Where were you when you first heard about what happened on 9/11?

[TMTTR]

I will write my story in response to KilgoreTrout because (1) I am a big Kurt V. fan and (2) my story starts the same way... [this may get a little jumbled because I am writing as I try to remember it -- I guess I have not tried to remember the details for almost five years]

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I was at the Red Sox / Yankees game at the Stadium on 9/9, had to work on 9/10,

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OK, the similarity ends there. I was not getting married that week. I was supposed to go the the Yankees/Sox game on Monday and Tuesday. The game was rained out Monday night. I was taking my parents to the Tuesday game which I had not done in a long time...

Anyway, in 2001, I was still living in Brooklyn Heights. I woke up early on Tuesday and looked out the window. It was a beautiful morning. The heat and humidity of the summer was gone so I cracked open a couple of windows so the cat could enjoy the fresh air while I was at work. I left for my garage to drive to work in midtown Manhattan at a few minutes before 8AM. Driving to work in Manhattan is not always advisable -- but I loved my car (at the time, a BMW 328c), hated the subway, and enjoyed the solitude of driving in by myself. Brooklyn Heights is just across the East River from lower Manhattan and my drive to work is across the Brooklyn Bridge.

For context, here is what I saw for the last time on my commute across the bridge that morning:



So I get across the bridge at 8:20AM or so, speed up the FDR Drive (way too fast as was my habit) and I am sitting at my desk by 8:40AM. I am an attorney and very few attorneys get in that early in the morning. This morning, one of the partners I worked for also got in early and stopped in and we talked for fifteen minutes about work. So, at about 8:55AM, I turn to my morning ritual of reading the NYTimes headlines online as well as the headlines of several other newspapers.

For some reason, I cannot call up the NYTimes website. After getting several error messages, I try to go to the website of another newspaper which says only:

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9:52AM - Breaking News: Plane Hits World Trade Center in New York.

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I think: "Hmmm. I don't remember seeing anything strange on my drive in this morning. This must have been one of those crazy tourist planes that got too close to the buildings."

My next thought was about the only connection I had to the WTC in the near future -- I was involved in organizing a fundraising gala that was to take place at Windows on the World at WTC in March. I recalled how long it took them to allow people into the Towers after the terrorist attack in 1993 and I wondered whether we would have to find another location after all the planning we had already done. In retrospect, that concern was laughably inconsequential in the grand scheme.

You know, there is nothing special so far and there is a lot more like that: listening to the radio, walking the streets of Manhattan and through Central Park, talking to people on the streets, trying to get home, the smell in my apartment when I got there, walking to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade late in the evening and standing there for hours with hundreds of others, learning about friends that were in or around WTC... It was an unbelievably surreal day.

There are a lot of people with more interesting stories and I don't feel like remembering more right now and no need to bore you folks further... maybe later...

[tuq]

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Politics Fourm 9-11 thread If you want to discuss the impact 9-11 has had on our country.

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It seems to me to be in incredibly poor taste to post a link to a political discussion in a thread full of remembrances, some of them emotionally charged. People know where the politics forum is if they want to discuss that sort of thing.

Feel free to reply, but I'm done with this exchange as I don't want to derail the thread further...

[nicky g]

I've posted this before;but might as well again.

I'd finished my MA a week before and had gone home for a short holiday. I'd gone out on the tenth and gotten horribly drunk with my friends, flew back to London on the morning of the 11th horribly hungover, being sick in multiple places. Finally made it back into London, got out of the tube and got a text message from a friend saying "Oh my god we're all going to die". Had no idea what he was talking about and didn't much care in my state, assumed it was some joke, and went into my flat planning to go to bed when I got a message from my Dad saying something about planes crashing in the States but that he thought my Mum and my sister, who were flying to the US that day for a wedding, were OK as their flight would still be over the Atlantic.

Turned on the radio (had no TV in that flat at the time) and got a BBC Radio Five discussion that made no sense, they were discussing who "did it" but didn't say what "it" was. Called my then girlfirend (now my wife) and Dad who explained what was going on, although there were all sorts of rumours flying around about more planes, a car bomb at the State Department or the Capitol at the time. Heard the people on the radio speculate that the DFLP (a small Palestinian group) had done it, which I thought was absurd but also worried me. Got the tube down to my wife's apartment, everyone was obviously pretty edgy on it, including myself. Bumped into one of her friends on the way in. Both are American and were obviously pretty shaken up. My wife was worried about her Dad because he sometimes visits the Pëntagon for work but found out he was OK via email; obviously it was impossible to get through to the states by phone for ages. Watched the replays of what had happened in shock and horror. My wife turned it off after a while, she thought the endless repition of the towers falling was tasteless. (At the time, having just finished an English Literature MA and having written a paper on Don DeLillio, I thought a lot about Underworld and its theme of the endless repêtition of images of disaster, JFK etc, this seemed to somehow be the awful culmination of that process. I realise that's really pseudy and out of place but that was what popped into my head at the time).

The next day (or possibly two days later, I forget) I went into work (actually a charity I did some volunterring at, had come back to London to look for work which turned out to be poor timing as the jobs market went very sour for a long time afterwards) and some of my colleagues were making jokes about it already, which I thought was pretty awful. There was also a lot of speculation about inconsistencies etc, especially a lot of scepticism about claims that a hijacker's passport had been found in the rubble.

My mother and sister had had to land in St John's and were stuck there for a few days (a year or two later on her way home from the US my sister was on another plane that had to make an emergency landing in St John's, not one of her favourite spots now). My wife's cousin's boyfriend worked in the towers for a bank, he'd slept in that morning and hadn't been there when the towers were hit. Shortly afterwards he quit his job and joined the marines.

