Four Years Later

Take a look at this excellent timeline, read some Portraits of Grief, and remember.

Here’s what I remember. I drove past the Pentagon around 9:35 a.m., mere minutes before Flight #77 crashed into it. I was listening to news reports on the radio about the World Trade Center in New York and had heard live reports of the second plane hitting the second tower at 9:03 a.m. The thought that we should be worried in Washington never even occurred to me. That’s the difference between before 9/11 and after.

At work, people were looking out the windows, not at the televisions. They said someone had called from the Capitol and said a plane had hit the Pentagon. I thought that was an overblown rumor. Moments later, we could all see the smoke rising from the crash site out the window and on television.

We wondered whether it made sense to leave. Some did. Others stayed, frozen with indecision. I was still there a minute or so after 9:59 when the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. I was on the phone with my mother to let her know I was okay when a Capitol policeman ran into our office and said we had to get out. Another plane was inbound. I hung up, and we ran downstairs to the parking garage. I took a co-worker who could not leave because she had no car and the Metro was shut down.

As soon as we got out of the garage, we hit total gridlock and chaos. Emergency vehicles were driving down the wrong side of the road at us. We were low on gas. It took us nearly an hour to get to a gas station just a few blocks away. Then we drove north out of town and around the Beltway to get back to Northern Virginia without passing the Pentagon. Every single radio station on the dial was simulcasting news accounts. It was mid-afternoon before I got home and began watching the coverage on television in a daze. Even VH-1 and Mtv were simulcasting news. The next day, when I drove to work past the Pentagon again, it was still billowing smoke. And the next day. And the next.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 11th, 2005 at 12:00 am and is filed under Holidays and Anniversaries, Global War on Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.