far from tall buildings.
They passed a woman wandering in a daze, sobbing.
“I think my whole office just got killed,” the stranger told them.
She’d left her office to grab coffee with a friend that morning, something she never did. As she walked down the hall, passing into the interior rings of the building, the woman said she heard a roar, turned and saw a fireball blazing down the corridor.
“She thought she’d lost everybody, because it was a direct impact,” Lukas remembered.
Nearly three hours later, Lukas arrived home to Springfield, Virginia. Her two children were crying on the couch, watching news of the day’s tragedies on television. They huddled together that evening, watching as Rumsfeld told the world that the Pentagon would be in business Sept. 12.
The debris
Fires burned inside the Pentagon for nearly three days, leaping along the roof. Firefighters hacked through wood, slate and concrete trench lines, a process the Reserve Organization of America says likely generated silica-containing dust. Those who breathed the contaminants, they argue, could have sustained permanent lung damage.
The smell of burning plastic filled hallways. Yellow police tape cordoned off sections of the building. Hours after cleaning workers cleared air ducts of debris, they would find them covered with soot again.
Arlington County Fire Chief Edward P. Plaugher opposed Rumsfeld’s directive, worried that gases and debris from the fire would spread through the building, according to a Pentagon report published in 2007.
A crew of 50 workers from the contractor ServiceMaster showed up on Sept. 12 to get the building ready for workers. They began wiping down as much as they could in the hallways: doors, windowsills, trophy cases, picture frames, light fixtures, vents.
Environmental samples tested before the cleanup found most contaminants were “below occupationalhealth or environmental standard,” though some lead and asbestos samples exceeded the healthy limit, according to a 2012 CDC report.
“Sometimes they will clean things two or three times because the dirt was so heavy in some areas,” Linda Luczak, who worked on the facilities team in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said in a Nov. 7, 2001, interview recounting the weekslong cleaning effort, particularly on the fourth and fifth floors of the building.
Thousands of people reported to work at the Pentagon on Sept. 12. Two-thirds of the building was reoccupied by Sept. 24.
Lukas remembers feeling like she was “sleepwalking” in those days immediately after the attack. People in the office rarely spoke. If they did, it was to share stories of the evacuation, she said.
Her headaches and throat pain persisted. About a month after Sept. 11, she saw a doctor inside the Pentagon for respiratory-related issues. She chalked it up to a lingering cold.
“It’s funny how we just did not connect any of that,” she said.
The aftermath
Lukas’ light-bulb moment didn’t come for seven years, when she was retiring from the military.
During a routine health assessment in 2008, she told a doctor she struggled to swallow pills and couldn’t take deep breaths. A physician at Walter Reed military hospital diagnosed her with tracheomalacia – a condition in which the windpipe becomes soft and weak, causing the airway to collapse during breathing.
The doctor told her he’d recently seen three other people around her age, 54, with the uncommon condition. When he said they’d worked in the Pentagon on 9/11, it clicked.
“That’s when I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sick because of 9/11,’” Lukas said.
The VA has never determined her health problems resulted from the terrorist attack.
Yet, in the 25 years since, doctors have diagnosed her with at least three conditions consistent with toxic exposure – tracheomalacia, fibromyalgia and sleep apnea.
At night, the fibromyalgia causes Lukas to wake up crying from muscle aches. On humid summer days, if she spends too long outside, she feels like she’s drowning – like her lungs are filling up with water.
Winter isn’t any better. Cold days bring back the familiar burning sensation in her throat.
“There are not enough drugs in the world for the amount of pain,” Lukas said of her conditions.
Each morning, she takes three supplements to boost cellular health and to repair cartilage and connective tissues. Before bed, she takes gabapentin and spreads layers of creams to help with the muscle pain.
“There was a guy who said he had fibromyalgia and he was thinking about committing suicide. And I get it now,” Lukas said.
She’s learned to eat small servings and drink lots of water so food doesn’t get stuck in her throat.
When Lukas lies on her back, she said it feels like someone is sitting on her chest. She bought a $2,000 Sleep Number bed so she could rest at an incline and breathe. Still, other tasks have remained difficult.
Doctors want her to use a sleep apnea machine, but she’s refused.
“I can take it for about an hour and a half, and then it wakes me up, and it feels like my lungs are on fire,” Lukas said.
