Ok, so I am not qualified to be an accurate journalist. It felt like an hour. I can post my med records to show where I was at the time if need be. :rolleyes:
SSG Schwartz
I had woken up early in the morning, was watching TV before I got ready for high school, and saw a report of a plane crash into the World Trade Center. I woke up my father to tell him, then went to take my shower.
While I was in the shower, the second plane hit.
I ended up spending the rest of the day watching coverage of the events, either at high school or at home.
It was a beautiful fall day in New England. I got up reasonably early and joined some friends for a day of water skiing on the Merrimac River. We were blissfully unaware of everything until we quit (mid-afternoon).
By the time I heard about it at 9am, the towers were down. My husband called me from work to tell me, we had the same conversation as probably every other person in California–“The World Trade Center is gone.” – “Gone, what do you mean gone, how can it be gone?”-- and I turned on the TV and just sat down on the coffee table, stunned. But at the same time my 14-month-old daughter wanted me to read her a story, so I had to do that. She took her first steps in front of the TV while everyone was singing “God Bless America” later that day. (She was a slow walker–spent all her energy talking.)
So I wanted to spend the day crying in front on the TV, but acted somewhat normal instead. I remember I wanted to call someone and talk, but for some reason I couldn’t think of anyone to call (say, my best friend maybe?). I mostly wandered around the house in a semi-daze.
It was a beautiful, crisp, cool early fall morning in Iowa. Another middle aged guy and I were stealing city park picnic benches for a chamber of commerce bar-be-que that was to be held at our house that evening. We were pulling tables off the back of a pick-up truck when my wife came out of the house and told us that an airliner had just crashed into the World Trade Center. We looked at each other and said that it could not be an accident. By the time we got into the house the second plane had gone in. I think we saw the first broadcast of the second plane banking in across the Hudson River. The rest of the day sort of went down hill from there. The party that night was pretty subdued.
We were living in Seattle at the time. Around 6:30 local time my mom called and woke us up. When MrWhatsit told me my mom was on the phone, I immediately thought that a family member must have died. But she told me to turn the television on. I did, and saw both towers with smoke pouring out of the top. I got off the phone with my mom, spent about an hour watching TV in utter horror, and then decided I might as well go to work. Went to work, spent pretty much the whole day watching live news feeds over the Internet, and then came home and watched more news. We didn’t have cable at the time, but the regular networks preempted all regular programming for at least 2-3 days, as I recall. MrWhatsit finally told me I had to stop watching the news because it was making me crazy.
I was hanging up laundry in Indiana. My husband and I were in the states for our yearly “repat” from Saudi Arabia. We were to fly out of OHare the next day (9/12) to Panama. When the second tower went down, I was on the phone with friends and family. They didn’t know where we were.
OHare on the 9/12 was spooky! Flying back to Saudi after 3 weeks in the states the planes were almost empty!
I never wanted to admit that I didn’t cry either, that it did not hit me personally the way it did many, although sometimes when asked, I say, “Well, we were in L.A., so it didn’t really disrupt our daily routine.” But, I can’t say that life just went on either. The effect it had on me was apprehension, not knowing what would happen next. It was apparent from the first hour that this was a huge turning point in American history. A great deal has changed as a direct result.
A bunch of us ended up heading over to a friends house to watch the news. I guess the only really unusual thing about that story is that all of us had been raised Jehovah’s Witnesses and were in varying states of uncertainty about our faith in the religion. JWs are always looking for signs that Armageddon is beginning. We spent a lot of time talking about that, whether or not this was the beginning of the end and feeling sick and scared about it. It seems kind of weird to me now, but we were all a bunch of teenagers who’d been raised to believe that the Apocalypse would happen in our lifetime, so maybe it was only natural. None of us were attending meetings very regularly at that point, but we all went that night. The attacks weren’t really discussed, except for a brief mention that our prayers should be with our brothers and sisters in New York and Washington. I didn’t get any sleep at all that day and I had to go in to work at two am. Seeing that huge picture of the towers over and over on the 400+ papers I had to deliver that night was surreal. Tropical Storm Gabrielle hit over the next couple of days, and the surreality was compounded by delivering papers over flooded streets with two inches of water in the floorboard of my car. I don’t remember a whole lot of the next few days because I was exhausted, sick and trying to catch up on sleep.
