Twenty-Five Years After the Towers Fell

Twenty-five years ago, I was driving to work late, as I often did. I lived in Alexandria then, not yet married, and worked in Crystal City, directly across the highway from the Pentagon. On the radio, I heard that a small plane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. It sounded strange, but at first it sounded like an accident.

After I settled in at the office, the Pentagon had been hit. We had no television there, and the early web was not built for a sudden rush of people trying to understand a catastrophe. CNN would not load. I found a window, leaned as far as I could, and still could not get a useful view of the Pentagon. People were talking in fragments, each person carrying a different piece of the story.

I called my brother. I tried to decide whether to stay at work or leave. A few people wanted to go home, but they debated whether leaving meant using a sick day. Eventually, I went to the garage and got in my car.

I remember the sidewalks packed with people. It looked as though everyone was trying to get out of town. I was alone in my car, and I felt awful passing so many people who seemed to be looking for a ride. Interstate 95 was closed, so I couldn’t make the usual trip home. Traffic barely moved on Route 1 (Jefferson Davis Highway). Every route I tried to get to 95 was blocked.

My girlfriend lived in Stafford, and she asked me to come to visit her instead. The radio stayed on the entire drive. Reports kept changing: planes had crashed, more aircraft might be involved, some were not responding, and nobody quite knew what else was happening. The phones were overwhelmed too. Everyone was calling someone, or trying to be called, at once.

I arrived at my girlfriend’s house before the second tower fell. I watched in horror as the tower collapsed on television. No one was prepared to see it. For hours, people had been hearing about those trapped above the impact zones. Then suddenly the buildings were gone.

It felt like an event the whole country experienced together, even while we were alone in our own homes or cars. For at least a month, maybe longer, the country seemed depressed. I remember a caller on the radio saying that he loved building model airplanes but had lost any desire to do it. That made immediate sense to me. Hobbies, free time, ordinary interests… everything felt drained of meaning for a while. People wanted to talk about what happened, but talking about it could make you feel worse. Eventually, I learned to step away from those conversations when I needed to.

There were also moments of people trying to lift one another back up. I remember my girlfriend and others standing along a busy road, waving a flag while passing drivers honked their horns. It was not a political statement. It was people reminding one another that we were still here.

The attacks were only the beginning of the fear. Anthrax scares began showing up in the mail. That bothered me deeply because my father worked at one of the larger postal facilities, the kind that handled far more mail than an ordinary post office. I remember facilities being shut down, including a post office where my mother had worked a few years earlier. There were warnings, suspicions, and even a radio story about someone who played a cruel prank on a coworker who seemed too worried about anthrax. The prank backfired badly; they fired the person who did it.

The point was not simply that the mail could be dangerous. After coordinated hijackings, attacks by mail, and warnings about possible dirty bombs small enough to fit in a suitcase, it felt as though danger could come from anywhere. A bag left behind, an unfamiliar package, anything out of place could suddenly seem threatening.

Life around Washington changed visibly. I sometimes took the bus to work or transferred at the Pentagon. After 9/11, soldiers in heavy gear stood at bus stops with machine guns, watching the crowds. Military vehicles passed with long antennae arcing from the rear toward the front. Soldiers walked through Metro stations with K-9 dogs. Eventually, they bricked off the Metro entrance to the Pentagon.

Those sights became part of the new normal, along with airport security lines, shoes in bins, ID checks, and limits on what you could carry onto a plane. Before 9/11, I could walk with my father to the gate, hug him goodbye, and watch his plane leave. That disappeared. Some changes were meant to keep us safer, and I am grateful an attack like that hasn’t happened again. But the changes also showed how deeply terrorism had disrupted ordinary life.

The years that followed brought wars, the Patriot Act, arguments over surveillance and privacy, and the long struggle for health care and recognition for first responders who breathed the dust at Ground Zero. I remember images of dust filling the streets, stories of emergency workers inside the buildings, and accounts of months of rubble removal. The immediate destruction was impossible to comprehend. The consequences kept unfolding for years.

For a long time, talking about 9/11 made me depressed. Now I can look back with more distance, but not indifference. I remember the confusion in my office, the stalled traffic, the radio reports, the shared shock of watching the towers fall, and the anxiety that followed in places as ordinary as a bus stop or a mailbox.

That day changed the country. It also changed the texture of everyday life for those of us who lived near Washington. Twenty-five years later, I still remember how quickly the familiar became uncertain, and how, in the middle of it, people kept trying to find one another, get home, and carry on.

I am grateful for the soldiers who have stood ready to defend this country, for the first responders who run toward danger when the rest of us are trying to escape it, and for the people across many agencies who have worked together since then to recognize and prevent similar threats. Much of that work is invisible to those of us living in small towns and going about ordinary days. That is probably how it should be.

But it is worth remembering that our safety depends on people willing to take difficult risks, share information, and act before a threat becomes another tragedy. 9/11 showed us how vulnerable we could be. The years since have also shown us the courage, cooperation, and resolve that help carry a country forward.

Lewis Moten
Front Royal, VA

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