Where were you?

I was in my car, driving to work. It was a normal day, unremarkable save for the fact that the sky was a pristine blue and I remember just how beautiful the Potomac looked as I drove over the TR Bridge. I soaked in the view for a few seconds--it was around quarter to nine in the morning. As I continued on through the Rosslyn tunnel and crawled along in traffic on Rte. 66, the first plane slammed into the North Tower of the WTC.

When I got to work, I settled in at my work station, and got a call from Sampriti, who said that a plane had flown into the WTC. I clicked on CNN, and it took several attempts before the page came up--the traffic to the site must have been huge at that point. I saw a fingernail image of the towers, and smoke was billowing. My first thought was that someone piloting a small plane had made a serious error and had flown into the tower. "The damage will be localized", I thought. Such naivete.

When the South Tower was hit, we all knew that it was a deliberate attack. Panic started to set in. Sampriti called to say that a loud explosion had been heard downtown and that her office was evacuating. The State Dept. was being bombed, someone mentioned. That turned out to be false, but the Pentagon had already been hit by American Flight 77. Things were spinning out of control.

A little over an hour later I joined colleagues in front of a large screen and watched in horror as the South Tower, and then the North Tower both collapsed within the span of half an hour. People screamed, cried--we all gasped, bug eyed, and started to stumble out of the room. We left the building, numb, stupefied by what we had just witnessed.

I drove to the Metro station and took the train back in to DC, since all of the bridges were closed. There was virtually no one in the train car. I got out downtown and started to walk north towards Logan Circle. It was eerie--there were few people out on the streets, and there was a strange and uneasy vibe.

We all gathered at our old haunt on Logan and watched the horrible events unfold. The images were horrific. I remember all of the trauma doctors and nurses gathered at St. Vincent's hospital, ready to receive what was sure to be thousands of casualties. They never arrived, as we came to know.

My buddy Charlie called, saying that he was on top of his hotel and was watching "the Pentagon burning". The Pentagon was burning, smoke had engulfed lower Manhatten, and there was a report of another plane that had gone down in Pennsylvania.

The Twin Towers were gone. I couldn't get my head around that. I had lived in Manhatten for a year, and remembered looking downtown and seeing those Towers. Once I had to drop off a package for someone at a firm that was located in one of the Towers, and I remember standing in the plaza that separated the two buildings, craning my neck to stare up at them. Now they were gone. In an hour.

The next day I went to the hospital to give blood. The line was already way out the door, and we were told to come back later in the day. It didn't matter, as it turned out. Our blood donations weren't needed.

I've thought about that day often, usually when I cross the TR Bridge on a beautiful day. Five years later I'm reading the official 9/11 report in all its chilling detail.