I had just entered my sixth year working on Capitol Hill and was the technical lead for senate.gov working for the U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms and I had just moved to my apartment about a mile from the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia a little over two weeks earlier.

Like most people on Capitol Hill, I had a TV at my desk, but I must have just been settling in as I hadn’t turned it on yet when my phone rang.

Me: “This is Brett…”

My Friend Bob: “Did you know a plane just hit the World Trade Center?”

Me [incredulously]: “WHAT?!?? Did it bounce off??” (I could not conceive that the airplane was a large, passenger jet. It had to be an accident by an inexperienced small plane pilot.)

Bob: “Uh…NO. People are dead. Lots of people. You need to turn on your TV…”

Me: “Ohmygod! Oh no! Okay. Thanks for letting me know.”

The World Trade Center

We hung up, I turned on the TV to see the north tower of the World Trade Center on fire. I watched—riveted. I had just visited the World Trade Center for the first time a few months earlier.

About 10 minutes later I watched the second plane hit the other tower on live television. “Disbelief” does not quite do justice to the utter confusion, quiet panic and lack of comprehension I experienced. I walked down to my staff’s cubicles and asked them to come quickly to my office. My first thought was that I wanted to know where they were. My second thought was that I did not want them to be alone when they saw what was going on. And my third thought was that I could not figure out how exactly to verbalize what I just saw.

We sat, huddled around my little 13″ TV for several minutes, each of us asking unanswerable questions or making exclamations, then quietly each of my staff members shuffled back to their desks.

My friend Meredith called—scared and unsure—and we agreed that today would not be a good day for a Capitol tour.

Flashback to July 2001: A Foreboding Feeling

At the time, my friends and I stepped out of the cab, I looked up overwhelmed by the sheer vertical size of the north tower and an odd, overwhelming sense of dread and fear overcame me. It was so odd. I didn’t understand at the time why I was so scared in that place, but I emphatically determined for us that we were not going to go up to the observation deck. I remember saying, “c’mon guys, this place will always be here. We can go up next time.”

The Pentagon

As I watch the World Trade Center burn, MSNBC breaks in with the announcement that something has exploded at the Pentagon. A good friend of mine worked in the Pentagon and, oddly enough, a week or so prior I’d asked where in the Pentagon he worked. He told me that he worked in the Command Center which was somewhere along the side that faced Arlington Cemetary.

Not knowing where “the explosion at the Pentagon had occurred, I actually lunged for my phone. In fact, I think I knocked something off my desk en route to it. After mis-dialing my friend’s number three times, my hand finally stopped shaking enough to get it right. I got his voice mail. I shakily, but emphatically, told him that I needed to know that he was okay and that he needed to call me as soon as he possibly could to let me know.

Meredith calls again to ask about our friend. I told her I didn’t know anything. We promised to keep in touch.

Evacuating

The quiet murmurs of “do we stay or do we leave” had begun to burble through the cubicles and offices. Nobody knew what to do. My boss had decided to work from home that day, my boss’s boss was in a meeting in the Capitol. The decision was made for us: evacuate.

Now!

Get out. Run for your lives. There is a plane headed for the Capitol!

I bolted for the elevators, but as I got there, I thought, “do I take them? We don’t take them in an emergency.” In the background two Capitol Policemen were emphatically pushing us to leave and one was completely hysterical: bawling and completely lost her composure. I took the stairs.

I walked across the front of Union Station to another federal building where I parked. I had decided that I needed my car out of that building. My insurance did not cover acts of terrorism and if they blew up that building, I could not afford to replace my car.

The ten minutes it took me to cross from one side of Union Station to the other on foot took over 45 minutes to do the same in my car. There was panic everywhere. People were running red lights, driving on sidewalks, anything to get ahead of the crushing traffic to get out of the city. There was no order, only chaos. And I feared that people would start to get violent in their panic.

I parked my car on 2nd St at Massachusetts Ave. NW. It had taken about an hour to go about a quarter of a mile. I fed the parking meter. I thought, “the world is ending and some ambitious meter maid will be out ticketing.”

I set out to my friend’s Ron’s and Jackson’s house in Kalorama thinking I’d rather be with people than try to get to Arlington. I debated taking the subway versus walking. Walking won. Not knowing what was going to happen next, I decided I would rather be above ground than stuck underground in a tube.

