Good Day - Part 2

I found a chair around the table in Dean’s office.  Jim, Jennifer, and Michelle were already seated at the table.  Dean was at his usual perch behind his desk.  I was a little annoyed.  Why were we going over this timeline again?  I felt like Dean could be quite obsessive about things that were either not that significant or that someone else had already put much time and effort into handling. The timeline was technically my responsibility that Dean had given to Jim while I was out on leave for my surgery. It had been completed but Dean wasn’t satisfied. So here we all sat at an 8am meeting he decided to call at 6:30 that Monday morning.  

Three of our office mates were not in attendance. Mac hadn’t come in yet. He wasn’t required at the meeting and kept a schedule different from most of us. Ericka was stuck in traffic on 495. Apparently a melon truck overturned that morning and wreaked havoc on the already insane rush hour traffic coming into the District in the mornings. She wasn’t needed at the meeting either so her absence wasn’t an issue. Patrick was the only remaining officemate that wasn’t around the table but he was on the phone. He was teleworking that day and called in to be a part of this meeting.  

I had not had breakfast or my coffee so I was feeling the hunger pangs. This made me even more annoyed about having to be in this meeting. Chocolate was staring me in the face as I tried to quiet my growling stomach. There was always a big tub of various chocolate candies in Dean’s office. Jim made sure we were well stocked with fun size Snickers, M&Ms, Milky Ways, Reese’s Cups, and the list continues. It made it extremely difficult to maintain good eating habits while at work and especially in boring meetings about topics that were being rehashed for the gazillionth time. Prior to my surgery I had lost 15 lbs. as directed by my surgeon. She wanted me as close to my ideal weight before the surgery. This was only my second week back in the office and I was trying to maintain good eating habits and not snack on the chocolate staring me in the face. Last week I’d  purchased a 32 oz.container of plain Greek Gods Traditional Greek Yogurt. It was waiting in the kitchen refrigerator for me. I had a bottle of clover honey and a small bag of organic granola that I kept at my desk to mix with my yogurt. This combination had become my daily breakfast.  

The meeting droned on for about 15 minutes. I had all but zoned out. I was trying to pay attention but it wasn’t really working. Dean got up to draw the timeline on the whiteboard behind our table. I kept thinking to myself “you really need to be paying attention because you’re going to get tasked with something related to this”.  And then we heard it, a rapid and muffled ‘pow,pow,pow’.  We all stopped and looked at each other. Dean immediately said “Was that gunfire?”  I responded “No, just sounds like someone dropped some tables in the atrium or something”, but even as I said it something didn’t feel right.  My mind was having this commentary on how I work at a military installation in the capital city of the United States. There are military personnel and security everywhere with guns. We couldn’t be hearing gunfire, not inside our building but somewhere deep inside me I knew my inner dialogue was off somehow.  For a quick second we tried to continue with the meeting and then we heard what sounded like a stampede. It sounded like groups of people running.

Dean informed us that he was going to check things out. When he walked out of the office, Michelle had a very concerned look on her face.  She said she was going to err on the side of caution and go grab her purse from her desk in case we had to leave the building. She told Patrick we would call him back and hung up the phone. Jennifer and I decided to follow Michelle’s lead and grab our purses too. I don’t remember what Jim did but I do remember hearing more gunfire followed by running as I walked to my desk to grab my purse and then the fire alarm sounded. Something bad was happening. I grabbed my purse and although my desk was right by the atrium, but I never looked into the atrium or at any of the other floors. So glad I didn’t.  

SBIR had just moved to this part of the building and we hadn’t been through a fire drill yet so I wasn’t clear where I should go to exit the building. I followed Jennifer and Michelle who were following other people heading for an emergency exit. A voice came over the loudspeaker saying that this was not a drill. This was a real emergency and everyone should exit the building. Dean and Jim had joined us in our effort to get out of the building. We moved quickly through a copy room that had an exit door in the back. I knew of this exit but thought it only took us to the first floor. Jennifer showed it to me last week when we went to the cafeteria to meet Tammy for coffee. When we got in the stairwell people were already running down the stairs as fast they could. I realized that I had on my 3 inch wedges and not my ‘metro’ shoes. I was also very aware that this was the most physical activity that I’d experienced since my surgery.

