11 Sep 06 Five Years Ago

I dropped the kids off at school, arrived at the office I was greeted by our secretary who informed me that an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.  At that moment it was just a freak accident.  Pilot error perhaps.  I called Beth and told her the news in case she had not heard.  I remember thinking the airplane was a small plane.  I had not even thought that it was a passenger jet.  I went to one of the classrooms, found a television and rolled it into the office admin area.  We tuned into a local television station and watched the second airplane hit the second World Trade Center tower.  The moment that second airplane hit everything changed.

I got into my truck and drove the short distance home.  It was then that I heard a loud explosion and saw the windows of our house shake.  We were under attack and I had to go get our children.  I drove RAPIDLY to the school (it sits in the flight path of Reagan National) and was the second parent to arrive.  I went into the office and calmly spoke to the vice-principal informing her that I was there to pick up my children.

 She said, and I’ll never forget this, "you’re just over-reacting."  I remember smiling back at her and saying, "You might be right.  We can talk about that tomorrow, perhaps, but right now I’m taking my kids out of school."  It wasn’t her fault.  They did not fully understand the magnitude of what was happening.  No one really understood.  I seem to remember that out of the almost 600 students all but 125 or so were picked up within the next hour.

I drove back home and by then the picture began to clear.  We were being told that commercial airplanes had been hijacked and were being flown into specific locations in New York and Washington, D.C.  All planes were being ordered to land and several planes were still in the air not responding to the instructions.  I’ve seen fighter jets taking off, flying high overhead.  Never before had I seen fully armed figher jets flying directly overhead, over our house.  We lived just a short distance from Arlington National Cemetery and the Pentagon.

We debated leaving the city.  We didn’t know where to go but wrestled with the decision to stay or leave.  I called my dad and asked his opinion.  He said, since we didn’t know the full extent of the situation, it would be better to stay.  He was worried about us getting out into a log jam on the freeway.  He advised us, and we took his advice, to bunker down in our basement and wait it out.

It’s hard, even now, to vocalize how scared we were - perfectly safe as it turns out the whole time but scared nonetheless.  Certainly our experience did not compare with those who were in the buildings or on the airplanes.  Just a few months before I had visited New York.  I had stayed at a Hotel in the World Trade Center complex.  I had been in the lobby of those towers.  I had spent time in the subway station and shopping complex below.  There was a small city all in itself underneath the ground of the World Trade Center buildings.  I kept thinking about being there and all those people in the buildings and all those people below.

And then the towers, one at a time, came crashing down.