An Altered Frame of Reference

He had just started first grade at Blessed Sacrament School, a K-8 institution in Alexandria whose student body included many children whose parents, Andy’s mom Anne among them, worked across the Potomac River in Washington, DC.

Life was good, and on this unseasonably cool, breezy Tuesday morning in September 2001, Andy was enjoying learning new things in Mrs. Hicks’ class, playing with his classmates, and doing all the other fun stuff kids his age like to do when they’re oblivious to the struggles, conflicts, and cacophony of the world around them.

Then, at precisely 9:37 a.m., he felt the ground rumble and the building shake as American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the west side of the Pentagon just a five-minute drive and one exit north off I-395 from his school.

What’s happening? he wondered.

As a six-year-old, he had little frame of reference beyond the happy world in which he lived much less a terrorist attack on the nerve center of the United States Armed Forces. 

“I was so young,” said Andy, a Collegiate help desk technician whose last name is pronounced San-tie-a. “They tried not to tell us what was going on. The older kids, especially the ones who had family working in DC, were scared. The crash was close. They shut the school down. They stopped doing classes within 15 minutes of it all happening.

“I still didn’t think of it as a big deal until I walked around and saw kids and teachers crying and people being terrified. That’s the moment it sunk in that something really bad had happened.”

Parents began to arrive to take their children home. 

“A teacher had to see that they were our parents and hand us off to them,” Andy continued. “My dad (Amador) picked up my brother (Adam, a fourth grader) and me. He had to be checked into the school, and they had to send him to our classrooms. Then we left and waited for our mom to get home.”

Which was problematic. 

“My mom worked on 14th Street,” Andy said. “She had to be evacuated. They shut all the roads down, so she had to walk from 14th Street to Georgetown and cross the Key Bridge along with my uncle and walk to my grandmother’s house. She walked maybe six miles with thousands of other people all trying to leave DC and get back to Virginia.”

As Amador, whose family had emigrated from Cuba when he was three years old, tried to make contact with Anne and figure out how to get her home, Andy and Adam waited at their grandmother’s house where they watched the stunning events play out on the television.

“The memory of watching those planes crash into the Twin Towers is ingrained in my mind,” Andy said. “We had an aunt who was a flight attendant and was supposed to be on one of the American Airlines planes. She called in sick that morning and switched with one of her co-workers.”

The next day brought further awakening for the six-year-old.

“My parents thought it was such a big deal that they put us in the car and drove us into the city,” Andy recalled. “You could see the smoke still coming out of the Pentagon because you drove right by it on 395. When we got into the city, on almost every corner there were literal tanks with soldiers carrying weapons. It was surreal, one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen.”

On August 23, 2011, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake whose epicenter was in Louisa County sent shockwaves through at least a dozen eastern and southern states.

Andy was still in Northern Virginia at the time, and his 16-year-old mind quickly flashed back to that moment a decade earlier.

“The ground started shaking, and my first reaction was, there’s a terrorist attack,” he said. “I had no previous experience with earthquakes. Dealing with that was like, we’re under attack. A plane is hitting somewhere.”

So as the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks approaches…

“Honestly,” Andy said, “9-11 is one of the first clear memories I have of anything. I saw the gravity of it, but I was so young that I didn’t realize the historical significance at the time. I grew up in a post 9-11 world so I don’t remember what life was like before.”
    ~Weldon Bradshaw