9/11: Old Flags, Sheer Terror, and Red Begonias
Keith’s note: I have lived in the Metro Washington DC area for 33 years – more than half my life. When I first moved to DC to work at NASA HQ I lived in Pentagon City directly across from the Pentagon in the River House III apartment building. The Pentagon was what I saw outside my window every single day. In the afternoons after work I often used to run on the road between the old heliport and the west side of the Pentagon – right where American Airlines Flight 77 struck. This image still makes me shudder.
As I would run by I’d always note a window where the yellow crane is in the left side of the image. There was always a red begonia in the window. I could easily drag my fingers on the smooth limestone surface of the building as I ran by. There was simply no real security back then. Had I still lived in my old apartment on 9/11 this horror would have unfolded outside my home’s window. A friend of mine was driving to work and saw the plane come in. Others I knew were in the building and felt the impact. On a stunningly beautiful day we had been attacked in a brutal way by an unknown enemy.”
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I worked at a company that was doing business with the FDA. One of our employees was in DC for FDA business. She changed her original later flight to the doomed flight to get home early to her husband and young child.
At home, her husband watched on TV as the events unfolded. He learned that his wife’s flight was likely the one that hit the Pentagon.
My company put a memorial plaque and monument in a parklike area of our campus to honor her memory.
I didn’t know her personally.
The story about the begonia window immediately resonated with me because just a few days ago I watched the PBS documentary “9/11 Inside the Pentagon” which was produced for the fifteenth anniversary. One of the major stories was about an Army colonel who survived the attack by being in a meeting instead of in her office which was destroyed. However she then had to crawl through the dark and smoke filled hallways trying to find an exit, leading several other people that she came across with her.
They finally reached a second story window, however the windows had been recently replaced with blast resistant windows due to the Oklahoma City bombing, so they couldn’t break the window no matter how hard they pounded on it. A solder that was with her picked up a printer and threw it at the window but it just bounced off. She said she felt she had failed to save these people and they would all die there. But then the soldier tried throwing the printer again, and this time it bent the frame a little and smoke started pouring out the window. With some more pounding they were able to push the window out of its frame, and people below on the ground helped them all to get out.