On September 11, 2001, I...

In My Humble Opinion
61

I was living in California, so it was early morning. My boyfriend (living in Nebraska) called to tell me what was going on, but my phone was turned down. I woke up really early that morning with the feeling “something’s wrong” and checked my phone.

I only had 4 channels (Fox, ABC, NBC and HSN) on my TV. I watched news coverage from CNN on HSN for several hours. I was supposed to work that day on a film shoot. The director called and said “you can come in if you want, but you don’t have to. Some of us are working to take our minds off it”. I ended up going in rather than sitting alone in my apartment 2000 miles from my family.

62

I stayed glued to the TV and also on call for my hospital. I’m in the metro NYC area and all area hospitals were on alert.

They had called all nursing staff at home to ask that we be ready to work if needed. Unfortunately, never needed.

I still get teary thinking about it.

63

I worked in an office building. One of my co-workers came to my cube and told me that a plane had just hit one of the world trade towers. I immediately jumped onto news areas on the internet and started looking, thinking a small plane must have been manned by a stupid or a suicide. Then the guy came by my desk and said that a second plane had hit. We both jumped up and went into a training auditorium and flipped on the “TV” which was a projector with a 20 foot screen.

For the next hour people quietly entered auditorium and stood. No one sat down. I remember I was standing next to that same co-worker when the first tower fell. Watching it happen on a huge screen was horrific. I can’t imagine want it was like to witness in person.

Later my supervisor came up to me and said, “The two tallest structures in New York have been destroyed. We are standing in the second tallest building in Kansas City. Go home”.

64

I got up and drove to work as usual. I usually listen to the radio as I get ready, but for some reason, I didn’t listen that morning.

I was just about a 1/4 of a mile from the gate of the military installation I work at, when I heard about the Towers. I remember feeling a huge sense of sadness and outrage all at the same time. At any rate, I continued through the gate and drove to my office. Not five minutes after I drove through the gate, they locked up the installation. No one left, no one came in.

So, we looked a internet news feeds, chatted, and tried to get some work done. Not long after I got to work, we of course heard about the Pentagon. I was scared because I knew people there and couldn’t reach them.

That afternoon, we got to go home, but leaving post was a fiasco, as there was only one gate open. It took forever to get home.

I came home, turned on the TV, and watched for about 15 minutes. I couldn’t take anymore after that. By then, I was irritated. It was the same coverage, over, and over, and over again.

The next day, I left for work early. I was supposed to be at work at 7:15, but left at 5:45 to allow for problems with gate traffic. My commute was usually 30 to 40 minutes. I didn’t get to my office until 10:00 in the morning because of the fact that there was only ONE gate open.

I found out that day, that none of the people I knew were hurt. One worked near the portion of the Pentagon that was hit, but wasn’t at work that day. Thank goodness.

65

I officially turned a year older.

66

I was in the second grade, on the second week of school. We all had jobs that we switched every week, and that week, my job was to take library books back to the media center. So, it’s a long walk from my classroom to the media center, and I was hauling a tub of books. Anyway, I get to the media center, and I see some teachers crowded around a TV. I take a look, just because I’m curious, you don’t normally watch regular TV at school, you know, etc… Anyway, I see the TV and the 9/11 coverage. This was all about 10 minutes before it was announced to the rest of the school. So I was probably one of, if not the first, student to know about the attacks.

67

I had a doctors appointment at 11:00pm. My husband woke me up about 9:45 or close to ten o’clock. He said the WTC had been bombed and I thought he was sleepwalking or something and told him he was full of shit. “No”, he said. “The towers were bombed”.

Well, at that time that was what we all thought. I got up and dressed and we understood that planes hit the towers. My husband was still in the Air Force at the time, so he asked the nurses who took my blood on a monthly basis if they could step it up in case he was needed. They did.

MY husband was a month or two from resiging from the Kansas Air National Guard but was willing to do what was needed at a split second. I was scared to death. We are thirty miles from McConnell AFB and every time I heard a plane pass overhead I cringed with fear. It was the worst time of my life.

No worries, hubby is safe, got his discharge on a medical and all is fine. He has admitted to me that he would have been more than happy to go to Afghanistan with the other soldiers. Al Qaeda was his enemy and he wanted Bin Laden to pay.

edited because it doesn’t matter.

