My office is located on the fifth floor of the Portals building, at 1280 Maryland Avenue SW, Washington DC. It’s the southernmost building at the end of 14th Street, right at the Tidal Basin and Maine Avenue.

Me at my desk.  The Jefferson Memorial is just out of the frame at the top.

There was a more-than-routine crisis going on in the office that morning. We had been asked to respond to OMB comments on our FAIR Act Inventory, and the short turnaround required me to constantly gig our various deputy directors and office chiefs to get their responses. My boss Ray, agitated about the pressure he was getting from the deputy administrator, had already bugged me a few times about it, and at 8:30 asked me to send another email to everybody. I could only send the email from my coworker Donna’s machine, since she had done the report initially and the long complicated mailing list was stored locally on her computer. She was due in at 8:30, but was running late.

So I was pacing around the office, faxing something to Phil White in the IT Division and generally charged up waiting for Donna. She showed up at 8:58, and I quickly got into her machine and sent the email. I went back to my office and printed out the responses we had received so far so I could tell Ray who was still delinquent.

At about 9:18, Ray charged by my office, head down, a scowl on his face. "C’mon," he growled, and headed for the conference room. I figured we had received a tighter deadline, or something had gone wrong with the report, and Ray was going to have one of his sit-downs with me to go over it.

The conference room was empty, and as usual I was drawn to the view outside the big wide windows. It was a beautiful day (everyone remarked on it later), a deep blue sky, no clouds at all, low humidity and crisp temperatures. Just outside to the right was the Jefferson Memorial, dead center in the window was the Pentagon, and Reagan Airport sprawled to the left. It was the same view as in my office, and I couldn’t remember it ever being so crisp and lovely.

The view from our conference room.  The Pentagon covers the whole width of the larger pane, near the horizon.

Ray, without a word, crossed to our 20" TV and turned it on. We had for some reason never gotten around to getting cable installed to the room, so we could only get a few commercial channels. Ray pushed the button to advance the channels, and stopped when he got a clear picture, on Channel 7.

We both gasped. On the screen was a live helicopter shot of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, smoke streaming from both of them in the aftermath of obviously large explosions. Peter Jennings was describing the events so far, and in a few minutes they showed a tape of a plane, a big twin-engine Boeing, smashing into the second tower.

It was an unbelievable, surrealistic sight. The plane, going full out at about 400 miles an hour, crossed the screen from right to left, disappeared behind the first tower, and exited the second tower in a shower of flame and debris. Verle, my fellow section head, had joined us, and we stared openmouthed at the screen, exclaiming in obscenities.

I went into my office and called home to tell my wife Laurel to turn the TV on. At some point, Jennings stated the obvious, that this was some kind of terrorist plot. I turned to the conference room window and started looking around. Laid out in front of me was a terrorist’s delight – Reagan Airport, the Pentagon, the roof of the Lincoln Memorial thru the trees, and reaching up from the top of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Washington Monument.

I mentioned to Ray that perhaps we should keep an eye on the scene. If they were hitting New York, we might be on the list.

For the next 15 minutes or so, we alternated between watching the TV and the landscape. I could see no changes in the air traffic out of Reagan, still landing from the south and taking off to the north. In the almost three years we had been in the Portals building, I had watched hundreds of takeoffs and landings, and had developed a real eye for the oddities, planes off the beaten track, at the wrong altitude or speed, things out of the ordinary.

That’s what I was looking for out the big picture windows. It seemed reasonable that Washington would be on any terrorist’s list of targets, but I never thought that we would really see anything. I assumed that the twin attacks in New York were at the outer limits of any terrorist organization’s logistics.

The Pentagon from my office at exactly 9:38AM, September 11, 2002, one year after the attack.  The plane hit the far side of the building, about where the crane arm sticks up in this picture.

I had just scanned the sky and the scene one more time, and turned to Ray. We were talking about the need for a swift response to this attack (we were already talking about bin Laden) when Ray leapt to one side, his face instantly animated beyond anything I had ever seen.

"They just hit the Pentagon!"

I turned. Rising up from the right center of the Pentagon’s mass was a gigantic spherical orange mass, the flames oddly bright and vivid in the clear direct sunlight. I stepped to the window, and instinctively put my hand to the glass. Verle and Ray were quickly on either side of me. A few seconds after the explosion, the glass rattled and a dull boom shook the room.

