Leadership Quote by Randy Forbes

“Smell of terror” is a calculated sensory claim: it takes an event already saturated in images and reroutes it through the body. Forbes isn’t just recalling 9/11; he’s establishing eyewitness proximity to institutional trauma, the kind that confers moral authority in political speech. The Pentagon is not “a building” here. It’s the symbol of American force, suddenly rendered vulnerable, and the language turns that vulnerability into a lingering atmosphere - something you don’t simply see and move past, but inhale.

The phrase also does quiet rhetorical work. Terror is typically framed as an ideology or tactic; giving it a smell makes it feel pervasive and inescapable. It invites the listener to accept fear as an objective condition rather than a manipulable emotion. That matters in a post-9/11 political culture where fear could be converted into policy: expanded surveillance, new wars, broader definitions of threat.

Then comes the anger: “I was angry” reads personal, but it’s a civic emotion, the sanctioned feeling that signals readiness for resolve. He specifies “brutal” and “innocent people,” a moral sorting mechanism that primes consensus and narrows permissible debate. Who counts as innocent? Who counts as proximate? The subtext is that retaliation and heightened security are not choices but obligations.

Forbes, a politician, isn’t offering grief so much as a credential: I was there, I smelled it, I felt the correct emotion. It’s a memory shaped like a mandate.