I’m never quite sure what right I have to talk about 9/11. It feels a little like stolen valor to even mention that I was in Washington DC that day working near the Capitol building. I didn’t save any lives, though the passengers of Flight 93 might have saved mine, but even that feels pretentious to say because frankly, any one of them was more valuable than I was.

I was 28 years old and working as a technical writer at an obscure IT office of the U.S. Mint. I’d had the job a few weeks after several dizzying months at a variety of ill-conceived dot-com startups, wearing shorts to work because we were all too smart and cool for business casual1.

I was wearing a tie on 9/11 because my bosses at the Mint had told me that was the level of decorum they expected from a tech writer with almost no human contact. So it was quiet at my desk while I ate my bagel and saw the first news that something strange had happened in New York.

This is how I found out: a posting on the tech website Slashdot.

Most news sites seemed to be down, and CNN had switched to a minimal text layout. When I saw that a second plane had hit the second tower, I called my wife at the time to tell her that the United States was under attack. She thought I was exaggerating2 and snapped, “What are you talking about?” I told her to turn on the TV and see.

I spoke to a few other folks on the phone, including my brother-in-law who asked what I was still doing in DC. He’d heard on the news that government employees had been told to evacuate, so I decided to go ask my bosses if that was so. I walked through the empty offices upstairs where phones trilled with no one answering them, and I saw no sign of any other employees.

They’d left and forgotten to tell me.

I gathered my backpack, took off my tie, and headed for the elevator lobby. A security guard was darting back and forth from the windows with her hand on the grip of her holstered sidearm–a revolver so old that it would probably have blown up in her hand if she fired it.

By the time I got to the ground floor, the streets were empty except for men in suits holding M-16s on street corners, peering into the sky. I wondered how dangerous or terrorist-y I looked with a big backpack full of books, especially heading toward the monuments and National Mall because that’s the only way I knew to walk home to Alexandria.

While green-and-white Marine helicopters passed overhead taking officials to see the Pentagon, I made my way in a long circuitous route by the landmarks I visited almost every weekend: the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, and Memorial Bridge, which I crossed to the GW Parkway.

This is the route I followed on foot from the top right to the bottom left.

I spent the time on my cell phone chatting mostly with my mother. She was comforting in her way, furious that terrorists would fuck up her beloved New York3 but also fascinated as a witness to history4. She wanted to know all the details of what I was seeing, so I became her personal news correspondent and she became mine, explaining what she was seeing on TV.

By then I’d reached the Pentagon which was still spewing black smoke. I couldn’t see much from my angle, but the reek of melted plastic told me enough.

Once I got past the barricades on the Parkway, my wife retrieved me and took me home. I settled heavily in the chair in my home office and finally got to see the images of what had happened from a clearer perspective than mine.

(To this day, I have what most mental health professionals would probably call an obsessive need to watch that footage each anniversary, especially this one, as though I’m still catching up.)

As some of you know from all my eulogies of loved ones, I usually find a way to carefully encapsulate the spirit of a person or a time or a place in words. That’s never quite worked for that day, which has always seemed like a bunch of things that happened that don’t need me to find their narrative significance. It’s the one event I can’t blithely summarize or make meaningful, probably because others did a far better job doing that by their actions on that day5.

All I did was walk home.

  1. Or, it turns out, profitability. ↩︎
  2. In all fairness to her, my poorly treated anxiety disorder often inspired me to say how things felt more than how they were. I thought I was being pretty calm and objective for a change. ↩︎
  3. Her guest sermon at her Spiritualist church that coming Sunday would end up being “Fuck those Fucking Fucks and their Weird Fucking Hatred of Mass Fucking Transport.” ↩︎
  4. My whole family has a kind of “Lot’s wife” thing going on where we have a hard time looking away from disaster, relieved it isn’t aimed at us for a change. ↩︎
  5. A half decade later on my way driving to Clarion, I happened to see a sign for Shanksville and detoured to thank those passengers for their sacrifice. ↩︎