I was in 7th grade. Listening to the radio as I got ready for school, and the talk radio guy said that a plane had crashed into the WTC. So I got my mom up and then turned the TV on, and they were theorizing maybe a small plane got lost or disoriented.
Then I saw the second plane fly into the building. At first, I thought it was a (tasteless) simulation of what they thought had happened, which was odd, because it was next to the one already burning, and it hit in a different place. Then the announcers (I really want to say it was Katie Couric, but I can’t be sure anymore) said that a second plane had just hit the World Trade Center.
I was a Tom Clancy nut, and thought… “Terrorism, someone must have read Debt of Honor.” I know now that it’s not a terribly original idea, but I was just barely 13.
Then I had to go to school, where it was just full of rumors flying based on half heard newscasts and what other people had heard. Then the principal got on the PA at the end of the day and said to go home and spend quality time with your families.
So I did to find my mom just cleaning everything within sight of the TV and crying as they replayed the towers falling over and over.
It was my friend’s birthday. That really sucks for her.
It was during my freshman orientation for college. My orientation program took freshmen out in groups hiking national parks for 7 days before the main orientation week started. (I would later become a counselor for this program - but that’s another story).
We were hiking the Superior Trail in NE Minnesota. We left on the 7th, and arrived in “basecamp” on the 10th, halfway through our hike. We spent the afternoon and night of the 10th having fun, swimming in a pond, talking with the basecamp counselors, etc.
On the 11th, my group woke up and packed our stuff. Our group’s two counselors were huddled together with the three basecamp counselors, and we could see them messing with the satellite phone (the basecamp was required to have a satellite phone for emergencies). We didn’t suspect anything - we didn’t know what protocol was for leaving basecamp.
After dithering around for half an hour, we were starting to get impatient, and our counselors told us to go ahead and start hiking, and they’d catch up around lunchtime. We set off, and after about an hour of hiking, we came into a clearing where there was a man sitting on a log. Funny - this was the only other person we’d seen on the trail the whole week. He was listening to a little radio with earbuds in. We said hello to him, and he immediately said, “Hey, you guys know what’s going on in New York?”
So I borrowed one of his earbuds, and started relaying to the rest of the group what was being said. By this time, both towers had come down. The radio newsperson’s phrase that has always stuck with me: “the twin towers are no longer part of the New York skyline.”
We sat with mystery radio dude for maybe 20 minutes until it was clear that there was no more information to be had from the radio. Two of my groupmates were from NY, and were terrified. We decided to carry on hiking. In retrospect, I guess that’s kind of weird. Perhaps we didn’t want to brood.
Around midday we stopped for lunch, and our two group counselors came huffing and puffing up the trail, without their packs. They told us what was going on - the counselors had not been sure whether to tell us about the attacks immediatly or to wait; but after discussion, they had decided openness was the best policy.
We doubled back and returned to basecamp. The other three groups on the same trail were being recalled - and we were moving basecamp a mile along a spur trail to the road. We spent the last three days of the trip with 60 people camped in a little trailhead park-n-ride. Our only news was a single USA Today we managed to get from a gas station on Wednesday - and a phone call from the university saying that they had gotten in touch with all the New Yorkers’ families, and everyone was fine.
I still feel a kind of disconnect with most other Americans about this: 99% of the country spent three days glued to their TVs, while I couldn’t even see footage of the event until a week later.
My brother comes in to wake me up. “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center!” Me: “I’m sure it’ll be on the news all day. After that, it’s old news.”
A couple minutes later he says “Now a plane just hit the Pentagon!” Me: “You freakin liar!” “No come look at the TV!” I was awestruck.
The one good decision I made that day, was when Dan Rather announces crude oil prices in Tokyo. I tossed my brother the keys to my car and said “Fill 'er up” an hour or so later there was a “gas crisis” that lasted a few hours
I was at work when the purchasing guy comes back to my office, where all the secretaries hung out when there wasn’t a lot happening, and said a plane hit the WTC. The gist I got was that it was a freak deal and nobody paid much attention. Then he comes back and says a second plane hit. There was a TV in there, but it wasn’t to be used for sitting around watching. We turned it on and pretty much watched the networks the rest of the day, it was a pretty slow day.
