@RepDonBeyer@mas.to
My memory of that day will always be a fairly direct one. We were scheduled to fly out to Chicago, around lunchtime. We'd gotten up to finish packing. My (now) wife had the TV on to the local morning news. She yells in from the room where the TV was, "I don't think we're flying, today". Ran out in time to see the initial coverage of the second jet flying into the towers, followed not long after by news of the jet crashing into the Pentagon. Not long after, our supposition that flights were going to be grounded was confirmed.
Stopped packing and headed over to the nearest blood-bank. Was a hot, sunny day, in Northern Virginia. We waited in a huge donation-line for hours. Finally got brought inside to give blood. My (now) wife got taken back, first. As I was sitting in my donation-chair, they wheeled her past: she'd passed out after getting up from completing her donation. As regular blood donors, fainting wasn't something that normally happened for her. However, 3+ hours in line in the scorching sun had dehydrated her, with the fainting being the ultimate result.
I remember watching smoke escaping from the Pentagon for days afterwards. Once the roadblocks had been lifted and we were able to drive freely around the inner NoVA suburbs, we'd stopped by the Pentagon City Mall to pick up some necessaries: the top deck of the Pentagon City Mall's parking garage provided a direct view of the scene.
First post-roadblocks evening that the bridges into the city were back to being open, we drove into the city for dinner. As we were transiting a mostly-empty 14th street bridge into the city, an Apache came roaring up and spotlighted us.
Dunno which was spookier: the scene from the Pentagon City Mall parking garage's top parking-deck or being spotlighted by that AH64. A whole week without the sound of air-traffic - but for the military helicopters and F16s was its own kind of eery.