A Unique View of the Attack on the Pentagon

Sept. 11, 2001 was deadline day for the Georgetowner newspaper and when the news of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks sank in, Editor Robert Devaney left the paper's Wisconsin Avenue office with his old Nikon in hand. “My journalist instinct kicked in.”

Devaney eventually made his way home to his apartment in the historic Halcyon House on Prospect Street.

“People have to remember, Georgetown is on the hill. You can see right down the river,” he says. Part of his vista that day included plumes of smoke, pouring out of the Pentagon.

As they stood on the grass rear terrace of the home, one of Devaney’s companion’s, artist John Dreyfuss, whose family has owned Halcyon House since the mid-1960s, remarked that this was the second time in history that Washington was attacked, the first being the War of 1812.

Then Devaney noticed the American flag waving at the entrance to the Francis Scott Key Bridge — named for the man who gave the Star-Spangled Banner its name.

He snapped his photo of the flag with the smoking Pentagon in the background, getting his newspaper’s cover shot and capturing a memory that still flashes into his mind when he casts his eyes down the Potomac river from his Georgetown home.