9/11 Fifteen Years Later: Honoring My Hero

Fifteen years after the 9/11 attack I remain grateful that I knew my sister was safe before I even knew she was in danger.

I was living in California, 3,000 miles from home, that terrible Tuesday. I was awakened by a telephone call. The caller ID indicated it was my mom, but instead I was hearing my sister Julie’s voice. The words were garbled and made no sense. “I just want to tell you Dodie’s all right, she’s on foot, and we’re going to go get her.” What, her car broke down? She repeated, “Dodie’s all right, she’s on foot and we’re going to go get her.” Then came the unbelievable. “The Twin Towers have been destroyed and the Pentagon’s been hit.”

Dodie was an intelligence analyst with the Air Force, and someone had just flown a plane into her building. Someone had just tried to kill my big sister.

9/11

As they were for millions of Americans, the next hours are a jumble of nightmare images and frantic phone calls. Dodie called my mom from a hotel on Route 1, where she had walked from the Pentagon. My mother and Julie forced their way to the hotel through the traffic. Unable to make a turn to the hotel because of the gridlock, my 80-year-old mother jumped out of the car and leaped over a road barrier in an effort reach her daughter, only Dodie was nowhere to be found. The hotel had forced the Pentagon survivors to leave and continue their exodus down Route 1, as tens of thousands of Federal workers ordered out of DC were heading en masse in that direction. (Osama bin Laden and friends are lucky to have met their end at the hand of Navy Seals and drone strikes. Had our mother gotten hold of them that day or any other their deaths would not have been so quick and merciful.)

For hours no one knew where Dodie was. She ended up walking seven miles to the King Street Metro station in Alexandria before my brother-in-law found her. Seven miles on the one day in decades she had not brought sneakers to work.

Finally, deep into the afternoon of 9/11, I got through to her house. “How is she doing?” “She’s taking a nap. And she is angry.”

What She Didn’t Tell Her Baby Brother

Dodie was furious at the actual attack and the al-Qaeda terrorists. Furious at herself for having left the sneakers at home and being forced to walk miles in heels and bare feet. She was also furious because the U.S. intelligence community knew an attack was in the works and was working around the clock to put the pieces together, but had been stifled by “walls” the Clinton Administration had put in place limiting what the various intelligence agencies could share with each other.

In fact, she revealed years later that the real reason she had to miss my wedding in the spring of 2001 was because of high-level top-secret meetings dealing with the looming threat.

There was something else she did not reveal to me until just a couple years ago — always looking to protect her little brother. The morning of 9/11 she had been scheduled to meet with her Navy counterpart over in his new offices. At the last minute he said, “Why don’t I come over your way since I have to be over in that part of the Pentagon anyway.”

They were meeting when the building shook. Aware of the attack in New York, Dodie told him “We’ve been hit.” Indeed. The wheel of American Airlines Flight 77 had just slammed through her colleague’s conference room. His offices were incinerated. But for chance, both of them would have been killed.

Hero Among Heroes

Few people realize that the Pentagon remained on fire for days. In fact, at one point, there were concerns the fire could not be stopped. Which gets to a story of unheralded workaday heroism.

Nobody can take away from the astounding bravery of New York’s first responders. Those firefighters went into the Twin Towers knowing they might never come out. They did their job. They headed upwards when everyone else was hurrying toward safety.

And on United Flight 93, finding themselves in the midst of a terror act, Todd Beamer and his band of citizen warriors declared their plane would not be used as a weapon. They would retake the plane or take it into the ground before letting it harm any more Americans. America’s counter-attack on al-Qaeda began with the words “Let’s roll,” and as the cockpit recordings make clear, it was the terrorists who ended up afraid.

However, left out of the talk of 9/11 heroes is a more modest and workaday feat of bravery.

Dodie had made it home safely on 9/11. And yet come dawn September 12th, after fully absorbing the horror of what had happened, her feet still swollen and sore, she — and thousands of her civilian colleagues — left the safety of home, made the long, slow commute, walked past rows of emergency vehicles and heavily armed Marines, and entered a building still on fire. With smoke and the stench of death still in the air, Dodie sat down at her desk and set herself to the task of helping defend the nation.

Dodie’s my hero.

Today

I happen to be home this week. And Dodie, now retired, is mere feet away surveying the news. A couple days back we were at Arlington National Cemetery for the internment of our beloved Uncle Jule. I remembered how in the days after 9/11 he had been inconsolable. After Pearl Harbor, he had rushed down to enlist. But this time, now over 80-years-old, he was distraught at being unable to enlist again.

“You answered your call,” I told him. “And this generation will answer theirs. Your task is to assure us, ‘We’ve been here before, and we made it through alright.'” Looking into the young, determined faces of the Navy Honor Guard at his memorial service 75 years after Pearl Harbor and 15 years after 9/11, I knew I’d been right.

My siblings and I made our way to the grave of my father, also a veteran of World War II. The grave overlooks the Pentagon, and in fact, overlooks the point of the Pentagon where the plane blasted through. The very place my sister was supposed to have been. Standing on those hallowed hills, Dodie shared what apparently was common knowledge but not known to me: The explosion from Flight 77 was so massive the shockwave had rippled through Arlington National Cemetery and dislodged our father’s headstone.

Fifteen years later, as this weekend’s commemorations demonstrate, the shockwave from 9/11 still rattles America.

When Dodie drops me off at Reagan National I will have to pass through security unthinkable on the morning of 9/11. I’ll have an awareness of those around me, a suspicion of anything out of the ordinary, a gnawing sense that there are countless jihadists eager to do harm and today might be their day. But as the plane takes off, it’ll bank left offering a view of an intact Pentagon, an unharmed Nation’s Capital and the memory of a few days visit with a true — if tiny — American hero.

Following a remembrance ceremony, a wreath lies upon a memorial bench as family members of those who died in the attack on the Pentagon visit the Pentagon Memorial September 11, 2011 in Arlington, Virginia.