Do you remember where you were on 9/11?

[vanmyers86]

I am always curious about people's Sept. 11, 2001, stories. I don't know if folks outside the United States have the visceral memories many of us do, but if you'd like to share your memory, I would like to hear it.

I was still a journalist, and arrived at work just after the second plane hit the tower. I remember walking into the newsroom and everyone was gathered around the televisions, utterly speechless. Then we kind of shook ourselves off, hunkered down and put out an extra edition. All kinds of rumors were flying that day, and people kept calling with new ones.

What I remember best is what a beautiful day it was - clear and perfect - and how weird it was to go out into a deserted downtown and not hear any planes or see any jet trails in the sky. . I still recall how numb I felt for a good three days or so. Our wedding anniversary was the next day and we spent it in a daze. We couldn't bring ourselves to celebrate it.

 

[Maeven_quinn]

I was getting ready for school with this cat-ear hair band I insisted I be allowed to wear. My mom got me and my brother in the car and we heard about it on the radio. She went white. I don't think I'd ever seen her that scared. My dad left work that day and none of us went anywhere for the rest of the day.

 

[SimonDoom]

I will never forget. I was up and getting ready to go to work, and the TV was on -- I think the Today Show. And I remember seeing the towers and the smoke coming from them, and I remember that I could barely comprehend what was happening. I tuned in after the second plane hit, and it was hard to tell from the video coverage what had happened at first. When the second tower collapsed it was surreal. I went to work but I spent most of the day on the Internet watching the news, dumbstruck by what had happened.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

I won't ever forget either.
I was at home, waiting to get some furniture delivered. I'd been puttering around and hadn't turned on the TV. I worked for a crisis response team in upstate New York that was based out of the local hospital. My partner on the team was working in the emergency room. He called me and asked if I knew what was going on because the nurses were talking about a plane hitting the World Trade Center and he was sure that they were wrong about what kind of plane it was.

I turned on the TV just after the second plane hit. They kept showing replays of it. I told him what i was seeing, and that it was obviously a large plane. He didn't believe me either. I didn't sleep for 23 hours. I couldn't stop watching the coverage. It's weird, the things that stick out in my mind. That the home shopping network and most of the non news cable channels just stopped broadcasting. The look on the face of the delivery guy when he knocked on my door. Literally dropping the phone when the tower collapsed.

A few weeks later I worked with the Red Cross at the Family Resource Center in New York City for two weeks. Those are my most vivid memories.

You're right, about how eerie and incongruous it was, that the weather was just about perfect and then this horrible thing happened.

I don't dwell on it, and I'm sure folks from other countries think that we Yanks are too fixated on it. But in my mind, there's still "before" and "after".

 

[Rustyoznail]

It was about 11 pm here. I was watching TV and flicked across to the news to catch the weather forecast. There was smoke pouring out of a building, and I really didn't catch what had happened.

Then the second plane hit. I called my wife out from bed and we watched it for hours. The whole thing was surreal, particularly from this distance.

Later that morning, off to work.

 

[Voboy]

I was at grad school. I’d gotten out of the Army (a VERY highly deployable unit) on 01 June. Three months out. The moment I heard about the attacks, after a 9-noon class (no smartphones with constant news feeds back then), I knew immediately what had happened and who had done it.

Al Quaeda had been attacking us for awhile then. Most people, cocooned in the Clinton bubble, had no idea.

 

[NotWise]

I was in my office. My office mate/good friend grew up in the Bronx. I'm not sure how it all happened, but I think I knew before I went to work that something happened in Manhattan. Our landlord (also a friend) brought in a little TV that he had stashed in a spare room, and we watched together.

It was horrible.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I was working with a bunch of ex air-force pilots when it happened. I remember one of them saying, "That fucker is good, flying a plane that big into that tower so cleanly." I'd never heard of Bin Laden at that point. I later heard the sister of a work colleague was in the second tower; gone in an instant, so that made it more real.

I imagine for Americans it must have been a similar shock as Pearl Harbor, war brought to their own backyard. A world-changing event, without doubt.

 

[KeithD]

I was in my home office in Central Virginia, starting the day with an edit of book on Al-Qaida terrorism (with CNN on), while a crew from New York was putting up a fence in my back yard. After the first tower had crumbled and as I was returning from the back yard to tell the guys out there they could leave if they needed to (they did), my daughter, who had an apartment on the 10th floor of an apartment house on the Potomac River in Roslyn, across from Georgetown, was on the phone to say she'd just been dressing for work--attending an IBM project meeting in the Pentagon--and a low-flying plane had just passed above the river at her window level, followed by a nearby explosion. What should she do? "Take the stairs downstairs and stand in the parking lot. Now," I said. Someone from her office had already arrived at the Pentagon. For five days everyone thought he was dead, but then he was picked up at Crystal City (to the east of the Pentagon), wandering around and mumbling incoherently.

