WASHINGTON: William Sinclair always imagined he had a guardian angel, and Sept. 11 convinced him.

Sinclair, 54, was sitting at his desk on the first floor of the Pentagon that morning when he felt a giant ``gush of air, then everything went dark.''

As debris fell, he tried to focus his eyes. But the black smoke that had enveloped his office made it impossible to see anything. Colleagues were talking, shouting, crying. He started crawling, scarring his hands and legs on glass, scraps of metal and slivers of wood.

Suddenly, like something from a story in the Bible, a voice called out:

``Head toward my voice,'' it said. ``There's an opening out here.''

``We scrambled to get out,'' Sinclair recalled Wednesday, his first day home from the hospital. ``The smoke was so thick. If it hadn't been for the voice, we might not have gotten out. We still don't know who the voice belonged to.''

To Sinclair, who configures computers for an Army contractor, the fact that he is alive is nothing short of a miracle.

``They say that everybody is born with an angel,'' he said. ``I think mine was watching over me that day.''

• Story originally published by:
Washington Post via Akron Beacon Journal / OH - Oct 05.01

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