Many people witnessed Flight 77 hit the building, particularly the commuters on Route 27 who saw the plane barrel in less than 500 feet away. My vantage point was farther out. I drove into work that morning with the top down on my car. It was a lovely late summer day, unusually so, a cloudless deep blue sky, perfect temperature, a rarity. I mentioned that when I got to the office at National Defense University. “What a great morning,” I said. It was the kind of day that made you glad to be alive.
As I wrote in 2002, “I was in my Washington office doing research when one of the secretaries told me that an aircraft had hit the World Trade Center. We brought the news up on the projection screen in our darkened conference room and watched the coverage, seeing endless six-foot high replays of the impacts and explosions. It was unsettling, even disorienting, but my colleagues and I were appraising it professionally, trading theories on who was to blame and how the terrorists coordinated the attacks. We did not come to any firm conclusions.
“I went back to my office around 9:20. A short time later a friend of mine called, an Air Force officer, and we spoke awhile about the strikes in New York. I was standing, looking out my large office window, which faces west and from six stories up has a commanding view of the Potomac and the Virginia heights. (When I hired on my boss said we had the best view in town. True, most days.) The Pentagon is about a mile and half distant in the center of the tableau. I was looking directly at it when the aircraft struck. The sight of the 757 diving in at an unrecoverable angle is frozen in my memory, but at the time, I did not immediately comprehend what I was witnessing. There was a silvery flash, an explosion, and a dark, mushroom shaped cloud rose over the building. I froze, gaping for a second until the sound of the detonation, a sharp pop at that distance, shook me out of it. I shouted something both extremely profane and sacrilegious and told my friend, ‘They hit the Pentagon. We're under attack. Gotta go. JIM ROBBINS VIA THE ROBBINS REPORT
