September 11, 2001: I was Supposed to Be There

But I wasn’t. As a civilian employee of the Army, I was entitled to subsidy tickets when I took public transportation to and from work. Since the nearest ticket office was out of the denominations I needed, I had planned to whisk over to the Pentagon the morning of September 11, 2001. The counter there always had a full selection. From experience, I knew the hordes of people on their way to work cleared by 9:00 a.m. and planned to leave my office then.

The early morning of September 11 was absolutely gorgeous. The sky was a clear blue punctuated by billowy white clouds slowly drifting overhead. I was actually at the Pentagon around 6:45 AM, when my commuter bus stopped to drop off and pick up passengers. I looked out the window at the familiar stone walls inside which I had worked since 1995 until taking a one-year detail in Crystal City, just a few blocks away, during the summer. Many of us on the bus were well acquainted. We teased each other amiably each day, at least until 6:10 AM, when etiquette demanded silence to allow some to catch 45 minutes of sleep. Going home, we all looked tired and were often stressed, certainly not very talkative. Civilians were interspersed with personnel in Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine uniforms.

After the bus dropped me off at the corner near my office only five minutes later, I walked silently toward my building, reviewing the agenda of what I had to accomplish. I slid my card through the reader at the front door of the building, took the elevator to my cubicle, and noted the lights were out in my supervisor’s office. By 7:30 AM, workers began to trickle into the office, flip on their computers, and exchange a few jokes before getting down to the business of the day.

I learned from our admin assistant that my boss and the other managers would be spending the day at the contractor site. This meant I would have to finish a project by noon without her input. A bad day to take time to go to the Pentagon, I concluded.