Some of the most memorable things seemed normal, totally typical.
Pentagon workers were milling about and smoking cigarettes in the courtyard at the center of the building. Men and women in uniform were staying on the sidewalks, careful not to walk on the grass.
But it was no normal day.
Navy Capt. Timothy Tibbits, commodore of Patrol and Reconnaissance Wing 10 at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, was at the Pentagon three years ago when it was hit by a hijacked airliner. Sitting in his office Thursday at the edge of the flight line at Whidbey, Tibbits, 45, recalled how that day started like any other.
Dropping off the car after leaving his Ashburn, Va., home. Jumping on a commuter bus to the Pentagon. Checking e-mail. Prepping for a meeting with Navy brass from Patuxent River, a Navy base that’s home to the Naval Air Systems Command.
But in the next cubicle, a co-worker was watching an old black-and-white television, courtesy of the set’s coat-hanger antenna.
Tibbits heard him shout, “Hey, look what’s going on!” A crowd of more than a dozen sailors and civilian contractors quickly huddled around the TV.
“Between the static, we saw what had happened after the first airplane hit. We were watching when the second airplane hit” the World Trade Center in New York City, Tibbits recalled.
They stared at the set for a half-hour and asked why it happened and how it happened.
Then, everyone went back to work. Tibbets missed a phone call from his father-in-law in Buffalo, N.Y. In the voice mail, the man encouraged his son-in-law to turn on a TV and added, “I don’t know if anybody’s talking about it, but the Pentagon could be a target.”
Tibbits said the warning made his co-workers laugh.
He was talking with one of them a bit later when a huge explosion sucked the air out of the room. A big fireball ignited, followed by black smoke. Tibbits was sitting in Pentagon room 5D453, an office on the fifth floor.
“Four floors directly below my office was the Navy Command Center that took the brunt of the Navy casualties. I didn’t find out until later, but the airplane basically came in right underneath our office.”
No one knew what had happened. But nobody panicked.
“Nobody was tripping over each other to get through the doors,” he said.
Tibbets tried to take a right turn out of his office into a hallway that led to the outside of the building.
“It was gone. All the ceilings were collapsed onto the floor, and it was just black smoke coming out.”
Tibbits had just moved into the office two months before, after that section of the Pentagon had been remodeled. But it was so new that no one knew the escape routes or how to use the fireproof doors.
Still, they got out. Tibbits and others made their way to the center courtyard, down three flights of escalators, with Tibbits taking two steps at a time.
He saw that others didn’t realize why the building was being evacuated. “There were actually people standing on the escalator, riding down. Not running, not jogging, no sense of urgency,” Tibbets said.
There were similar scenes as people left the building.
“People were walking down the stairs complaining, ‘Why are we having a fire drill now? I’ve got work to do.’ I’ll never forget that.”
Once in the courtyard, Tibbits saw people smoking or standing around. “Everybody staying on the sidewalk. Typical military; stay within the lines.”
When Tibbits started to cut across the grass, he realized what had happened.
“I saw a piece of an airplane that was probably half as big as my desk. Until then, I thought maybe it was a package bomb, a briefcase (bomb) or whatever.”
The Pentagon attack claimed 184 victims: everyone on board American Airlines Flight 77 and 125 people on the ground.
The death toll included 33 sailors, many in the Naval Command Center.
It would have been worse if the Boeing 757 had hit the building straight on. Luckily, it didn’t.
Tibbits finally walked into his home about four hours after the attacks. He then went to pick up his son, a second-grader, at school. And he was glad to learn that the teachers hadn’t told the kids about the attacks.
There was no easy explanation.
“I just said some bad people had done some bad things, and we don’t know why yet.”
With his three children in bed, Tibbits spent the rest of the night watching TV coverage of the attacks and trying to find out what had happened to others in the building.
The Navy’s close-knit patrol and reconnaissance community was hard hit. Tibbits went to seven funerals in three weeks.
Tibbits, the son of an assistant high school principal, joined the Navy to get away from Cleveland, Ohio, get a college education and become the next Jacques Cousteau.
He has an office filled with reminders of a career that spans more than two decades. On one wall hangs an aerial photograph of the Pentagon signed by his co-workers. On another, a picture of his uncle, an Army pilot who was lost near Papua, New Guinea, during World War II. And nearby, a photo of his son holding a 14-pound king salmon.
Memories of Sept. 11 are never far away.
“There’s a lot of people who aren’t here who should be,” he said.
“It just sort of brings home some of the things that are important in life, and some of the things that are not.”
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