Dick Reed does not know exactly why he is alive. About 9:40 Tuesday morning, when a hijacked jetliner slammed through the west wall of the Pentagon, he had just walked out of his office for a brief look at television coverage of the attack on the World Trade Center. It was, quite possibly, a lifesaving decision.
While he was down the hall, the eight-foot window in his Pentagon office burst into uncountable shards of glass. The wall buckled. Part of the ceiling caved in. If he had been there, he might have been killed.
Then again, if the plane "hadn't gone under us, he would have smashed me," Reed said. "He went under me, literally under me."
For every story about the horrifying demise of a Pentagon worker, an airline passenger or New York bond trader, there are people like Reed who live on as "near misses," lucky souls who averted disaster seemingly just by the randomness of fate.
These are people who were spared the most perilous of moments in the office because of a morning errand or an ignored wake-up alarm, people who changed flights at the last minute and never boarded a 757 that went up in flames.
For some, the stories are imbued with an anguish of their own at a time of such widespread tragedy. Why is one life taken, they ask, and another spared?
"These questions really speak to very, very personal questions of faith," said Rabbi Daniel G. Zemel, of Temple Micah in the District. "The question is, what's at work? None of us know what our own destiny is. Why some of us were there and got killed and some of us weren't is just one of the great mysteries of life."
At Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown, the Rev. William J. Byron, the pastor, said some people mistakenly believe "God is at a control board saying, 'I'm going to let her get up and get coffee so she doesn't get hit, and I'm going to let him stay seated,' " he said.
At Holy Trinity, Byron has counseled two survivors of Tuesday's crash. He urges them to be grateful and ask, 'Now what am I going to do with this time that I have, with this extension of my lease, if you will?' "
Carol S. North, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who has studied many near-miss cases, said lives are sometimes transformed. "It helps them really keenly see what's important," North said.
But reckonings take time. Only four days have passed since the unprecedented attack on the United States, as Dick Reed, a budget analyst for the Navy, well knows.
"I don't understand why I'm alive," Reed admitted, his voice breaking.
He reflected, "I don't know that I feel guilty. I feel lucky. I know that the people who are dead have no more reason to be dead than I do to be alive."
A Tighter Hold on Life
Three weeks ago, Jason Kerben, a 30-year-old Rockville lawyer, was planning to take American Airlines Flight 77 to Los Angeles for a business conference he attends every year.
But with his wife newly pregnant with the couple's second child, Kerben got the idea that the couple should combine the business trip with a mini-vacation, using the frequent-flier tickets they had, as it turned out, on another airline.
"Let's make this our last big trip before we have two kids," he recalled telling his wife. "How often do you have the opportunity to fly across the country? And everything is paid for for me."
On Tuesday morning, as Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, Kerben and his wife were waiting for takeoff, aboard a US Airways flight, departing from Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The Kerbens' flight was being delayed, and Kerben went to wait in the gate area. There, he saw the pilot, who told him: "They just hit the Pentagon."
The flight was ultimately grounded. "Had it not been that I wanted my wife to come with me, I would have been on the Dulles flight," he said.
As it turned out, another communications lawyer bound for the same professional conference, Karen A. Kincaid, was on the flight commandeered by terrorists. Her memorial service is today.
None of this had hit Kerben, he said, until he heard stories from friends and relatives in New York and Washington over the last several days.
"I'm just happy to be alive," Kerben said. "More than ever I appreciate the time I have with my wife and my daughter. I hold them a little tighter."
A 9-11 Call Heeded
The way Kelly Rowland sees it, the birth of her baby Tuesday morning was a gift of life three times over.
That morning, Rowland was supposed to be induced at 6:30 a.m. Her parents -- both of whom work at the Pentagon -- had decided to work through the morning and come to the hospital, Inova Fairfax, that afternoon to join Rowland and her husband, Patrick.
But the baby had other plans.
Rowland went into labor at 2:30 a.m. By 5 a.m., her husband called her parents from the hospital to say she would be delivering her second child sooner than they had thought.
The proud grandparents, Susan and James Fetter, decided to skip work at the Pentagon.
It was 9:32 a.m. when Kelly Rowland delivered 7-pound 15-ounce Melanie Anne in a birthing room where her parents were looking on, not far from a television tuned to the day's stunning news.
Just minutes after the birth -- about 9:40 a.m. -- Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
"They would have been at work," Rowland said. Her parents' offices were not in the worst-hit area, but Rowland said they could easily have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, if not for the baby.
"It's like a miracle. . . . My mom made a remark that the birth date was 9-11, that it was [Melanie] calling for them to stay home."
A Family's Double Terror
Dov Schwartz was running late. The 38-year-old Army public affairs specialist was expected at his office at a Pentagon studio, where he and colleagues were making final preparations for media training they would conduct for senior Army officers.
"I just got up a few minutes late. My alarm didn't go off," he said.
Schwartz left his apartment in Cleveland Park and took Metro's Red Line to Gallery Place. But his connecting Yellow Line train was delayed by a medical emergency on another train ahead. Then, once his train began crossing into Virginia toward the Pentagon, it came to a stop over the Potomac River.
"I'm looking at my watch, thinking my boss is going to kill me," Schwartz said.
The conductor eventually announced that the train could not move because of a terrorist attack at the Pentagon.
A stunned Schwartz soon learned that his colleagues had been sitting in the studio, just a short distance from where the jet hit. Two colleagues were blown through walls but managed to escape with only minor injuries.
"That's my office, where I sit, and I should have been there," Schwartz said.
It was not the only close call. Schwartz's brother works 1 1/2 blocks from the World Trade Center and was unable for several hours to get word out that he was all right, Schwartz said.
"My poor mom on Tuesday in Baltimore," Schwartz said, adding, "It made for a tense morning. We're very grateful and thankful still."
'There Is a Reason'
American Airline flight attendant Dannye Ivey didn't know it at the time, but two telephone calls could have cost her her life.
By some scheduling fluke, Ivey, who lives in Vienna with her husband and two sons, found herself assigned to Flight 77 on Monday instead of Tuesday morning this week. Flight 77's Tuesday nonstop from Dulles to Los Angeles was one of her regular routes.
Hoping to return to the schedule she preferred, Ivey telephoned two of the flight attendants scheduled to work the Tuesday flight -- Michelle Heidenberger and Renee May -- and offered to trade days. Both declined.
And so it was that Ivey -- and not her co-workers -- watched in horror from her hotel room in Los Angeles as the World Trade Center and then the Pentagon burst into flames.
If she had gotten the schedule she wanted, she would be dead.
"I don't feel guilt at all because I truly believe -- my faith has really sustained me during this -- and I do believe that there is a reason that God left me here," she said. "And I do believe it is to be with my kids. . . . I feel incredible sorrow, and I do feel blessed."
A Fateful Delay
For all these stories of near misses, there also are people who were casualties of seemingly small life turns. One was Vicki Yancey, a former naval electronics technician and mother of two daughters, bound for a conference.
Unexpectedly, ticketing problems delayed her plans to leave on an earlier flight. So Yancey arranged instead to travel on American Airlines Flight 77 on Tuesday morning.
She called her husband, David, to tell him she got a seat shortly before the plane boarded. She had no idea it would be their last conversation. She told him she loved him, her husband recalled. Her husband said he loved her, too, and he told her to be safe.
