Mr Rumsfeld grabbed a stretcher and helped carry survivors to where they could receive medical attention. "I was trying to get a sense of what had happened. And I confirmed what had happened. And then your immediate reaction is to try to be helpful.
"And then once there were people there that could be helpful they didn't need me down there and I could get back, and started to pull together my immediate staff and the military people and went into the command centre."
Before leaving the scene, Mr Rumsfeld picked up a piece of Flight 77 that was several inches long. It is now mounted in his office in Washington,cheap retro jordans, close to a bust of Winston Churchill presented to him by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Once back inside the Pentagon, Mr Rumsfeld declined to be evacuated as the "continuity of government" guidelines laid down. He and his staff had to keep evacuating rooms. "When a room got too full of smoke we'd move to a different command centre."
Some 12 hours after the attack, Torie Clarke, Mr Rumsfeld's press secretary, asked him if he had phoned Joyce, his wife of 47 years, to tell her he was safe. When he replied that he hadn't, she blurted out: "You son of a bitch."
Mr Rumsfeld admitted: "I never did call her. When I got home at 11 or 12 at night, I don't think I even mentioned it to her. Her comment was that in retrospect she never would've expected me to call. She knew I was busy.
"And I had been told that she was at the Defense Intelligence Agency for a briefing, so she was taken care of."
It wasn't until two weeks after the attacks that the full emotional impact hit Mr Rumsfeld. That summer, his son Nick, then 34, had relapsed after being in recovery for drug addiction and was once again in a treatment centre.
He had not told President George W. Bush and was surprised when the commander-in-chief asked him about it.
"I love Nick so much," Mr Rumsfeld replied. At that moment, everything hit him at once and tears welled up. Mr Bush got up, walked around his desk and put his arm around his Defence Secretary to comfort him.
"It was a hard time in our family and I had not mentioned it to anyone outside the family," Mr Rumsfeld said. But somehow Vice President Dick Cheney had learned of what was happening and had told Mr Bush.
"The President raised it with me," said Mr Rumsfeld. "He was very compassionate, interested and supportive." His son Nick is now married and has remains drug free.
Reflecting now, Mr Rumsfeld said that "the idea that you could've crossed a decade and not had another attack of that type is amazing". He was in the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the building, making him the most senior member of the US government to survive the attacks.
He recalled approvingly that Sultan Qaboos of Oman had told him shortly afterwards that the 9/11 attacks could have been a "blessing in disguise" by providing a "wake up call that would alert the world" to the threat of Islamist terrorism.
The sultan had theorised that the attacks could ultimately have prevented "the possibility of not just 3,000, but 300,000 or 3 million people - a weapon of mass destruction, a chemical or a biological weapon, conceivably could kill that many".
Mr Rumsfeld praised President Barack Obama for keeping in place many of the anti-terrorist measures introduced by Mr Bush.
It was "a positive" that "the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, and the idea of indefinite detention, the process of interrogations, the military commissions, all of which the Obama administration campaigned against and others railed against, are essentially still in place".
After Mr Obama's language on the campaign trail, Mr Rumsfeld had expected Mr Obama to sweep away most of the measures the Bush administration believed had kept America safe.
"I am surprised, and pleased", Mr Rumsfeld said, that "fundamentally the same things are in place that President Bush's administration put in place".
Out of sight of Thai customs, the smart grey metalled road dissolves into a bumpy dirt track. I have to hitch a lift in a trader’s pick-up (negotiated by my Thai driver) and cross three miles of no-man’s-land before I see a Burmese flag fluttering above a line of log cabins. The friendly immigration officer wears jeans and a polo shirt. He enters my visa details into an old-fashioned ledger, counts the days I can stay on his fingers, and stamps my passport with a flourish.
Robert, my Burmese guide, is waiting with a Japanese four-wheel-drive. “There’s nowhere to stay here, not even a monastery,http://users.atw.hu/promotionscorp/index.php?site=forum_topic&topic=16780cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg,” he says. One of Burma’s top guides, this is his first time here. “The driver and I found a man who sold us a beer from his house. He said we could sleep there but when we saw the loaded AK47 hanging on his wall we thought it might be safer in the car.”
Peace has come only recently to these hills, by way of an informal agreement in 2012 between the Burmese government and the various Karen militias fighting for autonomy. It is a beautiful drive through the mountains along a gravel road lined with some magnificent hardwood trees – though most have been sold to buy guns.
At a Karen-controlled checkpoint we pay a $12 “road toll”. It can’t bring in much as the only vehicle we pass in the first two hours is an elephant carrying his oozie to work in the forest. Only as we near the coast do the first motorbikes appear. It has taken four hours to cover 100 miles – part of the road is being widened,cheap jordans online, which hasn’t helped – but Dawei is worth the journey.
The streets, laid out on a grid by the British, are lined with handsome wooden houses; many have intricate gingerbreading and verandas hung with rare orchids. The creekside market is packed out with fishwives, their piles of snakehead,http://users.atw.hu/probdesign/index.php?site=forum_topic&topic=14190cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, parrotfish and butter fish laid out with an eye to artistry. All over town are the sort of cottage industries – weavers, potters, cashew-nut roasters – that have disappeared elsewhere, squeezed out by cheap Chinese imports.

