"The thing I remember most was, I felt it"

felt it"

Franklin 'Chuck' Spinney, analyst, Office of the Secretary of Defense

I'd come to work on a shuttle bus with a radio. I knew about the World Trade Center; I knew two planes had hit. I was talking about it to some military guys on the bus. We all knew this was an attack of some sort; there was no question about it. I remember coming in, asking myself, Why am I even coming to work? This is ground zero, for Christ's sake. I don't think I was in the building more than three minutes when it happened. I never even got to my office. I saw a guy in the hall and we started talking about the World Trade Center. Then we felt this THUNK-and we kept talking.

What I heard didn't sound like an explosion. The thing I remember most was, I felt it. It was kind of like a dumpster falling over-and they fall over from time to time, because they were doing construction. We were jumpy, and this thing happened, and we kept on talking. We didn't really react until we heard someone scream, "Bomb!"

I turned around and looked at the corridor which I'd just come through. It was a torrent of people. They were running real fast. I've never seen anything like that in the Pentagon. I turned around, said to the guy, "I'm out of here." I joined the crowd. I started walking out. I wasn't in, like, Panic City or anything. But you had to trot, just to keep from getting trampled. The guards started yelling at everybody to "Slow down, slow down!" and everybody slowed down to a walk. Then they said, "Hurry up." They had to speed us up.

I was one of the first guys out of the building. The smoke was just beginning to billow up; there wasn't even much smoke at first. Everybody was sort of milling around outside in the south parking lot. I remember thinking at that time, if these people planted some bombs in some of the cars that were in the parking lot, they could have killed a lot of people. I went to some of the guards and said, "People are getting congregated here, and what if there's a bomb in one of these cars? We should get these people scattered. Somebody ought to be directing them out of the parking lot."

Nobody seemed to listen. They just sort of looked at me. I was standing next to a group of military officers, and I said, "Shouldn't we start to get people moving out of this parking lot?" And they didn't say anything. Everyone was just staring at the building. Perhaps it was a form of panic, but it didn't take the form I would normally think of. It was this stunned inactivity. I realized if I started talking about the need to evacuate people, it could make things worse. I could trigger a stampede. I decided it was better just to shut up.

I went under the I-395 highway overpass and started walking down Army-Navy Drive. I walked up the hill, and at that point, I could turn around and look at the Pentagon. All you could see was this black smear on the side of the Pentagon.

In many ways, my experience was unremarkable. I never felt any sense of physical danger. I was just exhausted. I only knew two people that died in this thing-and ironically, they were on the plane that hit the building, and they were unconnected with each other.