I was at work. We had the tv tuned to CNN as we always do and all of us were fixated on that for about half the day. The job I had at the time did a ton of business in New York so we went home around 1pm.
After leaving work I went to the gym for my daily workout then I went home and watched a few movies as I didn’t really feel like watching any TV.
That night I got into a rather interesting, and deep, discussion about the whole thing.
Nothing particularly interesting.
Although this sounds kind of like something made up afterwards, my teacher can vouch for the story.
I spent the night before doing something and was gone a good bit. I think it was sports related. Anyways, I was really tired, and I had classes all morning. I was in tenth grade, and in biology class when it actually happened. The teacher was well known for not allowing any distractions, so people avoided coming into her room during class if they were not in there. She never heard about it until our class left the room and then next came in. I was so sleepy, I had no idea what everyone was talking about. “That thing that happened in New York” was all I heard, or understood. I walked down the hall into the next class, which was a study hall and then geometry with the same teacher. I planned on sleeping through study hall, so I went in, sat down in the back (as to not bother anyone) and put my head on the desk. I was out before anyone else came in.
I woke up halfway through the study hall, realized the lights were off and I heard a television. Great, a movie. I raised my head up and saw a video of all the smoke coming off the building and got ready to ask what movie it was. Then something stuck out - the news logo at the bottom of the screen. I woke up and watched the coverage for a while, but still went to classes like normal, just walking room to room to watch television.
After school, I met with the only other guys on the cross country team who still wanted to go run. There were 4 other varsity guys and the head coach. He told us we could go home, but honest, we were pretty dedicated to running, and had a meet in Florida in a few weeks. We ran three miles and went home. After that, I have pretty much no idea what happened that day.
In our small town, someone did steal a crop duster later that evening. I don’t know the whole story, but I remember hearing in on the radio that evening when listening to the local news.
Brendon Small
Hubby and I both work for the same state environmental agency, so we commute to work together. We usually have the local talk radio station on in the morning so we can catch the weather and traffic reports but for some reason we didn’t have it on that morning.
I had just walked into my office and booted up my computer when a friend of mine, Robert, came running down the hall, yelling that the WTC had been hit by a plane and another had just crashed. Hubby called me a few moments later, telling me that the only website he could get on to was CNet and that our boss was setting up a TV in the main conference room for us to get the news. He went to see what was going on while I called my mom in the Northern Panhandle to talk to her and tell her all of state government was probably going to be sent home within the hour. I will never forget what she said before we hung up. “Now you know what it was like for your dad and I the day Pearl Harbor was bombed.”
Right before the Governor sent everyone home, we got word about the Pentagon bombing. We had several employees who were at a conference at a hotel several miles away and no one was sure at the time if they’d been sightseeing at the Pentagon or not. After several frantic minutes of trying to get thru on their cell phones, my friend Tim, who’s a supervisor over our Air Monitoring section called the main switchboard and said everyone was fine and that they were going to hit the road to come back to WV as soon as they could check out of the hotel.
By the time Hubby and I got home, we were overwhelmed and numb, too numb to watch more than a half hour or so of TV before we shut it off, crawled into bed with the cat and held each other. We had to feed our horses around six, so he went down to do that and I went down later to clean stalls and ride. I went outside into the dark on my horse and sat there, staring up at the sky and realizing that the world was absolutely silent, there were no planes overhead. It was creepy as hell.
It was horrible. We didn’t lose anyone, thankfully, but it took us awhile before we could stop being uneasy when a plane flew low over our house (we have an ANG base at our local airport and they do training runs over our area sometimes) and for me not to get scared when he had to fly somewhere for a conference or training.
I was at work in London, at my job in the office of a NY-based law firm which has an office close to the WTC. The first I knew of it all was when one of the associates wandered out of his office at lunchtime and said a plane had hit the WTC, so like many others I just thought “poor little guy” and fired off an e-mail to the managing partner’s secretary in NY to ask if everyone was OK. Never heard back, of course …
I printed out a page from BBC news and took it over to our other building where a partners’ meeting was in progress, thinking they might be mildly interested, but the TV was on and the meeting had been abandoned. Cue second plane.
The afternoon was pretty unreal. Some people just downed tools and left to get home to their families, others waited for official permission, and some, including myself, reckoned we were probably safer indoors as our building wasn’t big or significant enough to be a likely target.
