Sept. 11 a personal experience for CMU off-campus program administrator

Barbara Jenkins had just sat down at her desk in the Air Force Education Center in the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and was sorting through her e-mail and preparing for the day.

Suddenly in the distance, she heard a rumbling. Seconds later, a Pentagon police officer burst into the windowless room Jenkins was in, telling her she had to get out— right away.

Jenkins, a program administrator for Central Michigan University’s off-campus programs at the military headquarters, figured it was some sort of drill. She could hear an alarm beginning to sound somewhere and people beginning to pour out of office doors down the hall.

She joined the flow of people shuffling slowly out of the building, when she opened the door and exited to the sidewalk, Jenkins realized something wasn’t quite right.

“When I got outside, you literally had to hold on to the person in front of you because there was literally that much smoke,” she said.

Realization

That’s when she turned around and saw the source: plumes of black smoke and flames were rising near a parking area to the South, apparently from a wing of the Pentagon across the courtyard from her office. All over, people were popping open their cell phones, trying to get a call out and make some sense of what was going on.

“You were totally just cut off from any type of communication,” she said.

Jenkins traveled slowly across the street to an area called Pentagon City Mall, located about a half-mile away.

She started to hear bits and pieces of information offering a clue as to what may have caused the confusion.

“Folks were getting information from the people they were calling using the pay telephones,” she said. “That’s when people were saying that planes had flown into the twin towers in New York.”

The message slowly began to sink in and brought Jenkins back to the present moment and confusion that surrounded her.

“When I saw all the smoke, I didn’t attribute it to a terrorist threat, not the United States, that just didn‘t happen. I thought perhaps a boiler or something had blown up within the Pentagon. I didn’t know what to think,” she said. “To think we were hit by terrorists, that was something that never, never crossed my mind.”

All Jenkins wanted to focus on was getting out, getting away and to some source of news that could offer a more clear explanation of what was going on.

After a couple hours, Jenkins was able to make contact with one of her supervisors, Lou Howard, who lived and worked in Fairfax, Va. A metro train that eventually got up and running took her there that evening.

It was then, after reaching Howard’s home, that Jenkins first heard an account of the devastation that had occurred that day. Though she previously was a sergeant in the military and served in various missions overseas, nothing, Jenkins said, could have prepared her to see what had unfolded in her own country.

“When I finally saw everything on TV and I saw it over and over again, all you can think about was the devastation and all the lives that were lost,” she said. “You were just, I guess, shocked, because you never thought any attack would be made on U.S. soil.”

In the days that followed, Jenkins learned how devastating the attack was on the Pentagon community alone. The building was closed for nearly a week as the impact of the attack sank in for the people who worked and went to school there.

Two students who had recently enrolled in CMU classes at the Pentagon were walking in the corridor that was destroyed at the time of the attack. Both were killed, she later learned.

Another student survived, but an office the girl worked in at the Pentagon was destroyed. The girl had left and walked to grab something in another corridor at the time the plane struck.

“When the plane hit, everything in there was destroyed, and that included the (term) paper she was working on,” Jenkins said. “There were some that were indeed scared, who didn’t want to come back to work at the Pentagon,” she said. “I didn’t have any real fear because I’ve been in the military … its hard to describe your feelings … Just the loss of so many lives, it just made you physically hurt too. Even though you didn’t have an injury on you, you still hurt right along with them.”