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Where were you?
I had driven into my temp job doing data entry while I was still living in Maryland. I usually listened to CD's on the way into work, so I didn't hear any news until I walked in that morning. My boss came up to me and asked me if I'd heard anything on the news, and I gave her a confused look. She told me a plane hit the world trade center in New York.
My first thought was "Wow, somebody screwed up pretty bad to hit a building in NYC, but it's happened before.", but it was not until I turned on the radio to listen to the usual wacky morning DJ show to the news that a plane hit the second tower. It was at that moment that I knew something was going on and it was not somebody making a mistake. The morning DJ's completely switched gears, covering everything by the second and taking calls and reporting the best they could. I remember being impressed the entire week as they changed their show entirely for a good two weeks.
When the plane hit the Pentagon, I left work. We lived about an hour out of DC, and my dad worked at the Kaiser Permenente medical center there. Not close to the pentagon, but close enough that all roads were too congested for him or anyone else to go anywhere. Many of the students at my sister's school had parents that worked in the Pentagon or in the government.
I remember going home, and seeing the images for the first time on the TV. I remember that they forgot to bleep out people swearing also, and finding it both surprising and not surprising at the same time. I also thought of the numerous Muslim families in our area, and being afraid for them. I don't recall being afraid, only angry and sad.
Schools were being canceled and I raced to get my sister from high school, the same I had attended before I graduated. I've never seen a school since that had been so silent. I remember as we walked to the car in the school parking lot seeing combat jets fly over the school in pairs. There were three major airports (Dulles, National, and BWI) within an hour of our house, and the sudden lack of any plane other then the combat jets in the sky was a bit surreal.
My uncle, who lived on Canal Street in NYC (which is relatively close to where the WTC was), said dust came down on his building that day and they didn't want to go outside for at least a day.
Fortunately, no one I knew and no one they knew were hurt physically. As for me, it left a mark burned in my mind. Every time I see a movie with the towers in it, even if it's from two decades ago, I can't erase the connection now.
Where were you?
My first thought was "Wow, somebody screwed up pretty bad to hit a building in NYC, but it's happened before.", but it was not until I turned on the radio to listen to the usual wacky morning DJ show to the news that a plane hit the second tower. It was at that moment that I knew something was going on and it was not somebody making a mistake. The morning DJ's completely switched gears, covering everything by the second and taking calls and reporting the best they could. I remember being impressed the entire week as they changed their show entirely for a good two weeks.
When the plane hit the Pentagon, I left work. We lived about an hour out of DC, and my dad worked at the Kaiser Permenente medical center there. Not close to the pentagon, but close enough that all roads were too congested for him or anyone else to go anywhere. Many of the students at my sister's school had parents that worked in the Pentagon or in the government.
I remember going home, and seeing the images for the first time on the TV. I remember that they forgot to bleep out people swearing also, and finding it both surprising and not surprising at the same time. I also thought of the numerous Muslim families in our area, and being afraid for them. I don't recall being afraid, only angry and sad.
Schools were being canceled and I raced to get my sister from high school, the same I had attended before I graduated. I've never seen a school since that had been so silent. I remember as we walked to the car in the school parking lot seeing combat jets fly over the school in pairs. There were three major airports (Dulles, National, and BWI) within an hour of our house, and the sudden lack of any plane other then the combat jets in the sky was a bit surreal.
My uncle, who lived on Canal Street in NYC (which is relatively close to where the WTC was), said dust came down on his building that day and they didn't want to go outside for at least a day.
Fortunately, no one I knew and no one they knew were hurt physically. As for me, it left a mark burned in my mind. Every time I see a movie with the towers in it, even if it's from two decades ago, I can't erase the connection now.
Where were you?
Comments
So we listened to a BBC news update and the announcer was saying "... in a deliberate terrorist attack, two planes have flown into the World Trader Center towers, which have now collapsed."
My first thought was "Wow, this is huge..." and then my brain caught up with the last phrase: "...which have now collapsed."
