story1907.xml

story1907.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-08

My boyfriend woke me up around 9:45 telling me that I needed to go out on the balcony of our SW D.C. apartment. We lived across the Potomac from the Pentagon and all I saw was this thick black smoke across the sky. I asked him what happened and he said, "A jetliner crashed into the Pentagon and two more have hit the Trade Center towers." I looked at the television and couldn't believe what I was seeing. We had also felt something a little later as if a gas line or something exploded. It shook our building and the windows wobbled. There was no explanation for that, and we wondered if something else had happened. I called in to my job, where my boss was unaware. I was on the phone with her as the first Tower collapsed. She just said "Ohmigod!Ohmigod!" and got off the phone. I didn't find out until later that her son had been in Tower 2 that day and had been lucky and made it out. I was very unnerved for awhile seeing all the soldiers going by (I was near both an army and a navy base). There was nothing in the skies--which were silent-- and all you heard were military jets and helicopters. When they finally reopened National, I would wake up in the morning out of a sound sleep, freaked out and scared because the planes were so loud and seemed so low(I hadn't realized they had changed the flight patterns).