| Eye Witness |
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| Global Warning | |
| Written by Lisa Jain Thompson | |
| Monday, 11 September 2006 | |
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Arlington, Virginia, USA. The sky was blue, the day would be warm. It was the last breath of summer in Northern Virginia.
 At 9:42 A.M. on 9-11-2001 I was looking out my third floor window on the C-Ring at the blue sky back west towards Arlington.
I had been watching CNN on my computer and knew that New York and the Twin Towers had been attacked.
At 9:43 A.M. American Flight 77 crashed into the E-Ring a hundred, hundred fifty feet away from me. I heard the crash simultaneous with seeing the dark plume of smoke and fire rising before my eyes over the Pentagon walls.
“Shit! We’ve been attacked.”
The plane veered left, following the general line from Columbia Pike. The nose of the plane ended up in the office space I had just vacated two or three weeks before. If the plane had veered right, I would be dead in my brand new renovated office space.
After the explosion came the force of the overpressure rolling through the building and the rumble and shake of the building like an earthquake. The new windows held, the old windows broke and drew the overpressure and the flames away from me into the old , mostly vacant wing of the Pentagon.
I shut my computer down, locked my safe and several others, and started urging others to leave. Picking up my purse and coat, I followed them out the door like we had practiced being bombed a thousand times before.
Working our way down the escalators to the second floor, we were met my the first clouds of black smoke beginning to fill the hallway. When you inhaled, you could taste the burning JP-5. The smell was unmistakable --- another airplane had crashed into us.
By the time I got to the exit, the Pentagon Defense Forces were already visible with their automatic weapons. As I walked outside, Arlington Cemetery was across from me and, looking back, I could see the burning hole in the side of the building and the dark smoke curling towards the sky. No fire trucks yet, no police cars, no EMS – just the evacuees and a handful of guards. Inside the burning building, soldiers, some of them my co-workers, were moving into the burning, bombed out ruins, searching for survivors. They continued doing their job of protecting Americans.
I took one look at the whole, decided I didn’t want to stick around and be a target, and started walking the five miles back to my apartment. Ten minutes later as I was passing the Bed, Bath, and Beyond on Pentagon Row, a boiler or a construction propane tank blew back at the Pentagon. I walked faster. An hour and half later, I was home, calling and emailing friends to tell them I was alive. I could see the smoke from the Pentagon from my apartment windows. The glow was visible through out the day and night.
 Ten O’ Clock that night, the Army Operations Center, still working out of the Pentagon, called to see if I survived. By the next Monday we were setting up shop in a temporary location, comparing notes and memories, and checking on who else may have survived and who may have died. Of the 20,000 people at work inside the Pentagon that day, 125 people died, most of them civilian employees of the Army and Navy, some of them my friends. 64 passengers and crew member died on Flight 77.
By 9-12-2001, the Pentagon, less the section that had been hit, was back in operation, continuing to do what we do 24-7 every day.
Lisa Jain Thompson is Co-Founder and President of the Transsexual Symposium, Inc. (TS-Si). She serves as a Conribuing Editor and columnist for the TS-Si websites. Lisa is a poet and author, with works available at the Starpoet website.
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