On 9/11, I Was Just Trying to Get Home

On September 11, 2001, I walked past the burning Pentagon. Twenty-five years later, I am still reckoning with where that walk took me, and where America goes from here.

At my desk during my first Pentagon assignment in 2002.

For the past several days, I’ve been trying to understand how I feel about the 25th anniversary of September 11.

Grief, certainly. Gratitude. Anger. Pride. Regret. Fear.

But more than anything, I keep thinking about choices.

The choices taken from us that morning. The choices our country made afterward. And the deeply personal choices so many of us made because of what we saw, what we lost, and what we believed the moment required of us.

September 11 changed the course of history. It also changed the course of millions of individual lives.

Mine was one of them.

The Life I Thought I Might Live

I was raised in a deeply patriotic family, the daughter of a truck driver and a Mexican immigrant. Born in Nevada to a family connected to farming and the casino world, I later moved to El Paso, Texas, the border town that molded me into the person I am today. Life there was shaped by culture, faith, family, and a certain kind of working-class toughness. Mom taught me to be bold and unafraid. Dad was bullish, fiercely protective, and deeply no-nonsense, especially when it came to his only daughter.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, I moved to Washington. But politics and public service were not the only interests pulling at me. For years, I felt torn between two worlds: the desire to serve and a love for the arts. At one point, I left Washington for Austin, Texas, where I worked at a law firm connected to Lady Bird Johnson’s family. I had always been passionate about First Amendment law, but outside the office, I danced with a company and pursued theater and acting. I still did not know which direction my life would take. Then politics pulled me back to Washington.

In the summer of 2001, I returned to work at the Republican National Committee (RNC). I was conservative, shaped by my Catholic upbringing and working-class Texas family. But I was also the artsy staffer who wore black, showed up in platform shoes, and did not exactly blend into the building. People at the RNC would jokingly remind me that the Democratic National Committee was down the street. And back then, it really was a joke. I had friends who worked there. We did not see politics the same way, but we could still laugh together.

On September 11, 2001, none of those labels mattered.

I was at the Capitol that morning, delivering a package and was making my way back, when Capitol Police officers began yelling at people to clear the building. At first, I thought someone might have a gun. I didn’t understand what was happening. No one around me seemed to understand. There was only confusion and the increasingly urgent order to get out. So I ran. As I exited, I heard an officer say there was another plane in the air and no one knew where it was headed. Another plane? I looked up at the sky. I had no idea what he meant. I ran back to the RNC. When I walked into the building, everyone looked pale. People were staring at the televisions in disbelief as the horror unfolded in New York City. My phone was ringing. It was my boss, calling from Alaska. He had been awakened by the news and wanted to know whether I was safe and what was happening in Washington. He sounded scared. I was scared. We were all scared.

Then came the sound of a distant boom.

Soon, the reports began coming in: the Pentagon had been hit. Then came the news from Pennsylvania. Our building was evacuated.

My parents knew their only child was somewhere in the nation’s capital, but they had no idea where. The phone lines were jammed. I couldn’t reach them or my roommate. There was no way to tell anyone I was alive. I thought about my college boyfriend, who worked on Wall Street, and my classmates from Penn. So many had gone to New York. How many were in those buildings? How many families were calling phones that would never be answered?

With nowhere else to go, I walked with a friend to her apartment in downtown Washington. The streets were gridlocked. Police were everywhere. People were crying. No one knew whether another attack was coming. Only later would I learn that the passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 fought back, preventing the plane from reaching Washington. The Capitol, the building I had just fled, is believed to have been its target.

Eventually, I began walking home.

I lived near Ballston in Arlington, Virginia. Anyone who knows the Washington area knows that walking from downtown to Ballston is no casual stroll. That day, it felt even longer. I had plenty of time to get lost in my thoughts while the world around me seemed to be burning and no one knew what would happen next.

Then I passed the Pentagon.