[Thundercat32]

Normally I sleep in very late, but this particular morning I had the alarm set. I listen to a sports talk show in Dallas most mornings. The show has a reputation for being off color and making jokes in bad taste alot, they were talking about how some plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York and making jokes about the Ghost of JFK, Jr. flying a plane into the World Trade Center and than one of the hosts said maybe it's just a really big cigar that someone is smoking.

I was really sleepy and pretty much out of it, I went back to sleep sorta semi conscious. Than I hear these same guys who are always joking and cutting up sounding frieghtened and panicked going Oh My God! I can't believe I just saw that. Oh My God this is terrorists! Hearing the change in their voices was very eerie to me, I felt very concerned immediately.

I got out of bed and turned up the radio. They described the 2nd plane hitting the towers and they were able to run ABCnews straight into their signal and comment over it. I went to the kitchen to turn on another radio to a straight news station here in Dallas KRLD 1080, They had a straight news feed from CBS radio. At the time we didn't have any TV service, I was hearing rumors that 8, 11, maybe more planes were unaccounted for. I called my Dad at work and asked if he knew what was going on? I asked him if he could come home because I thought it would be safer.

I just remember this feeling that I was going to lookout my window at any moment and see bombs going off and all sorts of explosions. I just heard the Pentagon had been hit as well. It seems foolish now but I thought Dallas would be a target. Maybe DFW airport, maybe the Bank of America building downtown. My Dad told me he thought he would be safe and that I should get to school.

I went up to the college but no one was going to classes, most students were in the student center or huddled outside the doors watching the news on TV, no one said a word, all you could hear is occasional crying and sobing, gasps and shrieks. I remember seeing a live shot of someone jumping out of the WTC must have been from 90 stories up, that image stuck with me. They cut away as soon as they could but you could see this woman jump from that high and falling to earth, it was just horrific. I never saw on any of the news coverage that footage again, but it just made me think about how awful it was for those people inside the WTC. I remember crying. I also had enlisted in the Army in 1999, I got chaptered out after basic training, I thought about if I could go back, I thought about will this country ever be at peace again?

[el mapache]

I had just moved from Seattle to Manhattan Beach, CA. I had a tiny little room attached to a house w/ no kitchen, but very close to the beach. My cable tv hadn't even been hooked up yet. I woke that morning to the sounds of an upstairs neighbor talking to someone, I couldn't make out what she was saying. I turned the radio on, I had it set I believe to an AM sports radio station, but it was Peter Jennings talking. So I listened a while, and as I had only one friend in LA, who happened to be at work at that time, I really had nowhere to go to watch any coverage. So, I ended up walking up to some small convenience store that I remembered usually seemed to have a small tv going. ANyways, I watched a good hour or so of coverage in there, but I hated standing, and couldn't really hear anything, so I guess I went back to my house and listened on the radio. I remember some people on the street approaching me and asking if I'd heard what happened. I told them yes, but couldn't really watch any of the coverage and I remember being so frustrated - here's this huge event unfolding and I basically can't watch any of it.

[robber baron]

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I question the loyalty and patriotism of ANY American who's first instinct was not "Let's go F somebody up for this"

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My first instinct was to experience a feeling of sadness and terror.

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Then its ass kicking time.

[Fast Food Knight]

I had 9:30 am Calculus recitation at Georgia Tech. I stumble into class, half asleep, and someone mentions something about attacks... there is a small outburst and the TA stops what he is doing. He is foreign, Asian or Indian, I don't remember, but what I do remember was that he started laughing and saying "oh yeah! terrorist attacks, hijacked planes, hhaaaaahahahaha" like it was f'ing hilarious. I just remember feeling very sick to my stomach and sort of like punching him.

The rest of the day, we huddled around the TV at my sorority house, people were crying and calling relatives. I remember how somber the mood was. I am almost certain that classes were cancelled.

[beenben]

At that time I worked a noon shift at a call center and didn't have kids yet. So weather permitting, I'd often play golf before work. So I go play my pre-work 18 at a course between my house and work. I get in the car and the radio, which had been set to a classic rock station witha humorous morning show, was now a news broadcast. I checked the channel and then figured out that something bad was up. But since it had already been a while since it happened and since they had already been covering the story for a while, it took me a few minutes to figure out what they were talking about.

I got to work and no one was working, no one was calling.

[dibbs]

I was at work, doing some wiring stuff on the edge of a massive property, all of a sudden my boss came running out of the house we were working for, he said New York had been attacked, it was a really tense morning.

[Cry Me A River]

We were at home on the morning of Sept 11, I usually went in to work around noon (flexible hours). My wife turned on the television shortly after the first plane hit and called me out to see what was going on. We watched the second plane hit live, at which point I said some like "Holy [censored]! One could be an accident, two no way! You're coming with me!"

At the time, we lived in downtown Ottawa (capital of Canada). Obviously Canada is not a the top of any terrorist "to do list", however we lived about 8 blocks from Parliament Hill (Canadian equivalent of The White House) and 2 blocks from the Iranian embassy. For all I knew, there could've been 20 planes in the air and if the [censored] was really going to hit the fan the last place I wanted to be was a few blocks from a potential ground zero.

I didn't have a car, so we both hopped on a city bus and we went out to my office which was on the far edge of town. This was an incredibly surreal ride as nobody else on the bus was aware yet that World War III may have just started and were just going about their day. Once at my work, we watched the day unfold on an old b&w tv in my boss' office and caught whatever news came over the net. Couple days later we went to the memorial service on Parliament Hill.