9/11: The Last Thing I Remember

RADM Craig Quigley, Pentagon Spokesperson on 9/11

A key physiological trigger to memory recall is adrenaline which is why people remember exactly where they were on 9/11. Remembering much of anything else, just prior to hearing the news of the attacks, is difficult.

The last thing I remember before hearing the news of the 9/11 attacks was how beautiful of day that late summer Tuesday morning was. I was living in Northern Virginia, a couple miles from Dulles Airport, where American Airlines 77 departed from and crashed into the Pentagon, about 20 miles away. I had just taken my four month old puppy out for a walk and vowed that I could go for a run at lunch because it was too perfect of a day to not do that. But that never happened. After walking my dog, I was working out with the radio on when I heard that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. My initial thought was it was a small plane that inadvertently hit the building much like a B-25 that crashed into the Empire State Building in the summer of 1945. As the news reports continued to flow in I turned on the TV and never left my house for the rest of the day.

Exactly one week earlier, my boss and I were driving to a client site at the Navy Yard, in Washington, DC. We both grew up in New York and, as we drove pass the Pentagon on SR 110, we pondered the question, "Which office building was bigger, the Twin Towers or the Pentagon?" Obviously, we wouldn't have reached our destination if that meeting were scheduled on 9/11, due to the mayhem.