Smoke filled the sky. Emergency crews were everywhere. On a grassy hill, I saw people gathering and staring at the hole in the side of the building. Some were waiting to learn whether their loved ones were alive. I felt nauseated. I had grown up in a city with one of the largest military installations in the country. Now I was watching the center of the American defense establishment burn. I knew, even then, that the United States would respond. I did not know what that response would look like, where it would take us, or how many lives it would claim. I only knew that the images in front of me would remain seared into my mind forever.

When I finally reached my apartment, my roommate opened the door sobbing. "Oh, my God. You’re alive."

I have never forgotten that moment. By the time I made it home, my feet were covered in blisters.

The Choice I Made

Two months before September 11, I had been considering a completely different life: moving to California to pursue dance, theater, and perhaps acting.

Two months after 9/11, my father died unexpectedly while driving his 18-wheeler across the country. In the days after the attacks, he had begged me to leave Washington and come home. He worried about me being so far from my mother in Texas, especially because his work kept him on the road. I sometimes wonder what he would have thought about the decision I made next.

I returned to my desk at the RNC after the attacks, but campaign politics felt increasingly difficult to care about. The country had just experienced an unimaginable act of terrorism, and spending my life focused on party strategy and political advantage no longer felt meaningful. I wanted to serve—not as a Republican or a Democrat, but on behalf of the American people. All of them. I wanted to help keep families safe, regardless of their politics, religion, race, or community.

So I asked to go to the Pentagon.

That decision shaped the next 25 years of my life.

On my first day inside the Pentagon, the dust was still there. Near the corridor where the plane had struck, there was an overwhelming heaviness, something you could feel before anyone said a word. I thought about those killed inside the Pentagon and aboard Flight 77, and the families they left behind. A year later, on September 11, 2002, I was there when the Pentagon Memorial Chapel opened near the site of the attack. I began attending Mass there regularly while working first for the Army’s Office of General Counsel and later in policy. There was something deeply personal about sitting in that chapel. I had once walked past the Pentagon as it burned. Now I was working inside of it, trying to honor those we had lost through the life of service I had chosen.

My earliest national security education came from some of the most experienced military and civilian leaders in the world. That education soon moved beyond offices and briefing rooms. I deployed overseas and served as an aide to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer in Iraq. There, I became friends with Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations Special Representative for Iraq, and was among the last people to speak with him before the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad killed him and 21 others. That night, from the palace, I answered calls from Condoleezza Rice, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, the FBI, and others trying to understand what had happened.

Over the next decade, my work in the counterterrorism community took me across multiple departments and administrations, and to Afghanistan, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, other parts of the Middle East, and Africa. Along the way, I witnessed terrorist attacks and watched dedicated public servants disrupt plots most Americans would never hear about.

My mother, still grieving my father, carried the worry of my service for years, and over time, it took a toll on her health.

What Service Taught Me

I entered national security determined to help prevent another September 11. But the years that followed taught me that protecting a country requires more than military force, and that patriotism demands more than unquestioning support for every decision made in America’s name. Across the Middle East, the people I met bore little resemblance to the images Americans saw on television. Learning their cultures and sharing meals with their families allowed me to know them beyond the distant narratives of conflict.

I saw war up close.

Its consequences were visible in the children living with decisions made thousands of miles away and in the extraordinary courage and sacrifice demanded of American service members. I also learned how intelligence can be misunderstood, selectively interpreted, or bent to support decisions already made. Over the course of my career, I worked for some of the most senior officials in the United States government and witnessed consequential national security decisions up close. Those experiences did not make me anti-military, anti-government, or anti-public service. They made me deeply wary of war, especially long, open-ended conflicts without a clearly defined purpose or an honest measure of success.

Supporting the people who serve does not require us to stop questioning those who send them into harm’s way. In fact, I believe the opposite. If we value their lives, we have a responsibility to ask the hardest questions before committing them to war. That, too, is patriotism.