I run down the stairs and we are still hearing gunfire. It was now clear that it was gunfire and people were yelling that there was a shooter in the building. Wtf? How was this even happening?  What was going on?  I only had one flight of stairs to run down but it seemed to take forever. People were running, tripping, panicking. We pushed out of the exit door to outside the building. I was in the front of what had grown into a large group of people trying to make an escape. We came out into the alley between the east side of 197 and another building that I had never paid much attention to. We ran towards the front of 197 which would have placed us on Isaac Hull Way and at the front entrance of the building. As we approached the front of the building a female DC MPD officer with a gun drawn waved us in the opposite direction. She told us to run as fast as we could in the opposite direction. She yelled ‘do not come up here’. I don’t remember all her exact words but I remember getting the message that we were to run as fast and as far in the other direction and I remember thinking ‘this is really serious’ as if I couldn’t acknowledge the severity of the situation before now.  

People were pouring out of the exit, scared and confused. Everyone got the message to go in the other direction. I was still with my SBIR team. I had all of them in my peripheral vision.  We ran towards the Anacostia River which was just on the other side of the wall that surrounded the Navy Yard. We got to the wall and could go no further. There was a gate there but it was locked. There were a bunch of men at the front of our escaping group and only one uniformed Naval person. I was looking to them for direction. What do we do now? The panic in the air was palpable.  

I had never experienced such a collective sense of panic and urgency. I had experienced emergency situations before and even in a work environment. In 1998 when I worked for Chrysler Financial in Phoenix, AZ a very close friend and coworker came into work on a Monday morning and had a massive heart attack sitting at his desk. He died instantly but in the moment we didn’t know that. I didn’t see him have the heart attack but a coworker ran over to my section of the office asking if anyone knew CPR. I went over to his desk to see what was going on. He was not breathing. He was lying on the floor and two coworkers were attempting CPR. I wore a crystal cross around my neck during that time. I remember clutching my cross and doing some version of praying but in my soul I knew he had left us. He had just handed me a CD he had borrowed and said good morning moments before.  I was on the phone and didn’t have time to talk to him. That would haunt me for years but this situation was different. Multiple souls were leaving this earth as we know it and somehow I could feel that. Was I next?  Was it ‘my time’?  Only a year before, I had asked God to let me die. Life had just felt too hard, cold and lonely but I was good now God! if this was some delayed answer to my prayer.

Some men who were leading our group of escapees said that we couldn’t stay trapped in this alley. We would be sitting ducks for the shooter or shooters. That was the other thing.  We didn’t know exactly what was happening. Were there multiple shooters?  Were we under attack?  Had some foreign enemy infiltrated the Navy Yard and were killing us off?  Our ‘escape leaders’ yelled out “We’re going over the wall!”.  There was no time to think, to process what was happening. It all was just happening. There were wooden pallets and plastic pallet type objects stacked half way up the 10 ft. wall. It wasn’t  extremely sturdy but it would work. Several men climbed up the makeshift platform and jumped down on the other side. Other men stood one each side of the platform and buttressed it, while others helped the women climb up. Many of the women had on dresses and skirts and were working hard to make sure no one could see any extra flesh as they went over the wall, but this was a survival situation...no one was thinking about that. One woman was pregnant. “Please don’t let her fall the wrong way as she jumps down on the other side” I thought to myself. Someone grabbed my purse and threw it over the wall. At that point I literally thought “Well, I have no choice now but to go over” as if not going over was ever an option.  

I began to climb the platform. I was thinking that it’s a good thing this didn’t happen two weeks earlier, my sutures from surgery weren’t completely healed...but what kind of thought was that?  This shouldn’t be happening at all.  Hands were pulling me up, pushing me up, helping me to get to the top. I got to the top, sat on the wall and looked down. I realized how far a jump this was and I still had on my 3 inch wedges. Funny, how it never occurred to me take them off.  A man waiting down below grabbed both of my hands. I tried to tell him that I could jump without help but there was no time to debate, to be Ms Independent. I jumped, landed flat-footed and then fell over. But I was on the other side. A wall now separated me from whatever the hell was going on in 197.