It was said with such finality, but it completely freaked my out. These were two of the biggest structures mankind has ever built; I didn't even know it was possible for something so big TO collapse. I tried to think of the New York skyline without those buildings, and it just didn't seem right. I tried to imagine what it was like for something so big to fall down, and I just couldn't imagine how planes of any size could cause it. After a minute or so I started thinking about other aspects, but those first few moments of cognitive dissonance are the most memorable part of that day for me.
A few hours later I saw some footage on TV and I knew it was going to be one of those generation defining events. For example, I knew this exact question woud be asked in years to come, and a room would be split by those who remembered it and those who didn't. Like the assassination of JFK, the Apollo moon landings, maybe the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin wall and the freeing of Nelson Mandella a few months apart, and I'm sure some many others.
I remember thinking, "This is so surreal." I mean, at the age of 11, and not staying on top of current events as much as I should have been, I really wasn't sure if we, as a nation, knew something like this was coming. All I knew was that one of the twin towers had been hit, and there would most likely be hell to pay. We sat around in the somewhat strange chaos in the middle school, and talked about what had happened.
The TV was still on, with the news playing so we would know anything, and we saw the second tower get hit. I think that that one impacted me quite a bit harder. The nerve of them. Hitting two towers? Wasn't one enough?
I don't know much more than that, and that's a bit hazy, but I do know that at that age, it really didn't affect me too much. It did have enough impact though to cause me to write this poem. I think it's some of the best stuff I've ever written, so that has to say something. I'll leave you with it.
My upperclassmen friends at NYU would tell stories of those days, but I was still in high school, outside the city. I walked into my High School English class, and everyone was crowded around the television. I remember thinking that they were watching a movie, and I asked someone what was on. They said "They bombed the world trade center." I assumed that it was the video from years ago when the parking lot bombing happened, but they said, "No, this is live."
My teacher had a daughter who worked in the world trade center. He was frantic, waiting for a call.
I went home for lunch, and didn't go back to school that afternoon. My mom made me a sandwich and we sat on the couch together. We had been to the towers a week before, right before the end of summer vacation. It was were we would get off the PATH train. It was weird. When I lived in an apartment on Water Street my sophomore year, I would pass the gigantic hole and think about it.
I remember thinking that people who were saying that no one could have foreseen that people would use airplanes as missiles didn't have much imagination. It's not like the Japanese Air Force didn't do it in WW II, and it's not like Tom Clancy hadn't written about it as a major plot point in Debt of Honor.
On my way back to the office, I was tried to remember a story I once heard about a B-25 crashing into the Empire State Building during WW II. At the office, I confirmed that had happened by the internet. I thought that, surely if the Empire State Building stayed up, the WTC would stay up.
Something that was a little odd for me was that my wife and I had been on a trip to see her family in NH just the week before. We flew into and out of Logan airport during the same general time frame the hijackers went through Logan. Weird.
BTW, the Bush Administration is now saying that Osama bin Laden was not the mastermind behind the attacks.
When I go to work, my coworkers asked if I knew what was going on. They told me. I didn't know what to think. It was surreal. I felt really bad for the people suffering. I was a bank teller at the time. Not many customers came in that day. Those who did, we would talk about it and just hope that not too many people were hurt.
[My story] I was in English class, my teacher turned on the TV when it was announced through the PA system, then a min later, the PA system announced to turn all TVs off. This was the first time I heard a Teacher swear, she just looked at the PA speaker and said "Fuck that." and we watched it until class ended. She was to my knowledge one of the like 4 teachers that left it on. (I figure Scrim... well more just Rym, will have an opinion on this, since it was a public school.) We were deprived knowledge about what was happening in the real world in school.
I know people in NYC and I was hoping that they weren't around the building when it happened, but if they were, what could I have done?
But I really can't get why people make such a huge deal about it. Is it because people died? Is it because people never thought it would happen? Or is it because people had their worlds shaken in a way that may actually their livelihoods for the first time since WWII?
Yes, it was terrible. But really, what does "Never forget 9/11" really mean? Not to forget that when you’re a big country with enemies you can be attacked? I don't get it. Is it calling for like retribution or something? People say it and I see it on bumper stickers, but what is its meaning? It's really ridiculous to me.
Next day my school was closed since everyone feared the international schools would be attacked. Over the next 3 months or so I continuously got text messages from the German embassy telling me to fly back. Then 1 and a half years later terrorists actually did attack the compounds foreigners lived in and I ended up coming back to Germany.
If it wouldn't have been for 9/11 I'd probably be studying at an American University right now and would have never ended up living in Germany. It's really strange how things play out in retrospect.
This was the biggest event in world history since the wall came down and at the same time it was the polar opposite of it, 1989 signaled a happy time, the biggest part y of all time and some even thought it was the end of history. It was also the first time that America had been seriously attacked on home soil since British burned down the White House in 1812, I was watching a country been dragged into the "real" world for the first time in over a 100 years.
It didn't hit me full force until I got home and called my Grandma ma to tell her I was home. I turned on the TV and it hit me then. I watched it for hours into the night. I think even until late at night.
The next day we got off too since we lived in the DC area. I went to a store with Mom to buy some stuff. The cashier asked if I was happy to be out of school today. I said in a monotone voice "Why would anyone be happy to be out of school because of that!" I looked around at the things people were buying and the attitude in the air and thought to myself, the world has changed on Sept. 12. It took Sept 11th.
The biggest stressor was that my Aunt worked for the military at the time and was a frequent visitor to that wing of the Pentagon. We went for days without hearing anything from her; not that the cell phone towers were helping much in that regard. She happened to be in Florida with the President and White House Senior Staff at the time of the crashes. She tells a very interesting story of not being buckled in and positioning herself between the desk on Air Force One in order to not fall over as they took off the ground to a then-undisclosed AFB shortly after the crashes.
I tried unsuccessfully to contact my wife, who was on her way in a rental car to Albuquerque to catch a flight I knew was going to be canceled. She was smart and lucky: she figured out what was going on while standing in line to check in, and called the car rental place to reserve a car before they were swamped with people. She reported back that a ton of people took the bus back from the terminal to wait in line to find they had no cars left. They had all gone to people who had called ahead from the terminal. I assume similar things went on all over.
LANL was open the next morning, and we went back to work. Not being in NYC or DC, it got back to business as usual pretty quickly.
A colleague was more affected. He was at a conference in France, and ended up having to spend another week or two over there before he could get a flight back. Life is hard...
Incidentally, as a teacher of young children, it's interesting to see the divide of people who know and the generation who has no concept of what happened.
I was on the very first Continental Airlines flight out of Denver after the attacks. (I believe the flight was on a Friday, although I could be mistaken.) The plane was about 1/3 full of airline staff that had been stranded. The airport was actually pretty quiet. A lot of planes were still parked in weird places. We connected in Newark. Across the river, you could still see a cloud of smoke rising into the air above ground zero.
We were very lucky that we just happened to have reservations on the first flight out. Our travel back home was actually pretty easy - although for a while I was tempted to keep my rental car and drive across country with it.
There's nothing wrong with remembering 9/11. It simply that the proportion of attention given to the problem of terrorism is continually disturbing given the kinds of things happening in places like Darfur right now. Terrorism of the nature that we saw on 9/11 is real and significant, but it is the least of our worries.
People keep using the slogan "never forget" for 9/11. I don't believe it. They've already forgotten all the other far more terrible events in history. They've even forgotten Pearl Harbor and Oklahoma City. And that's the worst part of it. By having all these memorials for 9/11, they're pretending to show respect for the people who died there. But really all they are doing is disrespecting those people by using their death as a tool to sway people's political views and get TV ratings. It's really disgusting.
If you want to "never forget" 9/11 properly, start by remembering everything else first. If you feel 9/11 deserves your moment of silence, give a month of silence for everyone else.
No, it's not an attempt to make you feel bad (I don't see how it could make anyone feel bad really), it's simply an observation. And I find that it's more than TV or radio. That's only how people found out unless they were actually there, not how they reacted.