On anniversaries like this one, we often talk about how united America felt after September 11. There is truth in that memory. Strangers helped one another, first responders ran toward unimaginable danger, and Americans searched for ways to serve something larger than themselves. But memory can soften the edges of history. That period also brought fear, suspicion, and cruelty. Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans were harassed and attacked. Entire communities were treated as suspect because of their faith, their clothing, or the color of their skin. If we are going to remember the unity, we must also remember who was excluded from it. Love of country should never require us to abandon the principles that make the country worth loving.

That lesson feels especially urgent now.

Twenty-five years after September 11, Americans are again being encouraged to see one another as enemies. Political disagreement has become a test of personal loyalty. Public institutions have been weakened by distrust. Service is too often dismissed as weakness, and cruelty is marketed as strength.

I watched those divisions deepen from inside the government. I entered the first Trump administration hoping, as I had with every administration I served, that the president would succeed for the sake of the country. What I ultimately witnessed forced me to make another choice: to speak publicly about what I believed was wrong. The choice was different, but the instinct behind it was the same one I felt on that long walk home.

The country must come before party. Truth must come before personal comfort. And public service must serve the public—not an individual, a faction, or a political movement.

What the Next Generation Must Carry

Many of the intelligence officers, military personnel, and public servants serving today do not remember September 11. Some were children. Many had not yet been born. I hope they never experience that particular kind of day. I hope they never have to call home and discover that the phone lines have gone silent, walk alone through a city under attack, or stand beneath a smoke-filled sky wondering what will happen next. But I do hope they understand what genuine public service demands: expertise, discipline, judgment, courage, and, above all, a moral compass.

Intelligence is not a political product. The military is not a personal instrument. Government power must never be turned against people because of their politics, religion, ethnicity, or dissent. Public service is a promise to people you may never meet and who may never know your name. It is a promise to protect the Constitution, tell the truth, and put the country before yourself.

On this 25th anniversary, I am thinking about the people who never made it home.

I am thinking about the firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and ordinary people who entered burning buildings to help strangers escape—and those who breathed the toxic air at Ground Zero and spent years fighting the illnesses that followed.

I’m also thinking about the service members, intelligence officers, diplomats, aid workers, journalists, and families who carried the weight of everything that came next. And about the civilians overseas whose lives were forever altered by America’s response.

How many lives took a different path because of that one day? Mine certainly did.

This anniversary does not belong to a president, a political party, or any one version of America. It belongs to the people we lost, the people who carried us through, and the generations now responsible for deciding where we go from here. Twenty-five years later, I do not believe America can, or should, return to exactly what it was before September 11. We know too much now about the costs of fear, the consequences of endless war, and the fragility of institutions we once assumed would always hold.

But I still believe in what America can become. Not because I have blind faith in our political system. Trust me, I don’t. I believe because I have seen the American people at their best: running toward danger, opening their doors, serving without recognition, and choosing courage when fear would have been easier. What made America a beacon was never a building, a president, or a political party. It was the promise that people from every background could belong here. That power would be constrained by principle. That truth mattered. That no person stood above the law, and that, in the moments that tested us most, we would recognize one another as Americans before anything else.

We have drifted far from that promise, and we may not find our way back soon. But perhaps "back" is not where we should be trying to go. Perhaps our responsibility is to move forward. To build a country that is more honest about its mistakes, more careful with its power, more protective of democracy, and more determined to see the humanity in people both within and beyond our borders.

I began walking toward that country on September 11, 2001. I did not know it at the time. I was simply trying to get home.

Twenty-five years later, I am still walking. And I still believe we can find our way there together.

–Olivia

If September 11 changed the course of your life, I would like to hear how. What did you choose because of that day? What have you carried with you ever since? Please share your story in the comments. Twenty-five years later, those stories are also part of our national memory.

If this piece meant something to you, consider sharing it with someone who remembers that day, or with someone too young to remember it at all.