A Former Newtowner Reports From Washington

By Shannon Hicks

David Deutermann lives close enough to the Pentagon Building to have heard the explosion around 10 am Tuesday morning, and then watched in horror as billows of smoke started filling the sky.

Mr Deutermann, a former Newtown resident, lives in on R Street in Washington, D.C., less than two miles away from the building that was struck by the third plane involved in a terrorist attack against the United States on September 11. He knew immediately that something was very wrong.

“I could see the smoke coming out from that even before it was being reported on the news,” he said over the phone from his home Tuesday evening. “You knew something had happened. And once you realized that there had been a terrorist act in New York of that magnitude,” he said, referring to the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, “and then you see smoke coming from the general area of the White House… that was scary.”

Mr Deutermann was at home Tuesday morning when he first heard what had happened in lower Manhattan.

“I was having breakfast when the radio reported that an aircraft had reportedly crashed into the World Trade Center, so I switched to the TV then,” Mr Deutermann said. He was among those watching, therefore, when live camera feeds showed as United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

“I was stunned,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. It was obvious to me at that point that it was terrorism. It was so intentional looking.”

After serving for years with the US Navy, Mr Deutermann left active duty on May 31 of this year. At that point, he had been working in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Just last Saturday, he became a Naval Reserve Office with the rank of Lieutenant Commander, and then he will return to ONI next Monday as a federal civil service employee. That was why he was home the morning of the attacks.

“I feel safe enough here at home,” he said late Tuesday morning when he was first reached by phone, his voice shaky and his tone echoing the disbelief millions of others also felt earlier this week. “I’m in a pretty residential area, so it makes no sense to hit here unless they just want more casualties.

“There are a lot of people up on the rooftops right now, as you might imagine, getting a view of the city and also watching the skies to the west. We heard fighter jets about an hour ago, so we know the air space is now secure.”

Once the initial shock of what had happened subsided, Mr Deutermann began walking around DC. From his apartment, he walked down to the National Mall and back, purposely following 16th Street because of the view the street offers of the White House.

“It was amazing,” he reported that evening. “Just moving along 16th Street, which is one of the major corridors of the city, it was a major parking lot. The closer I got [to the White House], the fewer people were driving and more were walking. People were just getting out of their cars and walking.”

Cars were left all over the city, Mr Deutermann said.

“You have to remember,” he continued, “everything was shut down right away, so you had all these people just trying to get away from the city as fast as they could.”

The other strong presence in the city at that hour was the police force. Police officers and Secret Service agents were everywhere, Mr Deutermann said. By the time he reached the National Mall and turned around to head back home, most of the traffic had died down “almost to the point where everything was just deserted.

“The police were still out, of course, and they had their shotguns drawn,” Mr Deutermann said, “but there was no one else there.”

Mr Deutermann was still waiting to hear from some of his friends Tuesday evening, people he hadn’t been able to reach during the day. But with the city’s telephone servers asking residents to limit their calls to only necessary ones, he was staying off the phone as much as possible. Washington’s telephone lines had been flooded all day, but Mr Deutermann’s parents, who live in Massachusetts, had been able to reach their son on the phone by the middle of Tuesday morning.

By Tuesday evening, things had quieted down in Washington. The nation’s capital was eerily quiet, in fact.

“Normally here in the city you hear and see planes taking off from National Airport,” Mr Deutermann said. “But now when you look up and can even hear an aircraft — which is rare tonight — now all you see are the fighters, and the occasional helicopter.

“D.C.’s really quiet now,” he continued, “except for the occasional emergency vehicle going by.”