WTC Attack Thread 2

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I can’t even begin to describe the horror, anguish, and just pure, bitter anger I’ve been feeling. The lives lost, destroyed, changed forever by this. What terror did they endure knowing what was happening? Pictures of people choosing a quick death by jumping out windows. Desperate phone calls made in the last few minutes by those who must have been terrified. This absolutely sickens me.

So. Yes. We must acknowledge that we are at war. Not against a clear, visible enemy, but one sneaky, hidden, capable of unspeakable evil, willing to go to any lengths to achieve victory. How do you wage war against an enemy who,literally, takes no prisoners?

You methodically, cooly, systematically hunt them down, and you don’t give up until you find them. Put them on trial, and when proven guilty before the world, put them into a cell, lock the door, and remove them from the light of day.
I agree with the president; those who condone, accept, aid or in any way benefit terrorists, must pay a price as well. The time for a worldwide concerted war against terrorism has come. Now.

42

BBC is reporting that they have spoken with fire fighters in Washington who have confirmed that Over 800 Individuals Have Died In The Pentagon. They did not get an exact number.

Three hours ago, the numbers were closer to 10-20, not 800.

“A Prayer For The Dying, A Kiss for the Last,
A Tear for The Crying, A Hit For the Cast.”

43

Oh andygirl, you just sent me over the edge. I’ll be hugging Mr. Servo extra tightly tonight.

Sue, thanks for the warm thoughts.

My manager just called me. He asked me if I could come in to our midtown office tomorrow. He was very nice about it, and said that the other people he has called were pretty shaken up and he told them he wanted them to stay home. He’s really a nice guy [he was genuinely worried about me before we contacted each other].

I told him I’d be there tomorrow morning. Part of me wants to work, to do something productive instead of just staring at the TV. But the other part feels like a whore. Big business, time is money. [I work for a bank.] “People are dead, but we’ve got to get the servers back up.”

This is part of the rebuilding right? We can’t just let commerce stop I guess.

I can’t even begin to express how good it feels to see things like {{{{{Americans}}}}}, to hear other countries pledging their support, to have Canada fly the flags at half-mast. We really are all human beings [with the exception of a select few]. And as much as this disaster hurts, the sorrow, support, and well-wishes from everyone goes far to ease the pain.

OK, my schmaltz-o-meter is starting to peak so I’m going to head off to bed. I hope I feel better in the morning.

44

As with many, I’m near speechless, but I’ve got to ramble.

My boss was in town today - he comes about once every 4-6 weeks so we can review and pitch stuff to him. He walked in just in time to join us watching the TV in the drilling V.P.'s office (when we still thought it was just a tragic accident) when we saw the second plane hit.

Well, we were there to work so we adjourned to the conference room and got after it for a very short while, until a geologist came in and told us the Pentagon had been hit. My boss called Southwest to see about getting back to Tulsa this evening and the res agent told him there were three more hijacked aircraft.

We office in a building with the Israeli consulate. Boss took about 4 seconds to decide to shut it down. We sent the secretaries home and then we gathered at the Landman’s nearby home. I was the only one who grabbed a map, and we talked about that for a bit, and then ran through every thing else in highly abbreviated fashion. And then the seven of us watched TV in the Landman’s living room for the rest of the day. Much discussion.

Away from the 'net, I was surprised how much time I spent thinking of the NYC Dopers. I’ve checked that thread and am largely relieved, but I do wish cmkeller would check in.

I heard Shrub, and liked what I heard. To whomever posted above about the lack of emotion, I’m afraid your anger recognition skills may be deficient. As somebody else said, watch out for the calm ones.

The blood people couldn’t take me tonight, so I’ll go tomorrow. I picked up some cleaning tonight and the clerk and I talked about it in an odd, stilted fashion - we don’t know each other well enough to say it well, but we had to express our appreciation of the horror, the affront, the baseness of the events.

