"Suddenly, everybody was a potential terrorist"
WASHINGTON -- I rode my bike down to the White House shortly after the attack on the Pentagon. I made it as far as the intersection of 16th and H Streets, where thousands of people were gathering in the streets and on the sidewalks. People were looking up at the sky, watching for another airplane attack. "Here comes one!" someone would say. I felt my heart pounding in my chest. People with machine guns stood guard on the roof of the White House. They didn't fire at the aircraft; it was a U.S. fighter plane.
Rumors were rampant that there were other hijacked planes in the air heading for Washington. Police and Secret Service agents were trying to push people back, but it was too chaotic. Then a huge explosion erupted; I couldn't tell where it came from. Was it the White House? Another explosion at the Pentagon? A car bomb? For the first time since I've lived in Washington, I was afraid for my personal safety. I rode up Pennsylvania Avenue, past the FBI building. Was that a target, too? I found myself looking up at the sky, watching for planes careening toward the building.
I made my way toward the Jefferson Memorial, where I saw the black smoke billowing from the Pentagon from across the Tidal Basin. The police were closing all the roads, but I managed to get on the 14th Street Bridge. Military brass were walking across the bridge away from the burning building; many looked stunned and confused. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and watched as fighter planes and helicopters buzzed low over the Potomac. Was President Bush arriving? Was it now safe, or were more attacks imminent?
Along Constitution Avenue, I joined a crowd that had gathered around a person with a radio. There was a report of a car bomb at the State Department. I was only a few blocks away; didn't see any smoke. But sirens were screaming all around. I made my way to 23rd Street. There were a lot of police around the State Department, but no evidence of a car bomb. But what about that van? That guy with the briefcase? Suddenly everybody was a potential terrorist.
-- Brian Hansen
Like the worst sort of TV movie
NEW YORK -- I am writing a review for the Nation of the Bill Ayers memoir of the bomb-happy "Days of Rage" Weathermen and I am feeling ironic about all the sirens on the streets outside, like Muzak, and then we leave the house to vote in the New York primary and while there is a strange absence of electioneers on the upper east side of Manhattan, nobody at the junior high school polling place says anything about the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, so my wife decides on this beautiful day to walk across town and maybe shop for something, and I go back to my computer, where I try and can't get online to check for e-mail, so I just stroke some more '60s violence, until the phone rings and my stepdaughter downtown tells me that maybe I should be watching television because it is like the worst sort of TV movie, and I don't know what she's talking about, and I'm just in time to see the reruns of the collapse of the towers, and the talking heads are full of just as much blank incredulity as I am, after which the local news is all evacuations and no subways or buses to evacuate on, and go south from Battery Park and ferry boats will get you away to safety, plus gas line explosions are suggesting the possibility of methane clouds, plus the primary in which I have already voted has now been officially canceled, and what happened to all those passengers on all those hijacked airplanes, and I can't reach my daughter in Washington, and then my son calls from Salon because journalism marches on as if sense can be made of this story through sheer speed and frantic hand-waving, and so now I will try to fax this to San Francisco and then go back to being wired to the gills and stupider than ever.
-- John Leonard
Eerie, bizarre calm
WASHINGTON -- I rolled out of my bed at the customary time this morning to the site of fireballs crashing out of the World Trade Center, then still in their intact state. I contacted a few friends and slowly began to realize and was told what should have been obvious: that two separate jumbo jets don't crash into the World Center through some sort of logistical snafu. As the sleep began to clear from my brain the first reports came through of a similar attack on the Pentagon and other attacks near me in Washington, D.C., attacks which thankfully proved untrue.
Stunned and verging on panic, I hesitated to leave my apartment and put myself out of touch even for a moment with the terrifying onrush of events, some of them occurring very nearby.
Eventually, I walked out into my neighborhood to a scene that I can only describe as eerie, bizarre calm. The coffee shops near my apartment were closed with surprisingly quickly constructed signs informing patrons that they were closed because of the World Trade Center catastrophe. Another Starbucks nearby was busily locked and bolted as I approached.
Washington was beautiful this morning. And if you didn't know what was transpiring, you would have sensed little panic and little apprehension. The only sign of what had happened was a steady tide of men and women in business suits streaming up Connecticut Avenue, in the opposite direction I was walking, obviously making their way by foot from the numerous buildings 10 and more blocks away that were being evacuated in expectation of further disaster.
Yet none of the faces bore signs of panic. Perhaps vaguely stunned and just walking, would be the best description. Very few people were talking to each other, most were just cradling their cellphones trying to get through to nearby friends and anxious, distant relatives.
People were calmly shopping in the neighborhood market. A few were buying jugs of water, something that hadn't occurred to me. So I did the same. For all this, though, some family was moving into a new apartment, carting boxes, unfazed, maybe unaware, of what was happening around them, the fear or shock bubbling up through others around them. Another man was washing the windows on the front door of my apartment.
-- Joshua Micah Marshall
Next page: "I hear something: Boom. It can't be"
