Sept 13, 2001

On the first week of September 2001, I began my career as an Army journalist at Fort Myer, VA writing about news in the National Capital Region, including the Pentagon.

On each anniversary of 9/11 as people share their memories and feelings from that fateful day I tend to remain silent. I vividly recall where I was and how I felt as the towers were hit, the way my building shook when the Pentagon was stuck, the feeling of knowing soldiers from my barracks would never come home again, the guilt at feeling grateful that my public affairs officer had dismissed me as too inexperienced when I had tried to get him to sent me to the Pentagon just after the second tower was stuck. But those moments usually take a backseat in my mind to another that happened two days later.

As a journalist, I should have immediately committed this experience to paper and shared it with others, but it felt too soon, too personal, and I was too inexperienced to think that I could write well enough to convey the emotions, so I remained silent. Over the years, I've told a few people the story, but each time I tried to write it, my thoughts failed me and I put it off again.

I was manning a security checkpoint at Fort Myer’s main gate. Since Fort Myer was about a mile from the Pentagon and housed not only the Joint Chiefs of Staff but also a large number of the junior enlisted and senior officers assigned to the Pentagon, access to the base was restricted after the Pentagon was hit. The gate I was working could only be used by the crash investigation team so traffic was fairly light.

A couple military police, a few infantrymen, and myself were manning that gate and checkpoint. We spent most of my 13 hour shift chatting, as there were often large gaps between arrivals at our checkpoint and we were all a little on edge.

A little after midnight we were idly talking when the conversation just stopped dead. Never one to allow silence to go long unfilled, I was about to attempt to restart the conversation, probably with a joke or sarcastic comment, when a visceral feeling came over me. I’d best describe it as a mix of sorrow and evil. I have, on a few occasions, been in the presence of truly evil men and that feeling has been unmistakable. I was surprised by these feelings and figured it was a delayed response to the tragedy. However, as I looked around and saw the expression on the faces of a couple of the other guys, I realized I might not be a he only one having those feelings.

We continued standing in silence when a few moments later a column of trucks came around the bend and approached the gate. I don’t know if the MP manning the gate had been forewarned, but no one at my checkpoint had been notified about the arrival of the first refrigerated morgue trucks from the Pentagon.

Not a word was spoken as we moved aside and stood in silence as as that long column of death drove past. When the last truck had past, we wordlessly resumed our posts.

When the horrible, oppressive feeling finally past, I quietly asked the soldiers around me if they had known the trucks would be coming, and all denied knowing. I later found out that it was just a temporary stop at Fort Myer, as their ultimate destination at Dover AFB was not ready to receive them yet.

That moment is forever burned into my mind. As the years have passed, the memories and feelings from other moments surrounding that tragedy have become a little less sharp, like stones slowly worn smooth by the passage of the brook, but this one remains as jagged and sharp as always.