68

We have 14-year-old dopers? Who knew! I guess it’s never too early to fight ignorance…

69

I know a lot of people in the USA, some of them in NYC, so this probably had more of an impact on me than on most people here in the UK.

I’d been on the computer, but not on the internet, and went down to the kitchen to get some lunch. The radio was on, BBC Radio 4, and I wasn’t really listening. They were talking about the first impact on the WTC. I thought it was a radio drama or something at first, and then the second impact happened. Suddenly I realised that this was for real, that this was really happening.

By the time reports started filtering in about the Pentagon attack (only very sketchy details at the time), I was getting extremely anxious and not particularly thinking straight. I rang my parents, asked Dad if he’d heard anything - he hadn’t - and told him what I knew so far. He said he’d put the TV on immediately, and hung up. I’d not thought of the TV - I was so confused that I’d imagined it would only be on the radio.

So I turned on the TV. Mum rang back, and asked if I’d heard anything about these attacks. They’d obviously been so caught up in it that she’d forgotten that I’d phoned them.

After a few minutes, I dashed upstairs to the computer and checked for messages, wondering how people I knew in NYC and Washington and PA were, particularly NYC. They’d mostly checked in, and were OK, so I went back downstairs and started cleaning and tidying the house.

The reason for the housework is that it was my son’s 8th birthday, and he was due to come home from school shortly. I put up balloons and banners and all that stuff, ready for his arrival, then checked the internet again.

When he arrived home, with his Mum and younger sister, I’d turned off the TV and the radio, and I quickly whispered into his Mum’s ear that we shouldn’t mention this - today was his birthday, and let him enjoy it. She nodded, and there was no mention of the attacks until he was tucked up in bed several hours later. My parents and various friends, who’d come over to help celebrate the birthday, did the same. It was difficult, but we managed to laugh and smile and pretend that everything was OK.

Once he was in bed, I checked the Net again, and everyone I knew who might have been affected was fine, at least as fine as they could be. Then I sat down with my (then) wife and explained to her the ramifications of the attacks - she’s not very well-versed in international politics, and had never heard of ObL, didn’t know anything about GWB, but now wanted to know. Unfortunately, the predictions I then made have turned out to be largely correct. But let’s not go there, at least in this thread.

70

I was playing online chess when my son phoned me from his works screaming “Turn the TV on dad, something horrible has happened in America”.

I turned TV on and was glued to it for hours, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing

71

I forgot to add a few things. While I was getting ready for my doctors appointment, I also got online to find out if my NY online friends were okay. They had all checked in and I was happy about that. But still, it was a somber day.

72

Seeing a post from England jogged my memory so I would add how much it meant when the Queen had the Stars and Stripes played at Buckingham Palace. That was touching beyond words.

73

I was at high school. The principal made an announcement during my third-period history class (around 10-ish), and wasted twenty minutes by holding up the PA phone to a radio. He then said that they’d have the news on in the library(!) and the school psychologist was available. Predictably, most people were either stupidly panicky (oh god what if they bomb our suburban high school next?!) or entirely ambivalent. We had most of our classes normally, thankfully.

Then I went home, like normal, tried to convince my parents that it wasn’t good to spend all day in front of the talking heads, went to a martial arts class as normal, etc. The next day I was actually scolded by a teacher for not wearing some patriotic shirt of what have you, and for “not properly mourning America’s loss”.

74

I was a sophomore attending college in Annapolis. Because of the Naval Academy in town, the entire place was locked down, marines guarding every corner, armored vehicles on every corner. The local hospital (where one of the thousands of impromptu blood drives was being held) was slightly outside of the downtown area, so my roommate and I sneaked through back alleys and along a riverbank to reach it, and donated blood. On the way back, security had tightened up, so we stopped in at a bar just on the edge of where the roadblocks were. Not really thinking about the effects of drinking a pint after donating a pint, we ended up ridiculously drunk, singing morose drinking songs to block out the noise of the constant, no-information news broadcasts that were coming out of the television.

It was a pretty miserable day, but the memory is rather fond, six years later.

75

I was busy working on funeral arrangements for my mother, who died early that morning. When we went to the funeral home director’s office mid-morning, he looked so shocked and grayed-out. He told me that something terrible had happened in New York, and we promptly went into a back office area where there was a television. It was shocking, but I didn’t really absorb the enormity of it all until a day or so later.