I yelled, "Jesus Fucking Christ!" and the others yelled other things. The room seemed full of sound suddenly. Some people rushed in in response to the sound, then oddly left again.

Within seconds, the orange fireball had dissipated, replaced with an angry black plume, instantly bending to the southeast in the prevailing wind. I simply could not believe what I was looking at. To expect a bizarre, outrageous event like this, and then to see it happen, is literally the stuff of nightmares. The only similar experience I could compare it to was the Challenger explosion, when I actually believed that if I looked at the tape enough times and really concentrated, it wouldn’t blow up this time.

We didn’t know what kind of plane had hit the Pentagon, or where it had hit. Later, we were told that it was a 757 out of Dulles, which had come up the river in back of our building, turned sharply over the Capitol, ran past the White House and the Washington Monument, up the river to Rosslyn, then dropped to treetop level and ran down Washington Boulevard to the Pentagon. I cannot fathom why neither myself nor Ray, a former Air Force officer, missed a big 757, going 400 miles an hour, as it crossed in front of our window in its last 10 seconds of flight.

(The more I’ve thought about it since, the odder the choice of the Pentagon as a target appeared. The Pentagon is a huge pile of concrete, the walls over a foot thick, and no plane is big enough to do more than superficial damage to it. Had the hijackers chosen to dive into the Capitol or the White House, much smaller sandstone buildings with little internal framework, the damage and the death toll would have been infinitely higher. Both houses of Congress were in session, and in addition Laura Bush was in the building, preparing to testify to some committee about school reading programs. I guess the symbolism of the Pentagon was more important to the terrorists, who blamed the US military for everything, much like Chomskyites blame everything on the CIA. As horrible as it sounds, the hit on the Pentagon may have been a blessing.)

As we watched the black plume gather strength, less than a minute after the explosion, we saw an odd sight that no one else has yet commented on. Directly in back of the plume, which would place it almost due west from our office, a four-engine propeller plane, which Ray later said resembled a C-130, started a steep decent towards the Pentagon. It was coming from an odd direction (planes don’t go east-west in the area), and it was descending at a much steeper angle than most aircraft. Trailing a thin, diffuse black trail from its engines, the plane reached the Pentagon at a low altitude and made a sharp left turn, passing just north of the plume, and headed straight for the White House.

All the while, I was sort of talking at it: "Who the hell are you? Where are you going? You’re not headed for downtown!" Ray and Verle watched it with me, and I was convinced it was another attack. But right over the tidal basin, at an altitude of less than 1000 feet, it made another sharp left turn to the north and climbed rapidly. Soon it was gone, leaving only the thin black trail.

The TV was still talking about the World Trade Center for the next ten minutes, and we kept waiting for the news of the Pentagon to show up. Out the window, road traffic continued, but immediately the sky emptied of planes. Almost simultaneous with the Pentagon attack, the FAA shut down the air traffic system across the country. It would be a long time before planes flew in or out of Reagan again. ABC reported that some planes may still be unaccounted for.

At about 10, we were half-watching a view of the second tower, when an odd fuzzyness caught my eye. An edge of the building seemed to be crumbling, and it appeared that the camera was zooming in to take a closer look. It took a second to realize that the camera was stationary, and the blooming was due to the immense cloud of debris caused by the building as it pancaked and literally disintegrated.

Right after the Pentagon hit, Ray yelled out the door that anyone who wanted to leave the building was welcome to do so. Portals had been evacuated, but in such a dumb slipshod fashion that few of us knew about it. There was never a building-wide announcement, but we could see scores of people standing around on the plaza in front of the building, watching the Pentagon pyre. I figured I was safer in the building than out, especially (an morbid thought) if the bastards nuked Washington. Within a half-hour of the hit, Ray and I were the only ones left in the office.

The TV mentioned a few times that the bridges leaving Washington were closed, but the two that ran by our window, the Case and the George Mason, were never closed that I could see. Considering the wholesale rush of everybody to get out of town, the traffic never clogged up and gridlock never happened.

