Community Corner

After 9/11, Local First Responders Find Love

On the anniversary of September 11th, a Fort Hunt couple reflects on how they met at the Pentagon that day.

Ashley McNeff, had just completed a 12-hour-plus shift of cataloguing casualties, plane parts and documents when it was time for a break.

So the 19-year-old first responder and a group of fellow female first responders parked themselves on lawn chairs facing what was left of the Pentagon on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Then out walks a group of army men ready to hit the decontamination showers.

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“All of sudden they just started stripping these guys,” she recalls.

The girls laughed at the unexpected sight. And the men? Well, some of them jokingly began to flex their muscles.

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“It’s just a weird thing that sticks out in my mind because it was such a horrific scene that it … kind of lightened the mood,” she said.

Ten years later, their giddy laughter wasn't the only thing to make Ashley smile about the story. Among the soldiers who were getting decontaminated, was a 20-year-old guy a friend would introduce to her that day as Adam Behrens.

A day of tragedy

Adam Behrens was sitting in the dentist’s office about a block away from the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the building’s west side.

“I heard the boom.  It sounded like a truck crash,” he said.

After seeing news reports detailing the attack, Adam quickly ran to tell his squad, which was practicing on another part of the base.

“My sergeant thought I was messing around so he made me do push-ups. I started doing push-ups and I was like 'no, we are really under attack',” he said.

Since the Pentagon houses sensitive national security information, Adam said it was the army—not the police or the firefighters—that first entered the burning building that day to sift through the remains. It was their job to separate the casualties from the plane pieces and documents. 

In order to recover anything however, they had to carve a tunnel through the rubble, sometimes piling debris five to six feet high on either side just to make a clear path to the inside of the Pentagon.

“Everything was just burnt,” Behrens said. “You’d find a body and you wouldn’t even know it because it was so burnt up. It was gross. You [could] usually identify them because of the smell. After a week and a half [the smell] was horrible.”

Adam was just a 20-year-old private in the Old Guard at the time and some of the details of the weeks he spent at the pentagon have become hazy. Still, there are some moments—like finding a section of airplane seats or the smell of burning bodies—that he says he can’t forget.

“You remember the bad things. Good things fade away, bad things stick with you. I think that’s the way the human brain works,” he said.

A chance encounter

A month after September 11th, Ashley and Adam ran into each other again at Fort Meyer.  At first, she couldn’t quite place where she had met him before, though she knew she recognized him from somewhere.

“You were one of the ones in the lawn chairs,” she recalls him saying. “And I [said], ‘Yes, I was.’"

There was an instant connection. The two became close friends rather quickly. And in April of the following year they began dating.  

By the time she was 21 years old, Ashley would become a founder and CEO of United States Homeland Investigations, a company that conducts background checks in the private and public sector.  Now she is on the criminal justice board for the City of Alexandria, and a board of director with the Mount Vernon-Lee Chamber of Commerce.

Adam would leave the military in 2005 to attend college full-time. He currently works as a civil engineer for the Federal Highway Administration.

Over the years, the two grew closer over their shared experience of being a first-hand witness to a national tragedy at a young age.

“Nobody else understood what you saw in there except for someone who was there,” she said.

But there were other things too that seemed to make their relationship work.  His dry sense of humor could always make her laugh; the way he did things for her without asking made her feel cared for; the fact that they never fought.

“When you have a connection with someone you just know,” Ashley said.

The day Adam proposed in 2005 it was raining. He took her to dinner at Union Street Public House in Old Town, Alexandria.  Though she protested on account of the weather, the couple drove down to D.C. to take a walk around the Roosevelt Memorial.

“I stuck to something casual because I didn’t want to hint her on,” said Adam.

For Ashley, who would eventually become Ashley McNeff Behrens, the location was fitting.

“The waterfalls were going,” she said. "I love seeing all the memorials lit up. And he knows that.”

The couple exchanged vows at St. Mary Catholic Church in October of 2007.  The reception was held at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington, which overlooks the now-restored Pentagon building. 

Among the 200 guests who came to celebrate their union were some of their friends who served beside them that day.

“Even our family members were like it was such a horrible day, but your marriage came out of that,” said Ashley.


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