I took a flight back to my home after all was said and done less than a week later, when flights were back up and running. One of those ass-pucker moments, definitely.

76

I was asleep on the couch. I have no idea why I was asleep on the couch instead of at work, but I must have been feeling really rotten to be at home, asleep on the couch, at 9 am MDT.

Then the phone rang. I answered, groggily, to hear one of **Giant freakin marine’s ** friends (Ken) asking if he was there. I mumbled something about taking a message (while fuzzily wondering why anyone would expect either of us to be home at that time of day) and Ken answered “terrorists have taken out the World Trade Center.” I thought he was changing the subject.

Now, Ken is the go-to guy for off color jokes. He knows at least four variations of The Breakfast Club Joke, so I automatically, albeit sleepily, assume he has a new one, and respond with “Uh huh. And then?”

Silence.

“I’m serious. Turn on the TV.” and I realize there are tears in his voice. I turned on the TV, watched for a minute, or maybe an hour, mumbled “Now we now how Isreal feels every fucking day. Call his cell” and hung up. I assume I said it out loud, but I might have just suddenly hung up on him.

I stared at the TV all day and most of the night, but didn’t cry until the next day when I checked my email to learn that my best friend’s parents had been touring her brother’s “office” (aka The Pentagon) that morning. Since then, I tend to get a bit weepy whenever it’s mentioned.

(Everyone was fine – opposite side of the building – but no one could call her for a couple days because the cell towers & landlines both were jammed)

77

I woke up about 8:30 that morning (MST), when my wife, who had travelled to see her parents, called me from over 1000 miles away to tell me that the country was under attack. Being an afficianado of several fine political thrillers, I had naturally assumed that the United States government as we know it was simply no more. I was right, after a fashion.

78

I was driving down Briley Parkway in Nashville, on my way to work, when I saw two planes land one right after another at the airport, with a couple more circling.

When I got to work, our receptionist asked if I had heard of the plane crash. I asked her if that was what was happening out at the airport and she told me about the WTC1.

I was logging onto my computer about the time the second tower was hit. Not much else got done that day. I called my family, just to touch base.

Traffic was slow going home. What was usually a 20 minute commute took an hour. I stopped at my favorite neighborhood gas station to fill up (just in case) and had to wait in a line six cars deep.

I drove over to my SILs house, where we put in a movie, made mac and cheese for the kids (and as comfort food for the grown ups) and escaped into the singing and dancing of Grease for a while.

Working for a distributor of communications supplies and eqipment, we swung into a 24/7 mode for a few months to supply the contractors rebuilding communications in NYC and DC.

I still get choked up thinking about the attacks.

79

It was late at night here when it happened. At the time I didn’t own a TV and I was talking to a friend with the radio quietly going in the background when some mention was made of the Twin Towers. I said it must be a retrospective about the truck bomb of 1993. Then I heard reference to a plane hitting the building. I reassured my friend that if it was a private plane it would be no big deal, after all a bomber had once hit the Empire State Building. She was fascinated and we were talking about that when they said another plane had hit.

I went up the road to the pub to see if they had footage on TV. The place was closed but out in the back bar the giant screen TV that would normally be showing sport was left running on the news channel. I watched for hours into the wee small hours. Later that day I rented a TV.

80

My mother was living with me at the time. I’d been up working most of the night, so was sleeping late. I remember being awakened by her, telling me to come downstairs and watch tv.

I had lived in NYC for 25 years, and my mother had also lived there years earlier. I was going through my mind, trying to remember if I knew anyone who worked in the WTC, or who lived near there. Then one of the newscasters mentioned Canter Fitzgerald, and I remembered that two of my former coworkers worked there . . . two women who I was fairly close to during the years we worked together. Then there was a news segment about the president of Canter Fitzgerald, who had just missed being in his office, but everyone else in the company had died. My heart sank, as I told myself that maybe these two women no longer worked there, or they worked a different shift, or they weren’t in the office that day. It wasn’t until a week or two later, that I found out that both of them had indeed died.

But I also found out that a small miracle happened. Canter Fitzgerald had a day care for its employees’ kids. One of my friends had a baby, which she used to put in the daycare when she went to work. On that morning, the baby wasn’t feeling well, so her husband stayed home with her. So even though my friend lost her life, the baby was ok.

I also knew someone who worked in the other tower, but managed to get out in time. And a few others who lived in that area, who were all ok.