Also around 10, the TV was talking about reports of a car bomb at the State Department when we heard and felt a tremendous explosion, much louder than the Pentagon. I assumed that the Capitol, the only iconic Government building not in view from our window, had been hit. All morning, I had been thinking about the last chapter of Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, where a Japan Air pilot slammed a 747 into the House of Representatives during a joint session of Congress. I took off on a dead run to find a window looking east. I was afraid to leave the building, since they might not let me back in, and I wouldn’t be able to follow things on the television. I ran down to Civil Rights, but all the windows faced north. Still running, not finding a single person still in the building, I made it all the way down to Chris Reagan’s office until I remembered that a concrete firewall separated Portals from Portals II, and there was no way I could see the Capitol without going outside. Panting like an idiot, I made my way back to the office to await the news on the TV.

The explosion was never mentioned, and it remained a mystery for over a month. I finally read an account of the Pentagon attack in the Washington Post which discussed the air defense response. Before the Pentagon attack, fighter jets were scrambled from Langley, 200 miles south of DC. Trying to get to DC before any of the stray jetliners attacked, they hit Mach 2, leaving a rolling sonic boom all the way up Virginia to the Pentagon. When I was a kid, camping in the Mojave Desert, I heard sonic booms all the time, but it had been so long since jets have been allowed to go supersonic over land, I didn’t recognize the sound any more.

Ray and I continued to watch the developing news, watching with numbed shock as WTC 1 collapsed around 10:30. The notion that the slow, almost balletic collapse and the blooming dust cloud covering lower Manhattan contained the death of thousands of people was such an abstract concept that it could not be grasped for hours.

Around 11, Ray decided to leave. He gave me his bag lunch, and after he left I ate his ham sandwich and cookies, the only person left in the building. The TV reported that a fourth plane had crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside, but it was not known if there was any connection.

As much as you hate to admit it, there is a visceral thrill to events such as this. In my life, the Kennedy assassination sprang to mind, such a jolt to the national psyche that even at age 7 it made a lasting impression on me. The Challenger explosion and death of Princess Diana were similar. But the scope and breadth of this event was incomprehensible. Watching the continuing coverage, and pondering the events, I broke a cardinal rule and lit up a cigar in the building. Soon, my little cloud of smoke mixed with the lethal one outside the window.

The whereabouts of the President became an issue. We had seen him live as he announced the attack at an elementary school in Florida, and he was then whisked away to Air Force One. Since then, there had been no word. About 12:30, I saw some activity in the air and went over to the window. A small private jet, white with no markings, was making a landing at Reagan from the south, and flying just off his left wing was an F-16. The private jet touched down and taxied to the terminal, and the F-16 kicked in his afterburner and leapt up, making a sharp turn to the west. As he did, he was silhouetted briefly on the gibbous moon over the Pentagon, the only honest-to-God beautiful thing I had seen all day. I guessed that maybe the plane was the President sneaking into Washington.

Finally at 1PM, I decided to try to get home. Taking one last look at the Pentagon plume, which waxed and waned in intensity all morning, I headed down Maryland Avenue with the vague notion of seeing if any slug drivers were left. I immediately realized the error of my theory as I reached 12^th Street. Not a car, a bus, a pedestrian was in sight in any direction. Any number of 1960s apocalyptic stories sprang to mind, mostly Bob Dylan’s Talking World War III Blues ("Well, I seen a Cadillac window uptown/There was nobody around/I got into the driver's seat/And I drove 42nd Street/In my Cadillac/Good car to drive …after a war.")

After seeing no drivers, I decided to take a risk and ride the Metro. Laurel was convinced that nerve gas in the subway was the next phase, but I thought that if they were going to do that, they would have done it a few hours earlier when the system was more crowded. I took the escalator in the courtyard of the DOT building at 7^th and D and rode the Blue Line up through downtown and under the river at Rosslyn. The PA announced that we would not be stopping at the Arlington Cemetery or Pentagon stations. We did zoom through those stations, the Pentagon platform ominously empty.

I eventually arrived at the Springfield/Van Dorn Station, the end of the line. I took me a while to orient myself, and it took me over an hour to pick my way up offramps and across highways to get to Frontier Drive. All the stores on Frontier – Home Depot, Old Navy, Borders – were closed and the parking lots deserted. The only open business was TGI Fridays. Across the road, Springfield Mall was likewise locked, only 20 or so cars in the huge lots. It took me another long while to find a way through the mixing bowl construction and finally get to my car in the Springfield Plaza parking lot. The contrast between the deserted streets and the beautiful fall weather was eerie.

I didn’t get home until 3:30. After greeting everyone, the first thing I did was open a bottle of Laphroaig and take a stiff drink. Then I didn’t move from the TV until after midnight.

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