The Foreign Service Journal, September 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2021 23 being bombed. My boyfriend and I looked out of the window and saw the large, swirling pieces of debris sailing past. We locked eyes, didn’t say a word and immediately exited the room. I left everything behind: laptop, wallet, phone and even my shoes, thinking: “Get out now, we can always come back for our possessions later.” Many years later in Foreign Affairs Counter Threat (FACT) training, I would hear the need to move quickly away from a danger zone or attack site, referred to as “getting off the X.” 3) BELIEVE YOUR EYES, NOT WHAT PEOPLE TELL YOU. We took the emergency stairs down the 18 flights to the lobby. Surprisingly, there were just a handful of people in the stairwell at this point. Once in the lobby, we heard people saying not to worry, it was just an explosion in the hotel kitchen. I knew from the intense rumbling and from the swirling debris that this could not be the case. The hotel employees were trying to get us to go back to our rooms and not panic, but I knew something big was afoot. We walked out the front door to another Marriott we had spotted across the street. I used the opportunity to call my father (collect, since we had left our cell phones behind) to say: “You are going to see something on the news, just know that we are OK.” 4) KNOWWHEN TO BREAK THE RULES. In an effort to maintain order, the hotel staff requested that everyone stay in the lobby and not leave the building. However, I felt the need to put more distance between myself and whatever was happening across the street. Usually I am a rule follower extraordinaire— with not even a parking ticket to my name—but this time was different. I tugged on my boyfriend’s arm and ushered him out a back entrance. Almost immediately afterward, the second plane hit. Given the size of the buildings and how close together they were, it was impossible for us to see very far up, so we still didn’t know what was happening. We only pieced it together once we saw some of the wreckage and heard others saying they had seen planes. 5) KNOWWHEN AND WHOM TO ASK FOR HELP. We kept moving south, away from the towers, trying to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and the attack. The news was starting to travel, and people on the street were begin- ning to panic. I realized that there would be no going back to get our possessions, and that we would need money to get back home. We stopped in a bank to ask about a wire transfer, but they started to shut down almost as soon as we walked in. We left and kept moving farther from the attacks, walking carefully and back from dinner with my boyfriend and a colleague frommy office. My colleague was saying how happy he was to have come on the trip. I offhandedly commented: “Yes, everything is per- fect, although three words come to mind.” I paused dramatically and joked, “Osama bin Laden.” We laughed it off and continued our walk to the hotel. The next morning, as soon as I heard and felt the rumbling from the plane’s impact, my first thought was that we were ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/USER68C0DD38_58 (FOCUSSECTIONBACKGROUND)