Eyewitness at the Pentagon
Alfred S. Regnery
The Week of September 17, 2001

When I first moved to Washington from the Midwest, I used to joke that the commute into town from the Virginia suburbs got my blood circulating for the day.

Shirley Highway, or I-395, by the numbers, is Northern Virginia’s main street into Washington, and each day deposits tens of thousands of commuters into the capital. Wending its way through Springfield, Annandale, Alexandria and Arlington, it divides at the Pentagon and empties into the Potomac River bridges. Traffic is usually awful, drivers are aggressive and rude, and if a commuter’s blood isn’t boiling by the end of the ride, it is certainly moving.

But no trip along that highway, over more than 20 years, prepared me for what I saw on September 11.

As I approached the Pentagon, which was still not quite in view, listening on the radio to the first reports about the World Trade Center disaster in New York, a jetliner, apparently at full throttle and not more than a couple of hundred yards above the ground, screamed overhead.

Although airplanes regularly fly over the Pentagon on their way to Reagan National Airport, just a mile or two south, this plane was too low and going too fast. As I watched it disappear behind bridges and concrete barriers I knew it was about to crash.

At almost the same moment the radio announcer mentioned the likelihood that the World Trade Center had been hit by terrorists, although it was not yet clear whether the planes that hit it were small or large, private or commercial, or what any of the circumstances were. My first thoughts were that this, too, must be the act of a terrorist.

Seconds before the Pentagon came into view a huge black cloud of smoke rose above the road ahead. I came around the bend and there was the Pentagon billowing smoke, flames and debris, blackened on one side and with a gaping hole where the airplane had hit it.

I pulled onto the shoulder and got out of my car, as did many others, and we were among the first to see what would soon be seen by millions of people around the world. My first reaction, a correct one, as it turned out, was that a beautiful, peaceful September morning had suddenly gone horribly awry, and that we were at war.

I have passed the Pentagon twice each day for over 20 years. I have friends who work there and have been in the building countless times. And I see airplanes flying over it, landing at Reagan National, every day, and have probably flown over it myself a hundred times.

There are symbols that are indelibly planted in our minds, things that we take for granted, that reassure us that our world is safe and secure and that there is a consistency in our lives. And of course the Pentagon is the great symbol of American military might, the symbol of peace through strength, the symbol of the institution that helped to topple the Soviet Union, to defeat the enemy in World War II, and that keeps America free.

And the airplanes landing at Reagan National airport always symbolized the order that can be brought to the world by human intuition and by technology. In fact, I have often stopped in the park just north of Reagan National to watch in amazement as plane after plane descends and lands just where it is supposed to. Each plane, traveling at the same speed as the last, on the same path, landing on the same runway as the last got out of the way demonstrated, to me, the genius of human ability, of things working properly.

And suddenly, on a beautiful, cloudless, bright September morning, all of that was thrown out of kilter. One of those high-tech airplanes, suddenly not where it was supposed to be, and directed by a madman, breached the symbol of American strength.

Little did I know, of course, that one of the people in the airplane was our author and my friend Barbara Olson, whose new book was supposed to go to press this week. Little did I imagine how the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people would be shattered in that split second. And little did I know that the order, the consistency, which we take for granted everyday was suddenly order and consistency no more.

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Mr. Regnery is president and publisher of Regnery Publishing, Inc., a sister company of Human Events.

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