#1
I was at
the Pentagon on the 11th of September. I remember that day vividly. The sky was
crystal clear with not a cloud in the sky.
I was just returning to my
office on the first floor, four corridors away from the impact zone when I
heard that something had happened at the World Trade Center.
Initially
everybody thought it was an accident, but when the second plane hit this was
obviously not the case.
I sat at my computer and was trying to look at the
coverage on the internet when my phone rang. It was my daughter Brandy. She
said she'd heard a report that there was smoke coming from the Pentagon. Well,
you know how rumors fly and I told her just that.
Not two minutes after
hanging up with her people were suddenly running through the building yelling
for everybody to get out, that we'd just been attacked.
The entire building
was evacuated into the various parking lots around the building, and as I made
my way out of the building and into South Parking I could see this huge, ugly,
continuous cloud of smoke emenating from the extreme south side of the
building, pouring up over the top of the Pentagon and across all of South
Parking.
The wind was blowing in a northerly direction that day and the
smoke cloud engulfed a good portion of the building as it wafted across the
sky.
As I reached the far side of South Parking it was beginning to dawn on
me that I had friends working in the area that had been hit. At the time I had
no idea what their status was.
When I finally got home that night I
contacted a friend of mine K.P. Jones, who also works at the Pentagon and we
began worrying about our friends that we knew were in the area of the
blast.
I called James Drummond, another friend to ask him if he'd heard
from Wayne Sinclair, one of our friends in the area and he said no.
After
playing phone tag for almost two hours K.P. finally got in touch with Doug
Knickerbocker, another of our friends who was less than 50 feet from the impact
site along with Wayne.
After another hour Doug called me and told me that
he, Wayne and Stuart Fluke were alive but another friend of ours, Scott Powell
had been killed.
As tragic as it was it could have been much worse.
Doug and Stuart were treated for minor injuries and burns and released that
night.
Wayne didn't fare so well. He had second and third degree burns on
his hands, arms and face and although he has now since been released from the
Washington Hospital Burn Center in D.C., he will be undergoing treatments and
further skin graft surgeries for the months to follow.
Now, everytime I see
a crystal clear blue day I think of the 11th and probably always will.
Marc Hodgdon
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