This comment reminds me that I had an argument with my mom over the phone because she didn’t want me to go in to work that day. She felt there was a strong possibility that Microsoft would be bombed. Which sounds ludicrous now, but that morning it kind of felt like anything was possible. (I went to work anyway.)
I was on my honeymoon in Daytona Beach, FL. We slept in a bit and went down the road to IHOP for breakfast having never turned the TV on or the radio. We enjoyed a very casual breakfast and I needed to grab a couple things at the local drugstore before we went back to the hotel. I was waiting in the line at the cash register and getting annoyed at how long the guy in front of me was taking, and then he starts chit-chatting with the cashier and I am really losing patience.
I overhear him mention how his sister works in the WTC and I am thinking to myself, who the F cares, just move along there is a line behind you. I almost said it out loud, but thankfully I did not. I wrapped up my purchase and went back to the hotel. I jumped in the shower and my wife turned the TV on.
A few minutes later she comes into the bathroom and tells me something is going on in New York and she thinks the WTC is gone. I kinda laughed at her and said what the hell are you talking about, gone? We sat in front of the TV for hours and hours and felt like we couldn’t enjoy our honeymoon anymore. We did force ourselves to go outside and rent some ATV’s and ride up and down the beach for a while just to get away from the TV for a bit.
Flying home just a few days later was not fun.
Edited to add: we saw quite a few police vehicles at the flight school in Daytona. apparently a couple of the hijackers received schooling there.
I was pretty worried that the nursery school’s 3 year-old class and the elementary school’s second grade class were going to be attacked soon. We got our kids out of school.
I was at college in Arizona. I knew nothing about it until it was well over. It was a day I had a solid class-class-work-class schedule, and I almost always have earbuds jammed in when I’m walking around. I can hear traffic through them, but not things like stray radio noises.
I was working in our campus computer labs at the time, and I had no idea why all afternoon I was getting phone calls at the desk from people asking if I could find so-and-so and tell them that the caller’s plane had landed and they were okay. It crossed my mind that a very large airliner had gone down somewhere – or two of them had collided catastrophically, à la Tenerife – but no one had anywhere near enough of a clear head to tell me WHY they were trying to get a hold of randoms in the computer lab, and I spent the entire time explaining that we didn’t have a paging system OR a way to send messages to someone’s terminal without a user ID.
It wasn’t until I attempted to go to my 4pm lab and discovered the university had cancelled everything while I’d been at work that I realized there was something really wrong with the world. I came home and found my roommate watching the news coverage in complete silence. Along with everyone else in the dorm.
Being so far away, I didn’t have any reason to worry about anyone I knew. The closest friends I had were at school in upstate NY. Some of them had relatives out on Long Island, but I don’t think anyone I knew lost anyone in Manhattan. Communications-wise, it was much scarier for me when the entire east coast blacked out, because no one knew what was happening or where, and no one could get through to ask. I was personally in a place that had no patriotic, practical, or strategic value whatsoever, so the local authorities weren’t involved at all. It was mostly just very surreal. Life continued, albeit in a somewhat subdued fashion, bright and early the next morning.
I have similar memories of watching coverage of the first Gulf War. I was a small enough child at the time that my main thought was to realize ‘someday this will be in history books’. It did occur to me a few years afterwards that it was unusual for my parents to have let me stay up so late, especially to see something so frightening. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that both of them had grown up during the Cold War – my father is just old enough that they were still doing duck-and-cover drills when he was in grade school – and our government started the fracas by telling everyone that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction”. They hadn’t sent me to bed because they were terrified that no one would wake up the next morning.
It’s odd to watch what’s big news and what’s not, especially right when it happens. 9/11 was obviously going to be huge, but sometimes it’s not as easy to predict. Back in the '70s and '80s, the news services distributed bulletins to media outlets via Teletypes, announced with some number of ding!s from the attached bell that indicated the importance. In a time when one bell meant the weather report, and ten bells meant the Soviets had launched their entire arsenal and you could kiss the Earth goodbye, the death of John Lennon rated nine.
I was at work. A co-worker told me about the first hit and the thinking was tragic accident. Then the second plane hit and it was obvious that it was an attack. Another coworker asked me if I thought that Saddam had anything to do with this. My immediate response, “He’s not that stupid.”
Would that our “leaders” with all the intel that they have access to couldn’t have realized what I knew instinctively.
I thought they knew who rather quickly, but it’s been a while.
I first heard it on the car radio. I was just pulling into work. We didn’t have a TV in the office. I got a call from my husband saying he was packing up to go. His team had been tapped to do rescues at the pentagon, because they all have DOD clearances. He ended up not going. They went to McCord AFB and the military took their equipment and told them to wait for the next flight. Three planes later, they were still waiting. I can’t say I wasn’t happy about that.
One of the men I worked with at that time, kept laughing and saying, This is just like a movie!"