I’ve always tried to maintain an even handed approach to Mid-East travails, and have often been disappointed in the coarseness both sides exhibit towards one another. Israeli actions often seem poorly designed to achieve a defusing of the situation. But I must admit the Palestinian revelries today will stick in the memory for some time.

An F-16 blew by a while ago. They’re flyin’ CAP over Houston!

And I just heard the first “official” estimate of dead at the Pentagon: 800. From a fire chief. WTC will be worse. And the FBI is executing search warrants in Florida.

I hope you are all OK (and that includes all of the free world, not just U.S.)

45

I’ve been watching this unfold all day, and my stomach has been jumping around, but I only finally started to cry a few minutes ago. I watched and listened all day waiting for yet another shoe to drop, and I think I forced myself to do this because I was aiming for some sort of saturation level where I would stop being shocked and start being numb. Apparently, I’ve been numb without my knowledge most of the day.

The big stories of the day have been so hard to absorb - in some ways I think my brain shut down and went into “this is a Godzilla movie” mode. Now I am reading the personal stories. The firefighter who saw his friend killed by a falling body. People leaping out of these burning buildings to their certain death, hand in hand. A cop pulled out of the dust storm by a teenager, dragged into a church and having his eyes washed out with holy water. A stranger screaming at a reporter to throw away her high heels, grabbing her hand and running, then throwing her to the ground, shielding her with his own body. Construction workers showing up at the scene en masse to do “whatever we can”. People on this message board forum (and others I read) offering to open their phones, wallets, homes and hearts to strangers in need.

My God.

46

Cmkeller posted at 5:41 this afternoon in this thread.

47

There is hope. People are calling for help on their cell phones from the collapsed buildings.

The police now say there were no explosives in the van. The three people in the van are with the CIA now.

48

beatle

He has, thank God.

49

beatle: IIRC, Chaim posted earlier today in a GQ thread. That fact was mentioned in the NYC Doper Check In Thread.

50

This is the first attack on the WTC and Pentagon. There are three differences between Pearl Harbor and Today.

Pearl Harbor

  1. There was a war going on. We weren’t in it, but we probably would have been eventualy.

  2. It was an attack on military personel.

  3. It killed 2400 people.

World Trade Center/Pentagon

  1. No Imminent War.

  2. Innocent Civillians attacked.

  3. It has killed far more than 2400. How much more waits to be seen.

This is the worst day in American History, up there with Pearl Harbor and the burning of the White House.

By the way, I got a great email from my little cousin in England. I live in Michigan, but he doesn’t understnad the size of the country and wrote to make sure we are all okay.

We explained that the distance between us and the incidents is probably larger than the entire country of England.

But it was nice to have someone check up on us. :slight_smile:

51

I know I’m posting a lot, but it keeps me calm. I feel I have to do something. I can’t just sit here and watch the news and just sit here.
FDNY is now saying 300 firefighters unaccounted for. We lost our Cheif and 1st deputy comissioner. They’ve pulled two policemen out of the rubble. There are still close to 100 missing.

52

The absolute last thing we should do is let commerce stop. We have to go on like nothing happened, except that it has, and we have chosen to go on as per normal.

The terrorists responsible want us to fall apart in greif and mourning and chaos. We can’t give them the satisfaction. We have to show the world it will take more than this to bring us down.

We’ve willingly used atomic weapons to end a war.
We fought a bloody civil war to free the slaves and keep the nation together.
We endured the partisan idiocy of the last election without killing each other over it.
We sent men to the moon, and even after a near-fatal mission, we went back.
And we spent the last half of the century facing off against a regime intent on wiping freedom off the planet.

Did we give up when the Germans[sub]1[/sub] bombed Pearl Harbor? Of course not, we’re Americans, dammit. We’re the cockroaches of Democracy! We’re harder to get rid of than a damn bad penny! You don’t like us now? Well wait to you see us mad, no, furious! We won’t have pity on you, but we have pity for you and your cowardly, evil deeds. You think something like this will finish us off? You’ve got another thing coming, and it’ll be laser-guided precision ordnance.

God bless America, and God Damn the sons-of-ignorant-assholes who did this.

53

My first inkling that something might be amiss was when the A train pulled into the 42nd street station and I saw a bunch of people waiting for the E to the East Side & Queens. Figured I’d take the 7 train to Queens instead.
As I’m getting off the train I get a beep from my wife. It was 9:15 AM in the morning. I thought “This one’s gonna change my life” because the only reason the wife would beep you before you even get to work is if something awful just happened to someone in the family.
When I got to street level I notice a crowd of people facing away from the building where I work. Looked to me like they were just all trying to get across the street, and since I knew they’re doing construction around the subway station I just figured they had the street blocked off. I walked towards the building where I work, opposite direction to where these people were facing, and in the meantime I’m looking behind me trying to figure out what the obstruction was.
I look up, and see the top of one of the WTC towers burning. “Damn, they did it again”, I thought. And figured out why the E was having trouble: its southern terminal is at the WTC.
I get to my building lobby, and crowds of people are milling around. Why, I don’t know, since they bombed the WTC in Manhattan after all, and we’re in Queens.
I get up to the 27th floor and find out it was two jets that slammed into each of the towers, and from there I have a clear view of each building burning away from the floor where they were hit on up.
“That’s thousands of people” said I to someone there. Much worse, I thought, than the bombing.
I called my wife, and shortly decided to get out of the building, as it’s 50 stories up, by far the biggest building in Queens, and just a short hop away from LaGuardia Airport. A prime and juicy target for a stray jet. I now know why all those people were milling around in the lobby.
A friend and I decide to leave together, as we’re both NJ residents and facing the same long trek back home. We get to the street and try to catch the No. 7 train back to Manhattan, only to hear a PA announcement that there is no train service to Manhattan.
We go back to the street, and are idly watching the WTC burn when suddenly all of downtown Manhattan is obliterated by a huge cloud of smoke. Everyone watching on the street gasps, and when the smoke clears, one of the buildings is gone.
After the shock of this wears off a little, we walk to another part of Queens looking for busses into Manhattan. None. At this point we lose sight of Manhattan temporarily. When we can again see it, the second tower has already collapsed. We see, for the first time, the New York skyline without the Twin Towers. There is no way to describe the shock this causes.
We walk back and decide to walk across the 59th Street bridge. We pick up another co-worker along the way, and across the bridge we go.
Huge crowds of people are walking across the bridge from the Manhattan side, while only a thin trail of people are trying to get to Manhattan from Queens. After this long walk, we dive into a pizza joint and get something to drink, then decide to hop a bus across town to catch the ferry out to NJ. We walk to 57th and catch an M31 bus whose last stop is 54th and 11th, which is perfect. No fare is charged. All busses are free today.
We get off and walk one more block over and are faced with a line that starts all the way up there on 54th street for a ferry service that leaves from 38th street. Turns out that this isn’t even the regular NY Waterway ferry, but rather the Circle Line pitching in for free to help out in ferrying people to NJ.
After a couple of hours of waiting, (during which time a seemingly endless stream of ambulances passes by on 12th Ave going south, along with a vehicle from the NYFD’s Academy, and the Bergen County NJ bomb squad; the entire Metro area was being called in for this one) we get on a boat over to NJ, where busses are waiting to take us to Newark’s Penn Station from which you can catch trains to all over the state. On the line for the bus we meet a guy, coughing persistently, who says he made it down from the 102nd story of No 2 WTC. This is his story…

After the jet crashed into No 1, they got a call from the Fire Dept telling them to stay put. This guy was one of six fire marshals on his floor, and collectively they decided that no, they weren’t going to stay put, they were going to get out of there ASAP. They got everyone on the floor out of there, then the six of them followed behind.
Somewhere in the 80’s they hear a huge noise of something coming closer and then they’re thrown off their feet by a tremendous impact. They get up and continue on, until they get to 77, where the staircase ends in a pile of rubble.
They walk through 77, picking up a woman wandering around with glass in her eyes, following the lead of one of them who knows where there’s an alternate staircase. They find it and continue down to the ground floor. They get out to the courtyard just as the building begins to collapse. They run for their lives. Eventually they stop running, and our man walks with the woman to NYU Medical Ctr, where he leaves her for treatment. They want to keep him too, but he says no, he’s fine, he just wants to get home.