My condolences to any Dopers who lost someone or were affected by 9/11.
My first week as a freshman at college at the University of Michigan. I was in an intensive Spanish Grammar class when someone came in and whispered something in the prof’s ear. She tilted her head kind of stiffly, announced (in Spanish) that class was canceled due to an emergency, and left.
As I wandered upstairs to my dorm room, worrying about my teacher’s apparently personal emergency, my room-mate, who was from New York, crashed into me in the hallway, babbling incoherently about how a plane had just crashed into The World Trade Center.
For the sake of full disclosure, I will now reveal my ignorance by admitting I had no idea what the World Trade Center was. I didn’t even realize it was in the U.S.
We entered our dorm-room in time to see the second plane hit, and then we watched the towers collapse. I will not forget the feeling of horror watching those towers collapse, and realizing there were actual people inside. At that point my roommate was trying to get ahold of her Dad, who lived within view of the towers, but the phone lines were tied up. She was freaking out.
Then the pentagon. It just seemed like one horrible thing after another, and you really had no idea what was going to happen next. I wasn’t sure if there was more, if this was to be some kind of war to devastate all of the U.S., or what. I suppose this is a rather infantile thought, but I was barely 18 years old.
I called my Mommy.
Classes were canceled at our university for the first time in nearly 30 years. I suppose this is because we had an unusually high New York-Jewish population–14% in my dorm alone. One of the girls was talking to her brother on the phone, who was in a school near the towers, and had watched people jumping off the buildings before they collapsed.
My Mommy and I went to Applebees. The television was tuned to the news, but nobody was talking about it. Nobody wanted to. I presume that’s why they went out to dinner, like us.
I really hate to say it, but 9-11, in a very twisted way, was a blessing for me. It completely altered my understanding of the world. The following weeks were filled with so many intelligent and important dialogs about what happened, that it no longer became possible for me to ignore politics or the fact that U.S. foreign policy inevitably impacts other countries and ourselves in a huge way. It changed me forever.
Following that day, I pretty much dropped the media hype/horror. I certainly do not live in mortal fear of terrorists–but it was pretty hard not to be afraid then. Definitely surreal.
I was in my Contracts class in my first year of law school when it happened. I spent an hour blissfully oblivious of anything. When I got to the library during my break between Contracts and Torts, I checked LiveJournal, and freaked. Nobody in the library knew. I turned to my friend Crystal and started talking about it. Someone shushed us, and I told them off.
Eventually we made our way out of the library and downstairs, trying to find someone who knew whether or not we would be expected to go to Torts class and concentrate. We found that they’d wheeled the big-screen TV from the tiny TV lounge (which I didn’t even know existed until that moment) into the larger main student lounge. There was a crowd staring mutely at the television. We joined them. Eventually they announced that Torts was cancelled. We stayed there. I called my ex (who was from New York, and stunned) to come to pick me up. He was listening to Howard Stern, and hearing Howard’s reaction was the first time I cried. It was so bizarre that this shock-jock was taking phone calls of people in Manhattan talking about what they were seeing. I think that was the first time I realized I’d never look at the world the same way.
We spent the rest of the evening changing between channels. Most cable channels were showing footage. I remember being oddly comforted that the Cartoon Network was still showing cartoons, so other people’s children didn’t have to see this horror. At some point in time during the day, the news reported a potential bomb on an airplane in Cleveland, so I called my mother and stepfather (who lived there at the time) to make sure they were okay. It turns out that was one of the many false rumors that circulated that day. In a strange twist of fate, my parents now live in lower Manhattan, just blocks away from Ground Zero. Even though I know they’re building there now, I will never be able to think of it as anything other than Ground Zero.
It still blows my mind that someday my future children will learn about this day in school. I can only hope they never experience anything like it in their own lives.
I was at work in New Jersey. A friend called asking about Broadway. Co-worker John came in. I heard the phone ring and saw John answer it. I hung up my call.
The call was from another co-worker who had a breakfast meeting in Edgewater on the Hudson River. John said “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center. Turn on the TV. Turn on the radio. Get on the computer.” Of couse our TV wasn’t working, so we turned on the radio right as the second plane hit. Then I was on-line the rest of the day. I also had to call all my co-workers to make sure they were okay and to let them know what happened. I also told the mailman and the UPS man what was going on.