9/11 intensified U.S. dedication to peace

WASHINGTON — I had to escape the TV images last Thursday, the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Everything in Washington seemed to stop that day as people remembered. So I had the black-and-white TV in my office tuned to cable news as it replayed the same raw footage it showed two years earlier: planes slamming into buildings, fire, bodies, people jumping from towers, the Pentagon exploding, the trade center collapsing.

It brought back too many memories. So I took a head-clearing walk to the National Mall, a couple of blocks from my office. As I saw the Washington Monument sparkling in the sun, I felt a desire to go to its top — something I had not done in years.

One can see things clearly up there — including how much America has changed in the past two years, and how some important things that were threatened still survive.

I was happy to look east and still see the U.S. Capitol's white dome gleaming. I was in it the day of the attacks. After the World Trade Center was hit, I had walked next door to a House office building looking for Utah Olympics officials, who ironically were in town lobbying for more anti-terrorism money.

While there, former Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, and I watched out his window as people fled the Capitol. Police had told them a plane was coming, and they should run as fast and far as they could. They did.

But no plane hit the Capitol that day, nor the White House — clearly visible to my north from the Washington Monument. The president's house was similarly evacuated that day.

A plane that may have originally targeted those buildings ended up instead directly to my south, at the Pentagon. It could have killed me that day, but it killed others — a haunting thought. And another plane, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was also thought to have targeted the Capitol — but a passenger revolt led to its crash, maybe also saving me through the sacrifice of others.

I'll never forget seeing the Pentagon two years ago when I left the House office building. It billowed charcoal-black smoke, marring a perfectly blue sky. It stopped me in my tracks. Explosions there were loud enough even miles away on Capitol Hill, that people around there hit the ground for cover.

Our safe world was shattered.

On Thursday, the Pentagon looked peaceful in the distance. Its damage was long ago repaired, as is much of the 9/11 damage done to the nation as a whole. But the view from the monument shows we still have scars.