To him, to the firefighters he met on the way down who were on their way up to save the people inside and who are now surely all dead, to the police officers who did the same and are also now gone, to all who did a little to try to save this city and its people, a small salute from this ordinary person.

54

[sub]1 Animal House reference for those who don’t know[/sub]

55

I’m in the Groton Submarine base. We just sent all the subs underway so they don’t become targets for the terrorists. The base is on Threat Condition Delta, meaning nobody can leave and in order to get on your car is thouroughly searched. They cancelled all school and training for Wednesday. It’s pretty much really hectic here. We even had a bomb threat. We had to evacuate our barracks because the bomb dog sniffed out some explosives in the truck.

I’ve been talkin to a friend of mine who has a sister that works in the Trade Center. She’s been pretty hysterical. She can’t get in touch with her because the city is pretty much closed down. At least when I last talked to her it was. I hope she’s okay. =(

sigh

56

I’ll just add quickly a thought that recent threads have brought to mind. I’ve been on the wrong side of interactions with the police and I understand the dynamics that govern those public servants intercourse with the public.

NYC’s Finest (and that includes firefighters) have absolutely taken it to the front line and acquitted themselves with their mortality. I think their death count alone is approaching 300 in NY.
To borrow from some commentator I heard today, at least Pearl Harbor came with a return address.

57

This is a post on my main board, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer website. The poster, belmont, is a friend of mine. I’ve partied with him in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Atlantic City. This is his first-hand account:

most of you know the timeline of the events that went on in the world trade center area, but let me tell you what happened from someone whose building now acts as a stand for what’s left of tower one…

about 8:45am this morning, i get out of the subway within the world trade center and began my walk to work which is across the street from tower 1 of the wtc and behind 7wtc. i have my headphones on and it’s basically a normal day. no one is doing anything strange. no one is screaming. i get to my floor and my coworkers run out to the hallway.

“did you feel the bomb!?”

“what bomb?”

“1 wtc just exploded!”

so i run to the window. sure enough a large hole from one side to the other of 1 wtc. i go to my phone to call, of course, my mom. she doesn’t pick up. the announcer over the PA system says to use the stairs instead of the elevators. i go to the stairs and fly down them to the lobby. security tells us to stay in the lobby. going out into the street will only add to the chaos. pardon me for using this language, but fuckity fuck fuck that. i went running for the side entrance.

now i’m looking over my building at 1wtc and the huge hole along its side. people scream and i look around but nothing, i look up and i see nothing but i’m told that someone just jumped. another scream and this time i see a man… woman… someone fall 95 floors. shake it off. i’m trying to call my mom on my cell. i get thru.

“ma! i’m alright. plane crashed into 1wtc. i’m outside. i’m fine.”

“get out of there! go home! go home now!!”

“yeah ma. i gotta call my boss then i’ll go.”

“go now!!”

