Five years on
Just looking at today’s date immediately sends me back five years. We were living in Virginia and I was working in Washington DC. I’ll never forget standing at the westward window of our office watching the smoke billowing from the Pentagon. That was the moment I came to understand why they call it terrorism. It’s an extremely apt term.
Looking at the pale, worried faces of the women I worked as they rushed to evacuate our building, I struggled to push down the feeling of panic and shake off the cold grip of fear. The anger didn’t come until later.
I can’t believe it’s been five years. Each anniversary of 9/11 finds me thinking about the people I was working with that morning, and I wonder where life has taken them. I still feel connected to them, and probably always will, because of the terrible events of that day.
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Hello Sher,
As 9/11 unfolded I must admit that I I thought about you and everybody else we worked with, wondering if you and they could get home, and whether our associates whose spouses worked on Capitol Hill would be ok, all while I was being evacuated from the office building where I worked, which is located just 3 blocks from the White House. It took me 4 hours to get home. Bad reports on local TV said that the Metro train system was closed down (it wasn’t) and I relied on the kindness of total strangers, who I met on the sidewalks in downtown DC, to drive me to the suburban DC train station where I had left my car. I can relive that whole day as if it were yesterday.
I am a native New Yorker and for 11 years I worked in Arlington, VA in a building that has a clear view of where the plane smashed into the Pentagon. I knew the wife of the US Solicitor General whose cell phone conversations with her husband were well documented in the media in the days after the event, as I had her on talk shows that I produced. I knew associates who worked in the Pentagon. I can go on at length at how emotionally stunned I was for days, if not weeks, after that event. The terror didn’t end after the attacks. We in the DC area, especially those of us who worked in the District, were on alert because of the anthrax scare in post offices on The Hill, and elsewhere in the city.
But, back to 9/11; just yesterday, a man who volunteers at a reading service for the blind, where I work weekends as a radio engineer, told me that he was in another section of the Pentagon when it was hit. He’s Army Staff, in, the public information office. He didn’t feel a thing when the plane hit. He saw it like everybody else did, on CNN and MSNBC. Because he “reports” news to the media he treated what he saw as, “Oh, what an interesting international story. What do I need to do next?” Then he had one of those, “Hey, wait a minute!” moments. It’s those times that reporters or even former reporters realize that they’re not on the outside of the story looking in–they’re smack dab in the middle of the story. It’s not a comfortable feeling, perhaps because that false cloak of invincibility falls away.
Those are my memories from my side of “the pond.”
Rita
Sherrilynne, the weather here in the Washington, DC area is raining and drab, appropriate weather for this anniversary.
I remember 9/11 very vividly. One of my coworkers is a news junky and the first thing she would do every morning would be to log onto various news sites and check things out. She rang me up and said, “hey, a plane just flew into one of the WT towers”. It did not take long before we realized how bad the situation really was.
We worked for Marriott Hotels and very quickly the large conference room was filled with people watching the news coverage. We were watching the coverage on a wall size projection tv screen when the second tower fell. Marriott had a hotel at the Trade Center and everyone was thinking of our employees there. It was days before we heard any news.
Since that day my life has definitely changed. Marriott laid off a lot of people and I was one of them, but am doing great at the job I am now. I find myself more patient in certain things; like when dealing with people and dealing with the traffic that we have here in the DC area. Don’t you just miss the traffic here?
That’s my thoughts on 9/11.
Linda
Thanks Rita and Linda for sharing your thoughts. There are many things I miss about living in the US, most of all the friends I made there. I don’t miss the traffic, the anthrax in the mail or the snipers. I do miss the shoe shopping.