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2002-03-14

My September 11, 2001 Story
Kirk Foster

On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, I had to do another day of
my 2-week annual tour as an Air Force Reservist. So I left
our home in Springfield, Virginia, and made my way to the
Pentagon. From the Pentagon, I would take a charter bus
shuttle to my reserve office in Rosslyn, Virginia, which is
an office building community up the road, past Arlington
National Cemetery.

I got on the bus at its usual place outside the south side
of the Pentagon, near Corridor One. As usual, my Pentagon
ID pass from my old job in the Pentagon got me on
Although I finished my job in the Pentagon in June 2000,
the Air Force never took away my Pentagon ID. It didn't
expire until July 2002, so I just used it as a form of ID
to get on the bus. The bus was one of those nice,
air-conditioned charter buses with good seats, so I closed
my eyes and tried to take a catnap in my seat, which was a
window seat on the right side. I remember thinking it was
too early and I didn't want to be there. The bus soon
began its route to Rosslyn. It passed around the west
side of the Pentagon, about 50 yards from the helicopter
pad. I recall the time was 7:45 AM.

At about 9:10 AM, I was at my computer terminal in my
Rosslyn office building and checked my e-mail. There was
a brand new e-mail from the division secretary, Ms. Brenda
Germany, saying a plane just crashed into the World Trade
Center..."the top half just exploded." I figured it was
a horrible accident. A few minutes later, I got up to go
to the bathroom. In the hall, I met Lt Col Bruce Lennard
who said "Did you hear what happened?" I said no, and he
said both World Trade Center Towers had just been hit in a
terrorist attack. "It's on TV in the Conference Room," he
said. I recall saying "no, you gotta be joking." So I
went into the division conference room and saw everyone
gathered around the TV. One of the major networks was on,
and it showed the second tower being hit. I also recall
it showed the billowing smoke pouring from the buildings,
both up close and from a long-distance shot. I figured
now was a great time to go get a cup of coffee down the
street and think about this.

As I left the coffee shop at about 9:40, I saw dozens of Air
Force personnel, and dozens of other people, streaming out
of the office building across from mine. I figured
big conference had just finished, and people were getting
back to their jobs. I continued back into my building
(1501 Wilson Blvd) and returned to my office up on the 7th
floor.

There, I found Earl the paralegal looking at the internet
on his computer. The internet said the Pentagon had just
been bombed. Everyone was ashen faced; Earl said he'd been
able to see black smoke billowing up from the direction of
the Pentagon a few moments ago. I went to the window and
saw a large cloud of yellowish white smoke coming from the
area of the Pentagon, about a mile and a half away. You
couldn't actually see the Pentagon. Everyone in my office
was walking around, trying to get any information available.
There wasn't panic, but real concern. Between 10 and 10:30,
I recall, Doretha the secretary said my wife Shirley was on
the line. Doretha transferred the call into my office.
Shirley told me the World Trade Center had just collapsed.
No, I told her, that can't be right. She said they're
showing it on the TV. Shirley wanted to know if I was
coming home now, or what the plan was for us in the office,
and I told her I didn't know either. By this time some
of the phone lines were jammed, and so were some of the
internet sites. So I told Shirley to call me back at
around 11:00. I went back to the TV in the conference room
and saw the collapse on TV, too. There's no way people
can breathe in that cloud of dust and smoke, I thought.
People in the room were thinking tens of thousands of
casualties, because the TV talked about 50,000 people are
in the towers on a business day. The fire chief of
Arlington County, where the Pentagon is, already was being
reported as saying 800 were dead in the Pentagon. That
dumb-assed remark - with no proof - made the panic worse
for a lot of people.

When I went back to my office, I turned on the radio and
heard that several airliners up in the air were unaccounted for.
That was when I felt scared. For the first time, I realized
that people in tall buildings were being killed, that
hundreds of military personnel nearby had just been killed
by a rogue airliner, and that another one might be on the
way to the DC area. I looked out the window and still saw
military personnel streaming out of buildings. About two
stories beneath my window, on the plaza level of my
building, was a large shrub in a big pot, so I figured that
if on the bizarre chance my office did get whacked, I
could jump on that shrub and maybe just break my legs or
something. From my office, there was a Shirley called
again, and I recall putting her on speaker phone so that
everyone could hear the latest. The chief of our entire
Directorate, Colonel David Thomas, had come by earlier
saying he had received no instructions on what we were
supposed to do or go, but that he would let us know if he
did. He had three floors of Air Force personnel, spread
out from the seventh to ninth floors.

