Sparky said:
Seriously? You were in the Pentagon?? No joke?
Yes. Completely serious. I was running late for work that morning, and so I was putting my farecard through the Metro turnstile at 9:38 AM, the moment the plane hit the building. I neither heard it nor felt it, as the Metro station was on the opposite side of the building, and underground. Many people had the same experience, as I continued on my way in to the building to head to my office. There is a little shopping concourse in the Pentagon with a post office, a bank, a CVS drugstore, etc. and I had to walk the length of the concourse to head up a ramp to get to my office. Other folks were walking around on the concourse like it was a normal day. I was halfway up the ramp to my office when a senior officer (Don't remember if he was an NCO or a Lt.Colonel) came running toward me in a panic, waving his arms and shouting "Get out of the building!". I figured that this was someone who was trained to remain calm in a hazardous situation, so if he was panicking, I'd best do what he said, and I followed him outside. When I got outside, I started following the crowd away from the building. I couldn't get anyone to stop long enough to tell me what had happened. Eventually, someone did say, "A plane hit the building", and kept on running. Because of my commute, I had turned off the tv at home before the first plane hit the WTC, and so I had no idea that anything was happening, so when the man told me "a plane hit the building", I figured some geezer took his piper cub up from general aviation at National Airport, had a heart attack, lost control, and crashed. I started heading across the parking lot to see if I could see what happened. The flames from the jet fuel were burning so hot that it was like a curtain of fire and smoke going up the side of the building, so you couldn't tell how big the impact point was at first. We got evacuated to the other side of the freeway from the Pentagon, and went into the mall, where a tv in the Ruby Tuesday's was still on, and I saw the WTC for the first time. That was the moment I realized that it wasn't an accident, and that the sickening reality of the day sank in.
I spent the rest of the day getting home as they had shut down the Metro system until about 2pm that afternoon. I shepherded one of my co-workers who needed a familiar face for comfort, and kept finding little pieces of the building in my hair. One of the hallmarks of that day for me was when I got home to Bethesda, noticing the absolute silence that had descended. The streets were deserted, there was no air traffic, all the shops were closed. I felt like I was walking through a sci-fi film set for a post-apocalyptic movie, kind of like "Day of the Triffids" but with no giant killer plants.