12 September 2001

The Day After

Editor’s Note: I kept copies of everything from those days- not physical ones, of course; I have moved too often to keep paper records. But digital lasts forever these days- and I thought that on this day before the 15th anniversary of that awful day in September that changed so much, I thought I would share a brief recollection of what was going on the day after, 12 September, 2001:

It was eerie driving home last night. First, of course, it wasn’t home I was driving to. I was driving to Fort McNair, the old Army Post nestled on the point of land in the district that marks the confluence of the placid and majestic Potomac and the lesser Anacostia River. The tennis court is where they hanged the Lincoln conspirators.

It is an island of order at the boundary between Southwest and Southeast in the District. The dome of the Capitol looms two miles away.

Yesterday, once the great panicked exodus from the Capitol was achieved, the streets were deserted. Cell phones did not work; they were overloaded. There has been a state of emergency all day, everyone told to stay off the streets. The bridges into the District were just re-opened, and there is a pall of smoke hanging over the Virginia shoreline from the fires still burning at the Pentagon.

Those of us in uniform had stayed to move to an undisclosed location with the Leadership in case that missing airplane was coming for us. I was with the Director and watched the expression on his face as the first tower came down, and the growing realization that the second would come down as well. At some point in the late morning we drifted back up to the offices on the sixth floor of the Original Headquarters Building and pretended to look at computer screens, mostly numb. I had cut through the Pentagon parking lot on the way to the office that morning. It was still dark, and the sky was wild with stars.

Eventually, the Boss came in and told us to get our butts home, and get some rest. “There was going to be plenty of work to come,” she said, and I believed her.

As I drove south form the Agency compound along the George Washington Parkway there was no rush hour traffic. Some people were rollerblading on the bike path on the river side, a totally incongruous sight with the smoke from the Pentagon drifting overhead.

The Government had shut down in the morning, shut down all at once, and the gridlock lasted for hours until time digested the rush. Normally, that is a phenomenon that is conjured by even a single snowflake. Today, it was in bright sunshine- a perfect day to start, and then accompanied by a growing sense of disbelief and shock.

The day was surreal, as befits the crossing of a great line.

The old world is still with us, all around us. All the appurtenances, the newspaper boxes, the highways, the airports from whence the murderers embarked. People still move through the cycles and patterns that define their lives. But that world is dead, as dead as a fossil. We will never be able to look to the sky and hear the roar of a commercial jet and not think about it coming at us.

I ended that day watching the enhanced perimeter guard force at Ft McNair scurry around the old red brick BOQ and the blood-red sun going down over the still-burning Pentagon across the river. I poured a stiff nightcap, and watched the unthinkable and sipped on the balcony as the building continued to burn into the night.

Copyright 2001 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com