"Driving south, the landscape is beautiful and empty"
Driving south, the landscape is beautiful and empty: purple mountains frame a sward of rice paddy shaded by slender toddy palms. At the Shin Motehti monastery – a glorious collection of old wooden pagodas – a Buddhist initiation ceremony is under way. Some of the novice monks are toddlers and accompanied by their fathers. Their heads newly shaved, they will spend a week here, rising to chant at dawn and walking barefoot to beg food from the local community. But today life is easy as their mothers and grannies, dressed in their best silk longyis, arrive with rice and sweetmeats for their begging bowls.
Initiation ceremonies are a cause for great celebration in the wider community. In a meeting hall, low tables are piled high with food and cans of drink for anyone who drops by. The ceremony has cost $2,000, a monk tells us over tea, paid for by a local family with Thai connections.
Everyone gets a gift and we are pressed half-pint beer glasses when we leave. It is this sort of encounter – with Robert on hand to translate – that makes exploring offbeat Burma such a pleasure.
Asia Highway 112, between Dawei and Moulmein, has only recently opened to foreigners. The going is slow as it is being rebuilt. We stop at Thanbyuzayat, the western terminus of the Death Railway,cheap air jordans, where an original Japanese C56 engine sits in a glade. The nearby cemetery, maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission,cheap jordan shoes, contains the remains of 2,995 Allied prisoners. Each grave is marked by a metal plaque, giving the name and regiment (if known), shaded by a flowering plant. “Sleep on, dear son, until we meet. Mum and Dad,cheap jordans,” says one, dedicated to 22-year-old Royal Artillery Gunner H?J Humphrey.
Moulmein, now called Mawlamyine,http://users.atw.hu/promotionscorp/index.php?site=forum_topic&topic=16779cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, became the first capital of British Burma in 1826 and much of its colonial heritage remains: the Edwardian villas in gardens with flower beds; the colonnaded schools and law courts; lofty St Patrick’s and red-brick St Matthew’s; and a hub-and-spoke Victorian prison. All are still in use. The view from the pagoda-topped hill above is also much as Rudyard Kipling saw it in 1889 when he came here and wrote his ballad Mandalay, which opens with the lines: “By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea, There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me”.

A stall selling fried fish and sticky rice at Golden Rock
I wonder if the girl was a royal servant. For a few steps away is the former palace of Queen Seindon, one of King Mindon’s queens. Exiled in the 1880s, she brought her entourage to Moulmein and built a scaled-down replica of her apartments in Mandalay Palace. The gilded figures are carved with such verve they seem about to spring off the wall.
This corner of Burma is full of small treasures that give great pleasure. I take a local boat from a floating dock on the scruffy waterfront to Ogre Island. Just before we cast off, a quack doctor jumps on board. His sales pitch is a masterclass in mime. Over the next hour he persuades many of the passengers to part with several hard-earned dollars for his elixir of youth which, he claims,cheap wholesale jordans, will perk up every part of their anatomy.
Fortunately the islanders are an industrious lot and make a good living stitching conical hats and carving walking sticks, pipes and pens which are sold all over Burma.
The garden of one house is a forest of red, blue and yellow posts. “What are they?” I ask the rickshaw driver. He says I must guess. I fail. You can tell he loves this moment: the wonder on people’s faces when they learn that these are sleeves of dyed latex drying in the sun before being chopped into rubber bands. Ingenious.
It takes three hours to putter upstream to Hpa An along the fast-flowing Salween River passing farmers, fishermen and boatbuilders. The landscape is reminiscent of Guilin in China: outcrops of limestone rising sheer for hundreds of feet. Golden bell-shaped stupas balance precariously on some peaks; others hide cave temples filled with the Buddha statues that the Burmese donate to earn merit for the next life.
Hpa An itself is a scruffy, down-at-heel place, having been fought over by the Karen and Burmese armies for decades. Yet it contains the best Burmese restaurant in the country. San Ma Tan serves up tapas-size plates of fish,cheap real jordans, meat and vegetables and unlimited lentil soup, a dozen different homemade chutneys, rice, ginger tea and candies. It is more-ishly delicious. The bill is $5 for two.
After wandering around south-east Burma largely on my own, I rejoin the tourist trail at Golden Rock. Lorries ferry pilgrims up the mountain to see a giant boulder covered in gold leaf that balances precariously over a cliff, anchored in place by a hair of the Buddha. It may be one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Burma but everyone is on the make here, even the monks who start up at dawn with loudspeaker demands for donations that smother the ethereal chanting from monasteries on neighbouring peaks.
I wished myself back in Byin Nyi Gyi, the Prince’s Cave, near Hpa An. There I was the only early morning visitor. I crossed a bridge over a lake fed by a hot spring and climbed a staircase past a pageant of life-size temple guardians and heroes from Karen folk tales. In a deep cave, hundreds of Buddhas sat and lounged beneath curtains of stalactites. Plastic buckets on the floor caught the worst of the drips from the rock. In the corner, an old monk chuckled away at a tape-recording of a sermon and lit his first cheroot of the day. His beautiful grey cat slumbered on in a bamboo deckchair. This was the Burma I had come to see.
Gill Charlton travelled with Selective Asia (01273 670 001; selectiveasia.com) which specialises in tailor-made journeys throughout Burma. A 14-night tour from Bangkok to Yangon taking in Kanchanaburi, Dawei, Mawlamyine and Hpa An costs from ?2,600 per person b&b, based on two sharing, including all transfers and excursions in a tourist car with an English-speaking guide. The company also supplies its own country Apps with recommended restaurants,cheap jordans for sale, bars and things to do. International flights cost from around ?620 return.