Saturated

The nice people on NPR tell me this will be a fine day, high seventies, breezy and pleasant. Another wonderful day. I left work early yesterday and went to Arlington. I stopped at the Harris Teeter over at Pentagon City to buy flowers and drove up to the  front gate at Ft. Myer.

There were few people in the cemetery late in the afternoon. It was a refreshing change from the images of the ceremonial pomp of the morning. I places boquettes of blue and yellow flowers, Navy colors, on Vince and Dan’s grave. The sod is new and squishy underfoot. There are nearly fifty of the Pentagon dead there in three neat rows, looking over to the front of the Building where they were murdered. I felt better and it was a wonderful day. I got home earlier than usual and puttered with the mail and some divorce paperwork. I heated up an old casserole I made sometime before I went to Harvard in July and hoped that with enough heat it would kill anything bad. There is some strange stuff in that refrigerator.  I need to clean it out one of these days.

I am saturated by the media, sick of the hoopla, but with the alarmist reporting I wanted to see the news, see if there was another shoe to fall on this day. In the corner of the room the News transitioned into other programming that looked like news. I left it on. The screen became the ABC special on survivors of the WTC last night put a horrible grip on me, a grisly fascination. It was taken a year to bring together the images of a thousand video cams and hand-held shots. They added computer animation of what the place looked like in the hour after the attack. It was well done, it was comprehensive and it was beyond grotesque. There was a computer animation of what the inside of a WTC elevator looks like when the doors are closed and the buttons don’t work. And you are trapped in a little box and there is thudding and screaming outside.

Then they did the stories of the survivors and the heroes, since the two classes of people are not the same. There are those who helped and then went back up to look for more. The Man in the Red Bandana was identified, a man who guided dozens to safety and then died on his self-appointed duty. What would we do? Would we run, gasping, down endless steps? Or guide someone less able? In the Pentagon, one of my former employees slowly and deliberately walked an odious woman with MS down the corridors to the inert escalator and down the five floors to the parking lot.

Will we ever have an office without a plan of escape again?

In my office we have a stout rope that will reach to the ground from the sixth floor, and a fire axe to knock out the window. We have identified the load-bearing pillar that will take our weight, and practiced tying a bowline knot around our waists. Because the Special showed the people in Tower One who were forced to break their windows to get away from the fire, and then the draft through the now-open space brought the fire to them, licking them, finally forcing a choice between the pain of burning and the fear of falling.

Thank God they did not show them jumping away from the building’s top floors the way they did a year ago. Remember the photo in the headlines? Remember the video? Two insurance execs live because a couple rescuers have a flashlight that they see through their glass door. The adjacent office holds thirteen behind a wooden door, they don’t see the gleam and they all die. A man escorts a distraught woman to the ladies room, the wing slices through his office, missing him by feet. All the others died. Just incredible. But in the afterward the survival is bittersweet. They are all mostly unemployed or moved away now. Damaged as surely as if the fire had licked them, too, because it did.

And if we feel this way, the ones who only watched, what must the burden be to those who lived it? Or to the veterans of close combat in real war? I try to write about what our Father’s generation felt, what they buried away all those years, those moments of exposure to hell so searing that the memories became encapsulated. I was sitting in a bar someplace on the road years ago. I was a Navy guy, the man next to me had been a sailor and I peppered him with questions, interested in his experiences. I finally got to his special place of horror. He had been on the carrier Lexington the day the Japanese killed it, an otherwise sunny day in the Pacific. He had to walk through fire and sideways on the ship as it settled and rolled and prepared to dive to the deep with her men who could no longer move. His face froze as he ran out of words and could not finish. He got up and left and did not say goodbye.

The day of the attack I finally ran out of things to do, policy-wise at Langley. I listened to the radio to measure the panic and false reports that shut down the capital. I was hours behind the stampede that clogged the roads, not working so much as sensing. Some groups were starting to call people back to begin to plan the response, or to sleep in the office to make themselves feel better about the helplessness. I heard that the District streets were opened again after the mad rush to get everybody out, and drove down the George Washington Parkway to cross over the 14th Street Bridge to Fort McNair where I was staying.

There were people roller-blading along the Parkway, not even a mile north of the still-burning Pentagon. It was, after all, a beautiful day. I was no different. After I gained access to the base, passed the soldiers and the Humvees with the machine guns mounted, I poured a drink and walked out onto the balcony of the Bachelor Officer’s quarters. Then I sipped and watched the orb of the sun highlight the plume of black smoke. It went from angry red to the subdued glow of campfire embers that glowed right through the night.

Johnny Unitis died yesterday, too. He died naturally, of a heart attack. He was the first of the great Modern Quarterbacks. I remember him well back in his playing days. Finally some news that is not about the horror.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra