Under a Cloud of Evil

Their Remaining Innocence in Shreds, People Shudder and Carry On

It was a day in Washington that people compared to the day President Kennedy was assassinated, or when Pearl Harbor was bombed. America has lost its innocence many times, but this was a day to discover all over again that the country still had something left to lose.

A thick column of smoke rose black and blunt from the burning Pentagon for most of the day, like a new, sinister kind of Washington Monument.

The toxic plume -- acrid, smelling of burned plastic -- was an inscrutable smoke signal from an insane and murderous universe that Americans are accustomed to imagining as very far away. Scenes more dreadful than anything lately in Belfast or Beirut, more outlandish than a Hollywood vision of apocalypse, played out in American cities. Wealth and power are supposed to ensure peace at home. The apparent vulnerability of a superpower is shocking. Yesterday people studied the black cloud over the capital with grief, rage, incomprehension. It signaled things would be different from now on.

"Today we realize the world is a really scary place," said Wendy Mills of Arlington. "This shatters the bubble of invulnerability."

The first reactions were instinctive, survival-conscious: Secure the family, proceed from there. Mills and her husband, Mark Habeeb, went to Nottingham Elementary School in Arlington to bring home their son, Noah, from the second grade. But Noah said he wanted to stay in school. Lots of parents did the same, across the region. The whole surreal situation reminded Habeeb of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when he was Noah's age, and he remembered being really scared.

"The missile crisis seared my memory, but it didn't totally break me as a person," he said.

The parents recently took their son to visit New York, including the World Trade Center. "Noah's going to see pictures of the trade center not being there," said Mills. "We're going to have to find a way to explain why."

It hardly seemed possible that such wholesale homicide could ever be explained. But other preoccupations that were so important the day before -- the dismal condition of the Redskins, rush-hour traffic on the Beltway, the Virginia governor's race, the dwindling federal budget surplus -- suddenly seemed ridiculously beside the point.

Everyone started preparing for something, but didn't quite know what. In McLean, the local Giant was swamped with shoppers stocking up, as if bracing for some kind of disaster. Former defense secretary William Cohen and his wife wheeled a cart of groceries to their car. "We didn't have any food in the house," he said.

Cohen was sad and angry. "This is an act of war. We have to band together in the cause of preserving our freedom. That means we have to not overreact so we don't become a police state, but need to take greater preventive measures."

His wife, Janet Langhart Cohen, said the day went far beyond a loss of innocence. "We lost our innocence a long time ago," she said. "Maybe we'll lose the apathy. Maybe now it's time to recruit Americans -- not just the military -- back to patriotism. This is a test for us. I want to see if we're a great generation like World War II's."

The sensory data did not compute: Was this really happening here? The sirens were as constant as the smoke. It was impossible to stand downtown for more than a minute without hearing one wailing somewhere. Police officers darted about on every conceivable conveyance short of tanks. Mounted officers took up positions around the Washington Monument and kept anyone from approaching. Black-clad snipers prowled rooftops. A pair of officers guarded the 1400 block of Pennsylvania Avenue NW with shotguns, while colleagues on other blocks near the White House wielded snub-nosed automatic weapons.