Another Tuesday Morning

There will be tributes on television all day today. I will avoid them, not because they hold no meaning, but because they don't have to, at least not for me.

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The headquarters of the US General Services Administration is located just two blocks west of the White House. It was another Tuesday morning, one that started out like any other day.

At about nine or nine-thirty in the morning, I got a call from an old friend in New Jersey. Go turn on the TV, she said with urgency. There was one tuned to CNN in a conference room nearby. That was when I learned what happened to the World Trade Center in New York City. My friend ended the call by begging me to "please, please, get the hell out of town!"

But it would be a while.

I was on the top floor of the building, near the balcony in the north-east corner. From that vantage point, we could look down and see the people evacuating from the White House and related buildings. Over at the corner, I could see other associates at the other balcony on the southern side of our building, looking out over the Potomac. There was smoke coming from the Pentagon, where most offices of the Defense Department are located. A jetliner had just crashed into that as well.

Events were unfolding quickly, and rumors along with them. There was a report of a car bomb just up the street, near the World Bank. People described panic in the streets, although it looked more to me like the usual late rush hour traffic. In fact, most of it was less panic than pandemonium. Our boss was the deputy communications director. While he was awaiting an official order to dismiss us, other supervisors were already telling employees to get out of town post haste. Just down the street, the State Department was evacuating. Then a colleague came down from the front office. It's official, he said, everybody go home. By the time our press office could even find anyone to get a decision worth announcing, the building was nearly emptied.

My apartment at the time was just three miles from the office, across the Potomac into Arlington, Virginia. It would be an hour's walk. I could have taken the subway, but with the expected crowds, and some prior experience with just how Metro might respond in an emergency (which is to say, badly), I figured walking would get me home much sooner.

There was a university campus right there in the city. I stopped by the Newman Center, where I sometimes went to daily Mass, to see students huddled in front of a TV, and girls crying, consoling one another. I left after a while to make my way home. Hundreds of others were doing the same. In the distance, and on television monitors and car radios, it was as a scene from a disaster movie. A plane crashing into a skyscraper. That same building collapsing. Smoke and flames bellowing from the nerve center of our nation's defense. The Pentagon, one of the most secure buildings in the area, was on fire!

There was yet another rumor spreading along the sidewalks. The bridge into Virginia was being blocked. As ridiculous as it sounded, the unreality of the scene made it seem plausible. We were accustomed to roadblocks being erected on special occasions without apparent rhyme or reason. Why should a city under attack be any different?. But arriving at the bridge, the news turned out to be false. We ventured across the bridge, looking south to the Pentagon, to the reality of that which otherwise seemed unreal, like watching a disaster movie, except that you're in it.

I made it to the Virginia side easily enough, certainly easier than most of the cars. I passed a high-rise apartment complex. A frantic woman was throwing furniture and belongings from seven or eight stories up. She was out of control. Someone said she was carrying a sign. I didn't see one. There was a videographer trying to get footage, while shouting questions to her about her motives. Anything for a Pulitzer, I thought.

I finally got home, and called my mother in Ohio. My siblings were calling in from elsewhere in and around Cincinnati, asking her if they had heard from me. I told them I was home safely, and that I was never in any real danger. Meanwhile, my fifteen-year-old son called my house and left a message. I called the school to relay the same message to him. I learned later that his aunt, one of his mother's sisters, was stationed in the affected portion of the Pentagon. A doctor's appointment that day saved her life. My son had learned of this, and had taken it upon himself to alert other family members, including a frail maternal grandmother in Cleveland, that all was well, at least among their own.

It was a good thing I called home when I did. The lines were jammed for hours most of the day. That evening, a state of emergency was declared in the District, Maryland, and Virginia. No one allowed out on the streets or on the highway.

It didn't end there. For the rest of the week, we had to show our IDs just to walk around on the street.

I listened to the pundits on television, one after another. They were all quite sure of ourselves, and what must be done. They went on for weeks about it, as if to say: "We interrupt our normal programming for this special report..." and then never stopping. One of them, a former Secretary of State, reminded us that this will not be over in a couple of weeks; the American people should be prepared for a long haul.

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One day about two months after the event, they found me sobbing uncontrollably at my desk. I heard some really sad song on the radio, and it just triggered me. I was placed on medical leave for several weeks. It didn't exactly help my career. My director probably thought I was crazy or something. Any excuse would have sufficed for him, but that's another story.

Life went on, and so did I.

For a while, we were a united nation, with something like "you are either for us or against us." That lasted until there were no "weapons of mass destruction" to be found in Iraq after all. It was all thanks to poor intelligence, the same poor intelligence that could have stopped the whole thing from happening. Nobody lost their job. In fact, one or more defense contractors got stinking rich over the whole thing. Must be nice.

Then we weren't so united, thanks to President Obama, who made his way into office, and later his fortune, by showing us how divided we were, and still are to this day. We went from being united in adversity, in less than a couple of decades, to losing friends over how they voted.

Then there are the idiots who think the Twin Towers were rigged to explode, that this was all an elaborate ruse planned years in advance to get us into another war. They also say a rocket grenade hit the Pentagon, not a jetliner, as if thousands of commuters on the freeway nearby, and in the nearby high rise buildings, all simply imagined a jetliner and not a rocket grenade hit the Pentagon. That's why they're idiots.

And finally, there's the entire new agency created to keep us safe while flying commercial, the greatest accomplishment of which is to violate the Fourth Amendment with impunity on a daily basis. That's supposed to make us feel safer. How's that working out for us? (I have my own experience with these jokers, but that's another story.)

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I will remember that day. I don't need reminders.