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There were these guys standing in the, on landing zone
wearing their gray urban combat uniforms, holding
their M-16s, and we were ushered into the facility,
which was, you know, your typical Cold War-type bomb
shelter. And we went deep into it. There was obviously
preparations for us to stay for a long while if we had
to. Went through it, we crossed through one room that
had a set of law books, a set of the U.S. Code,
in case we had to do any legislating while we were
there, and we were eventually brought down this hall
into a—that opened into a larger conference room that
had two large TV screens. And there was a conference
table, a U-shaped conference table, and around that
table was *** Armey, my boss, the Speaker was there,
other congressional leaders were there. They had made
some snacks available, I remember that there was,
there were a few bags of, you know, Cheetos or
Doritos, and a few sodas that had been cracked open,
and, and we all sat around and looked at the TV screen,
and watched—it was probably, a loop, you know, the loop
tape of the World Trade Center Towers coming down. And
that’s where we stayed for several hours. Over the
course of the day, at one point, at least once, the
Vice President called from his own undisclosed
location, and told us what he knew about the attacks.
At that point, Members were getting frustrated because
they wanted to, it felt like we weren’t doing anything
but sitting in this, in this shelter inside this room,
and we wanted to get back, they wanted to get back
and, and have some useful impact on events. And so
they said, “Well, when can we leave?” And the Vice
President reminded us that the executive branch
controls the helicopters. He said that in a joking
way, but it was pretty clear that we were in the
control of somebody else, at least for the moment.