Archer W.: Where were you on September 11th and what do you remember?
Derek Hawkins: I was a 16-year-old at West Potomac High School, which is just a few miles south of the Pentagon. There’s—a lot of the kids there, their parents worked in government. We have a big military base down here, Fort Belvoir. Many of them worked there, many of them worked in the Pentagon itself. And it was early in the morning. We were between periods, and then I went into my English class, Mr. Howard’s English class, and that’s where I first heard the news. My friend CJ told us “a plane has hit one of the twin towers”. We all knew what the twin towers were, and we had no idea until the second plane hit that this was an actual attack.
And then it was sometime after that, not long, that we heard that the Pentagon got hit. And that’s when people really started to panic. And then we started to see the smoke rising from the Pentagon and this kind of haze washing over the horizon that morning.
I remember raising my hand and asking if I could go downstairs to the front office to call my dad because my dad worked in downtown DC at the time and I didn’t know where he was. I called my dad on his cell phone—I didn’t know if I was gonna get through to him, and I did—and he was in his office building downtown and he was getting ready to leave. He told me “everything’s gonna be okay. It’s scary.” And he said he was all right and he said my mom was all right, and that he’d checked in with her. It was a scary experience at first.
Archer W.: Thank you, Derek. That was Derek Hawkins from the newsroom of The Washington Post.