“yeah, ma! i know. i’ll be fin-” communication gets cut off. i spend the next few minutes trying to call her back. just as i’m about to walk a little farther away, i look up. explosion at 2wtc just behind 1wtc. people started running. i cut through an alley and end up a couple blocks north of the trade center. i’m standing on the west side highway (aka west st) watching the west side of tower one. i call mom and make it through. i’m fine and i tell her and dad to relax that when they hear the trains are open to page me. no way am i going to take a cab through the tunnels or bridges. i hang up and i start to watch people just start leaping out of the broken windows. a few tried to cling to the concrete dividers between windows only to slide down the concrete a floor then begin to freefall. one
man… i just don’t want to relive that. after seeing so much death, i decided to make my way up manhattan. my company has numerous offices up the west side so i can hit each one till i find a phone that works so i can call mom again since she paged a couple times.

i need water. been walking for about 30 minutes and i really didn’t eat a lot of breakfast. i go to a street vendor to pick up a bottled water. as i’m on line, everyone rushes across the street. i get there just in time to see 2wtc crumble. wow. speechless. i get my water and go to an atm because who knows how much cash i’m gonna need. then i finally get to the first office, but i can only get to Cricket. only local calls went through. tell her i’m alright then i’m off again.

i’m walking up 8th avenue. no cars. just ambulances, fbi and nypd. people start to gasp and scream. i turn in time to see 1 wtc fall to the ground. at this point, i just want to get home. i, in all honesty, just really wanted my mommy. as i’m walking, i’m fearing what’ll happen in the days to come. world war 3? was nostradomus right? will a “prince” from the middle east rise to be the main villian? i don’t know. i just wanna get home.

i get to one of our larger offices. i’m talking to mom and dad. they’re frantic and so is my boss who called her trying to find me. i get the lowdown about the hijacked planes and the transportation situation from them. feel a tremor. tell them that i’m getting out of there and i’ll call them later. nothing happened to the building so i crash with a few people on their floor. finally get through to a coworker’s cell and talk to her. she and our boss are in midtown with a bunch of other people from our floor. so off i go again. up 7th avenue this time. penn station is a mob scene. people holding signs about the end of the world.
military overhead. fbi everywhere. nypd everywhere. food. my stomach needs food. i walk into a deli but none of the food appeals other than a $3.89 bag of m&ms. after that, i make it to the building and greet my boss. he practically hugs me and my coworker and her mom smile at me from across the room. find a computer, post. the ferrys are working across the hudson. “great!” i think. i can get home. a crew of people from the midtown office are headed there. i’ll go with. three hours later, i’m pulling into nj. my first thought:

the nyc skyline doesn’t look right. something’s missing.

but that thought doesn’t last long. a few moments later after docking, i’m being told i need to be decontaminated. i’m basically hosed down and sent on my way…

final thoughts:

i hope this doesn’t turn into world war three. no one is immortal. no one can escape or cheat death. death is real. death is raw. and it leaves you empty. it leaves you shaking. and it leaves you glad that it left you for now.

i never want to be around death. i stood at the base of 7wtc looking up at the twin towers wondering what i could do.

“if i had powers, i could…” do nothing. reality check. all i could do was do the exact thing nypd and fdny were doing: watch. watch and do nothing. watch all this happen and feel so utterly helpless. helpless to aide humanity. helpless to lend a hand. helpless to save lives.

i’m fine. shaken. stirred. but i have no scars. i have my life. and hopefully walked away without exposure to chemical warfare.

58

Biggirl, you just post all you want. I think a lot of us are feeling the same way tonight.

Damn, StGermain. I’m glad your friend in okay!

59

I just saw Peter Jennings about lose it on the broadcast.

I know he’s tired and worn down. They had this interesting story where they followed a woman and her two daughters–consummate New Yorkers, assertive, keeping it together, persistent–trying to locate their Dad who worked in the WTC. They ran into a number of roadblocks. Kept placing fruitless phone calls. And then one of the daughters screamed DADDY! and they found him and everyone bawled in relief. Then they cut to Peter Jennings and he stammered a bit and said “I had no idea how that would end… a happy ending on a day when there have been so few…” he really had to collect himself for a minute. That was pretty moving itself. Anyone else marvel at that?

60

He’s had to do that a couple of times today.

My throat constricts everytime because those guys are never supposed to lose it. The only other time I remember it happening was when Challanger exploded and when the OKC bombing happened.