We waited for another 5 hours or so. I recall the phones
hardly rang. As I looked out the window, very few people
were on the street. At 3:00, Major Chris Van Natta said
we'd been given the go-home signal. But the shuttle bus
and the metro was shut down, the roads near the Pentagon
were closed, and I-395 (going past the Pentagon) was jammed
solid. Luckily, his carpool was going to my town of
Springfield, and he gave me and two others a ride. We
headed west, as all the roads to the east were closed.
There were police directing traffic at all the major
intersections in the area. I got home at about 5:00.
When I got home, Shirley told me that our old neighbor from
Mississippi, Katie Swanson, called her that morning, told
Shirley four rogue airliners were heading to Washington DC
to kill everyone, and that she (Katie) was sorry. That's
how Shirley got wind of the big picture. Prior to that,
she was up at Caroline and Alex's school when a teacher came
in and said "your husband works at the Pentagon, right?"
Shirley said no but got word from this lady that the
Pentagon had just had an airliner hit it. Shirley was told
not to turn on the TV for the kids, as they were trying
not to scare the children. By the end of the day, the
school had issued a letter talking about how to deal with
the attack with your children, and what the school could do
to help.

Aftermath

Thursday, September 13: Still on reserve duty, I caught
ride with a man driving to the Pentagon that morning. The
traffic was backed up pretty good, and as we rounded the
crest of the highway I could see why. The blackened gash
in the west side of the Pentagon was clearly visible, and
there seemed to be a small city of tents, construction
equipment, and lights next to the impact site. It was
pretty creepy. The guy giving me a ride calmly remarked
that he climbed out from his west side, fifth floor office
at the Pentagon on his hands and knees. That's the side
the jet hit. All the usual bus sites around the Pentagon
had been quickly relocated across the interstate to a
office tower community known as Pentagon City, about a
quarter mile away. He dropped me off there, and it took
about another hour to get to Rosslyn about a mile away,
using the metro. The shuttle bus still ran from my Rosslyn
office to the Pentagon at the end of the day, so I took it,
to try to begin my commute home from the Pentagon. The
driver really didn't have a plan; everything was disrupted.
He dropped us off on the far side of the Pentagon, next
to the river. That was not good for me, because I wasn't
about to use my Pentagon pass to try to take a shortcut
through the building - I feared they'd deactivated it and
it would set off some sort of alarm if I tried to use it -
and there is no sidewalk around the outside of the Pentagon
that allows you to skirt the outside. So I started walking
until the sidewalk ran out in front of the Pentagon exit
used by the Secretary of Defense. The gate guard picked up
on me real quick. He challenged me and I told him I was
trying to get to the "slug lines" on the other side of the
Pentagon where people catch rides home. He told me that
entire side of the Pentagon outer area was closed and he
directed me to Pentagon City again, about a mile away. So
I had to cut through parking lots and walk along access
roads. When I got to the South parking lot of the Pentagon,
it had been taken over by soldiers and emergency personnel.
There were army vehicles, armed guards, open sided tents,
and firefighters napping on the highway embankment. About
100 yards away, near the west side of the Pentagon, was a
community of tents. Many of the tents were white - no red
crosses - and it had the eerie look of a morgue.

By this time, I had thought about my colleagues and I being
left in our building for 6 hours September 11th, with no
instructions from our JAG superiors either in the Pentagon
or at Bolling AFB, across the river. I began to joke to others that
apparently, Plan B was to leave us lawyers in the building
as bait for any secondary terrorist attack.

By this time Shirley and I had received a lot of calls and
messages from family, friends, and acquaintances asking
if I was OK; it was a very nice. I've told people that
judging from my bus route's regular path, relative to the
final path of the plane, I missed being killed by about
90 minutes. I may well be wrong, but I feel I'm right.

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2001. My last day of reserve duty
for a while. The morning shuttle bus at the south side of
the Pentagon was running again, and I got a good view of
the damage to the Pentagon's west side. The gash is only
about 30 feet wide, but it runs from top to bottom. I
could see the "C" ring (the middle ring of the Pentagon's
5 rings of offices) through the gash, but it was pretty
beat up too. For about 150 feet on each side of the gash,
however, you can see extensive fire damage to the interior
of all the floors on the outside E ring.

That's about it. I'm still unsure about what September
11th, 2001 will mean in the long run. But this is my
story from that day and afterward, for what it's worth.

October 5, 2001
Kirk Foster, Major, USAFR