Water and Margaritas

My walk—only about 3 miles—took me through central DC. People were everywhere: walking, dazed, panicked, but most of all, they were polite. Strangers were speaking to each other.

Halfway to my destination, I stopped at a bar to get some water. I tried leaving with it and the bartender, in all seriousness, tells me that I cannot leave the bar with my water. It’s the law. I am sure the look on my face betrayed how absolutely crazy I thought he was. My God, the world as we knew it was ending and he was worried about a customer walking out of a bar with a bottle of water at 11 a.m.?!??

This gave me a good opportunity, though, to catch up on what had happened since I fled Capitol Hill. In those days, the Internet on mobile phones was not commonplace. And the mobile network had collapsed under the weight of the volume of people trying to use it.

Every 15 minutes or so I would get voice mail alerts telling me I had new messages. I couldn’t check them, but once I finally did, I had messages from friends I hadn’t heard from in years and from concerned loved ones.

I finally arrived at Ron’s and Jackson’s door and was greeted with a smile and a margarita. The three of us spent the afternoon glued to the television and drinking margaritas. Ron and Jackson will never know how grateful I am to have had their friendship on that day. There just aren’t words strong enough and meaningful enough to thank them.

‘We’re Open Tomorrow’

I had spoken with my mother at least twice to let her know I was okay. I know she was very, very concerned. And I was relieved and comforted to hear her voice each time we spoke.

I clearly remember three other phone calls from that afternoon:

• My friend who worked in the Pentagon left me a rushed message telling me he was okay. This is only the second time in my life I felt my knees buckle from under me. This time it was the relief that he was okay overtaking the dread that he wasn’t.
• My boss calling to let me know that we would be open for business the next day. We were allowed to take the day off, but I clearly remember him telling me that, “our nation’s leaders want the world to know that the U.S. government is functioning, open for business and not going to let the terrorists win.” It sounds almost cavalier now, but on that day, it was an important message.
• My friend who worked in the Pentagon called again to let me know he was okay. I have always found the second call odd, but I can only assume he was overwhelmed and making sure he returned all his phone messages. Hauntingly enough, I found out later, he had been working in an office where the plane hit the Pentagon, but had recently switched jobs. He was actually walking towards that office when the plane hit. He lost many colleagues and friends that day.

Home

Jackson drove me to my car about 6 or 7 p.m. through a deserted Washington. I drove across the Potomac on I-395 south towards my apartment. The interstate looked abandoned. I was the only car.

I had heard that The Washington Post had published an extra and I wanted a copy, so I pulled into the nearest grocery store. It was closed as was every other store in the shopping center. In fact, everywhere I looked, I saw a modern ghost town: no cars, no people, no lights, no commerce. Just the shell of an economy, a population and a world changed forever.

As I pulled out of the parking lot, I realized for the first time how hazy Arlington was. Then I realized it wasn’t haze. It was smoke from the Pentagon. That was a horrible realization. It made the terror, death and destruction so real to me. I hoped to drive out of it before I got home.

Unfortunately, I walked in to a smoke-filled apartment. I was mentally exhausted. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to sleep, but I was still keyed up (from adrenaline, I guess). I parked myself in front of the TV for a few minutes. Then decided I needed to physically exhaust myself. I walked over to the apartment complex’s gym, hopped on an elliptical machine and rode it until I couldn’t ride it anymore.

Epilogue

There are countless others whose story is much more tragic, heart-wrenching and horrifying than mine. But this is my story. I have been a writer all my life, it seems, and because of that it is important to me to document this.

It has taken me ten years to finally sit down and put these thoughts together. It took me nine years before I could watch United 93 and eight years before I could watch World Trade Center.

I drove by the Pentagon every day as it was being rebuilt. I visited Ground Zero in April 2002. But I still have yet to go to Shanksville. I’m not sure why.

I am lucky, I didn’t lose anyone in any of that horror.

But like everyone, I lost something that day. My emotions run raw every time I think about September 11 for so many reasons: for the loss of countless innocent lives, for the gut-wrenching agony so many people felt knowing they’d lost a loved one, for the impossible decisions people had to make about jumping or not jumping, for the first responders who ran in, not out, for the passengers on Flight 93 who chose to fight back, for the sheer terror I felt for that entire day and for months and years to come.

Writing my story helps me both to remember all that and to heal.