I was at home, about 2 miles from the Pentagon. My children were at school nearby. My husband, recently moved from the Pentagon to the Washington Navy Yard, was at work.
I listen to talk radio on a headset while moving around the house and heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV and got on the phone with him. Within minutes the other plane hit and I told him, “Thank God you aren’t in the Pentagon anymore.” (I knew they would attack Washington, and to this day am shocked that no one else seemed to know that.)
I heard a roar go over the house, and a few minutes later all of my windows shook, the glasses rattled in the cabinets. I had no idea what had happened. I know now that the fuselage of the plane had exploded at the Pentagon.
I jumped in the car, radio on and went to the school to get my kids. The other parents were streaming in and I was worried about the Navy Yard. A retired marine told me to calm down that it was not a target.
By this time, rumors were swirling. The State Department had been attacked, the Washington Monument was down, there was a plane headed for the White House or the Capitol. I kept scanning the northern horizon for mushroom clouds.
The smell of burning started and the beautiful September day smelled like a ammo dump.
The traffic was horrible, and it took me an hour to get the 2 miles home with my kids. The children took their hamster to the basement and built a shelter, while I made brownies and waited for my husband.
The principal told me later that she had to call some parents to come pick up their kids after almost all of them were gone... The children shuddered whenever a plane went by for months.
The offices that my husband had been in a few months earlier were destroyed. He lost 265 people from his home parish in New York and my sister-in-law walked out of Manhatten into Brooklyn.
Planes swept the DC area for weeks and we would lie awake at night listening to them. There were troops transports on every highway and byway.
A neighbor ran from Crystal City to the Pentagon child care center, extracted his daughter and headed away before the Pentagon was hit. We sit and marvel that we knew they would hit here while those in the Pentagon sat and watched NYC on TV without moving. There were no jets in the area to protect DC.
No jets near DC and the Pentagon sat watching the MSM. Is there any wonder we were vunerable?
I will never forget.
Only one other story was even scarier. I only learned this when this couple got back a couple of days after 9/11.
I found out that the couple who owned my daughter’s dance studio were over the Atlantic on an Air Italia flight inbound to Miami from Rome on 9/11. An hour out of Miami they were told they could not land in Miami and were being diverted north.
The passengers speculated it was bad weather, when they were informed that the flight was -returning- to Rome speculation was rampant. Upon landing at Rome everyone’s cell phones were confiscated, the men and women were put in separate rooms and “detained” for eight hours.
They were compliantly out of communications, tired, hungry and now scared.
The rumor spread amongst the detainees that the US was nuked and their was no place left to land.
Wow!