Finally I tapped him, hard in the chest and said, This is nothing like a movie! Real people are dying. My husband is going to do rescues in the rubble. (Another co-worker’s) father was in the second tower. Shut up! Shut up! shut up!"
Then, I sat down and cried. He walked away rather stunned.
We didn’t speak for days after. He finally came to my office and apologized for being an ass.
Because of this thread, I watched a large portion of NBC’s live coverage this morning - the Today Show immediately turned into hard news.
Even in that hour and a half, the name Osama bin Laden came up, as the most likely, being the only terrorist who had shown the resources to pull off a coordinated attack with multiple parts, and obsessed with the World Trade Center.
As an aside, given how lightweight I consider Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, they really came through. They were collected, they were careful to separate what was speculated, what was coming from just one source, from that which was confirmed, and my God, they didn’t break down as they watched the horror of the World Trade Centers burning and collapsing and a “bomb” at the Pentagon.
It was a little weird how long it took Matt Lauer to drop the ‘small commuter plane’ angle and even to not get what happened when the second plane hit live, and then to not understand that the whole first tower had collapsed.
I was asleep so I missed it live. I remember repeatedly hitting the snooze button and starting to wonder why there was no music. Then I heard something about a national tragedy. I got up and turned on the TV but I was getting ready for work and just couldn’t figure out what had happened. I didn’t know until I got to work exactly what was going on.
On the 10th anniversary one of the networks (NBC maybe?) replayed the coverage as it had happened. I had seen bits and pieces over the years but had never seen how it unfolded that morning.
The History Channel does this every year, for about the first 2 hours.
And for several years, one network showed the astonishing “9/11” movie. These were the filmmakers who caught the first plane striking the WTC, while filming FFs doing routine inspections.
Former CNN host Aaron Brown has said that when he heard the phrase “thousands of body bags”, he almost vomited live on the air. Only the embarrassment factor kept him from doing this.
And as for OBL, a Photoshopped picture of him being raped by the WTC tower with the big antenna on it went viral that fall. I can’t find it online, however.
I remember one year when that was on, some “family oriented” group protested, because the firefighter’s language, on seeing the first plane smack into the WTC, was not edited out.
Good grief, this was not fictional, gratuitous cussing, it was the shocked and horrified exclamations of people who had just seen something almost unimagianable. I’ll admit, I don’t always want to hear “Holy Shit!!” or “Fuck!!” on regular network Tv, but there was a content warning at the beginning of the show.
I’ve forgotten the name of one guy who worked as security for an investment firm(Merrill Lynch maybe) who, after the first bombing several years earlier, started drilling the employees of that firm in evacuation drills. They were in the second tower, and even before the second plane hit he was moving folks out, in spite of the “Keep calm and stay where you are” admonitions. I heard that all but six of those people got out, and he was not one of them, because he stayed behind to try and be sure every one of his people were evacuated.
I woke up around 5:30 pacific time with the TV on from the night before. My cousin came into the room and I switched it to CNN Headline News, which was on the same C-Band satellite, right as they were pointed at the gash in the first tower. He picked up the remote and moved it to another satellite – F3 I think it was – where he located a wild feed. As we looked at the feed, which showed both towers from a lower angle, I was the fireball erupt out of the second tower and said “what the hell was that?”
He replied, “A plane, didn’t you see it?”
He went to work, I had the day off, so I watched hours of feeds in trainwreck mode. I remember seeing the dust boiling through the streets when the towers fell, that remains the lasting visual image I have from that day.
I was in junior college. Like others in this thread, I’d thought it was just an unfortuante accident at first. They actually cancelled classes that afternoon, in spite of it not even being in my country. At first, I was miffed that my classes were cancelled, because I liked those classes. Before I got home and turned on my computer and found out just how horrible everything was, I didn’t understand why my classes were cancelled because of some “accident”. I then felt terrible that I’d been so shallow about it.
On the topic, here’s a video I found of Jon Stewart speaking of 9/11. Very moving.
I believe that you are the only other C Band guy on the board.
OK, I found the name of the guy on YouTube. It was Rick Rescorla, and he worked for Morgan Stanley/Dean Witter.
Thanks Emily. If that doesn’t make you tear up, you’re not human.
What does it have to do with MLK?
That movie has surprisingly little profanity in it, and that footage is usually aired either uncensored, or with no sound at all.
OT: Someone on another website who lives in an area where most people are multilingual has told a story about watching some riot footage where people were yelling things like “Get the fuck out of here!” and the subtitles said “Please go away.”
:smack: Another person on the same website does not speak or read Korean, but her husband does, and an American network news show had a story about Korea with a poster in the backdrop with three lines of print on it. Her husband busted up laughing, because two lines were quite innocuous, but the third said something like “HOT XXX PORN VIDEOS ON SALE NEXT TUESDAY!”