story1127.xml

story1127.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-08-19

I was driving down the George Washington Memorial Parkway to my office 2 blocks from the White House. For some reason I did not have the radio on that morning. As I approached the Roosevelt Bridge I heard unusally loud jet engines passing overhead. I thought "this is strange," because I knew that was not a normal flight path for planes arriving into Reagan National. As I entered onto the bridge into Washington, I heard behind me a loud BANG, which i first thought sounded like a truck hitting a very large pothole. Once I got off the bridge, the scene on Constitution Avenue was contained chaos. Police, fire and Secret Service vehicles were speeding past each other back and forth in every direction.

Only when I finally got to my office did I learn what had just happened, and that what I had heard was the sound of Flight 77 circling back over Washington and crashing into the Pentagon. My first reaction was thinking "how could we have let this happen? Isn't this why the CIA was created in the first place, the reason for its existence?" Then I remembered 1993 and thought "they just wouldn't leave them (the WTC towers) alone."