She’s spent thousands of dollars on air purifying equipment connected to her house’s HVAC system.
After she broke her knee hiking, Lukas almost couldn’t have surgery because her oxygen levels were too low. To strengthen her lungs, she bought a Peloton bike and treadmill.
The push for recognition
Near Lukas’ front door, a stone reading “retired and loving it” sits among a bed of flowers. By any account, the description overstates Lukas’ employment status.
The 72-year-old sits on three boards and routinely takes up temporary retail jobs. She worked part-time at Home Depot before the construction dust became too much, then moved to the J. Crew Factory store for a few months.
“I love being busy,” Lukas said. “I just don’t sit well.”
In 2022, she left her last full-time job as director of government affairs for the Reserve Organization of America. She’d begun to struggle walking up the slope from the Capital South Metro station to the group’s office on the Hill.
At the time, Lukas was working to pass the PACT Act, a law expanding health care benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange and other hazards during overseas deployments. After it passed in 2022, the law helped an estimated 2 million veterans, including Lukas’ two sisters, her uncle and her son, who she says all have toxic exposure from military service.
But the PACT Act didn’t cover Lukas or other service members who worked in the Pentagon on 9/11. They also weren’t included in the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides no-cost medical treatment to first responders of the terrorist attacks and New York City survivors.
“Nobody was ever interested,” Lukas said of those in the Pentagon. “I don’t get it. We were hit.”
Matthew Schwartzman, Lukas’ successor at ROA, has pushed for a new legislative fix to provide Pentagon workers coverage. He estimates upwards of 3,000 people may have been exposed to toxins while working in the building between Sept. 12 and Nov. 19, 2001, the official endpoint of the Pentagon cleanup.
Schwartzman asked Lukas if he could name the proposed bill after her. She told him not to be presumptuous. He did it anyway.
Democratic Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, Lukas’ congressman, introduced the bill on Sept. 11, 2025.
If passed, it would allow the VA to presume toxic exposure-related health conditions resulted from a service member’s time at the Pentagon in those two months after 9/11.
The VA has identified 6,457 veterans who were assigned to the Pentagon during the cleanup period and who have filed at least one disability claim ROA believes could be related to toxic exposure, Schwartzman told USA TODAY in an email. Together, they’ve filed more than 31,000 claims, he said, and the VA has denied 11,705 of them.
With the presumption, they would be entitled to disability benefits, including free health care for service-connected conditions and monthly financial compensation. Without the presumption, service members would need to undergo the process of proving their service caused their condition.
While the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund was expanded in 2024 to include uniformed service members, Schwartzman said, it covers only those who helped with search, recovery and cleanup, not people like Lukas who worked in the building.
The change at the VA, Schwartzman said, would “encourage veterans to come forward.” Lukas believes veterans would also receive more robust care for their toxic exposure symptoms.
The bill is pending in the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee. Schwartzman doesn’t expect it to pass anytime soon.
The Susan E. Lukas 9/11 Servicemember Fairness Act presumes asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema, tracheomalacia, cancer, as well as any cardiovascular, skin, or respiratory disease could be related to Pentagon toxic exposure.
During a February hearing, James Smith II – deputy executive director of policy and procedures, compensation service at the VA – said he was unaware Lukas and others like her were “overlooked” in the PACT Act. Still, he said the agency did not support the bill. The health conditions it covered were listed in a “manner that’s too broad,” he said. More research, he added, is needed to determine causation.
USA TODAY reached out to the VA for information about what further research may be needed, but the agency declined to comment.
At the hearing, Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, told the VA he expected expeditious progress.
“This is absolutely ridiculous, first and foremost,” he said. “They were the first ones to feel it, short of the towers falling.”
Coping
On the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks this year, Lukas will do what she always does: hide. She turns off her television and radio and avoids reading the news. To keep her mind busy, she’ll putter around the house.
“If I never have to talk about 9/11 again, I’d be fine with it,” she said. “I do it because of all the people that don’t realize that they’re struggling with toxic exposure.”
Forgetting is not an option for her.
“I’m one of the few people that maybe know exactly what’s going to kill me,” she said. “It makes me appreciate every day.”
Karissa Waddick covers America’s 250th anniversary, looking at how historical events have shaped our nation. She can be reached at kwaddick@usatoday.com.