 

[ChloeTzang]

I’d just gone to school when it came on the news. School was closed, my mom came to pick us up and after we got home we all saw what happened on tv. First and last time I ever saw my mom crying. My Dad was off overseas for work and my grandparents came round. I do remember feeling totally shocked.

 

[JPGmvny]

Where I Was

I was in my office at Madison and 40th. I heard a plane had hit the WTC, and I thought about the plane that hit the Empire State Building years ago. Then it was clear that a second plane hit. I called my wife, who worked about 12 blocks north, and we met on Fifth Avenue. That's when we heard the first Tower had collapsed. You could see the smoke if you looked down Fifth. Everyone was stunned.

We walked to my sister's on Riverside Drive in a procession of people heading through Central Park to the Upper West Side. We then went near Columbia where her kids were in grammar school. Many students, including my nephews, had parents who worked down town. We got word that my BiL was OK; his office was a few blocks away. The school released the kids in a very organized fashion, and we walked home with them. We borrowed my sister's car to drive home to the suburbs. All traffic into the City was haled except for Army and first responders.

When I went downtown a few weeks later, there was a spot where you hit a wall of a stench that took weeks to dissipate. And there were the Missing signs and the FDNY funerals at St. Pat's where Fifth Avenue was closed for the processions.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

When I went downtown a few weeks later, there was a spot where you hit a wall of a stench that took weeks to dissipate. And there were the Missing signs and the FDNY funerals at St. Pat's where Fifth Avenue was closed for the processions.

Yeah, the stench was still there when I went in with the Red Cross. And the missing posters. An entire wall of missing posters at the Family Resource Center (which was a converted warehouse). By the time I volunteered there, they'd already had some funerals, so people were coming back with Mass cards and programs from memorial services and taping them to the missing poster.

 

[AloneTooLong]

i was at work, had been there a couple of hours. Someone in the kitchen was watching the news before heading to their cubicle and came down the hall, getting everyone's attention so we all gathered around to see what was happening. Absolute shock and dismay (we worked for a Saudi company)

We were sent home at noon, and returned the following day to armed guards at the doors for the next 30 days. Will never forget that nor the day Pres. Kennedy was shot.

 

[SamScribble]

I was in London, a few hours ahead of New York. I had just sent off my copy for a magazine column, and I was taking a coffee break and scanning the world news on my laptop. I think the bandwidth must have been pretty choked because the picture kept freezing. It freed up just in time for me to see the second plane hitting. I remember thinking that it must have been a movie promo or something. But no such luck.

 

[Javahead]

I was on my way to work when I first heard on the radio. In the office, we all sat around the break room TV and watched. Lots of disbelief. Even more so that night as we tried to explain what had happened to our kids.

I’d never been inside the World Trade Center, just passed by outside, but my wife and kids had visited the summer before and been up to the top. It shook us. It must have been unimaginably worse for New Yorkers.

 

[Jada59]

I was living in military housing in Alameda, CA. I was upstairs with my daughter. We came downstairs. My parents were visiting. CNN was on TV. My then husband told me what happened. I didn't believe him because he was always making stuff up.

 

[RNJAG]

I live in Alberta Canada and do out side sales for an industrial supply company. I was driving to small town a couple hours from home. Listening to a talk show on the radio and the guys on the radio started talking about a plane that flew into the WTC. There was confusion, it was a small plane, it was a bigger plane, then the 2nd plane hit and removed all doubt. 2 big planes hitting the 2 towers is not a coincidence. This was deliberate. About an hour later I got to where I was going and every one was glued to a tv. A lot of shock and awe - was this the start of WWIII?
100’s of planes and 1000’s of people on those planes in the US and destined to the US as well as Cdn flights were directed to land at the nearest airport. That jammed up many CDN airports, big and small. Many of the passengers were put up in people’s homes. It was surreal, it was unreal. It was unimaginable.

 

[JKendallDane]

I was drinking coffee and doing some bookkeeping work at home with the TV on in the background. As soon as the first "Breaking News" reports and images of the first tower burning came on, I became attached to the screen. I was watching live when the second plane sliced through tower #2 and will never forget that image.

After both towers had fallen, I finally went down to open my antique shop for the day even though the almost deserted streets on the way told me it was highly doubtful I'd have any business to conduct. That assumption proved correct and I spent more time at the upholstery shop next door all afternoon because my shop was like a tomb, my dial-up internet was slower than molasses, and they had a TV to watch.

What I probably remember most is what happened a couple days later though, when a guy from the Navy base and his Middle Eastern wife who was wearing a hijab came in the antique store. I answered any questions they had and helped them just like I would with any other customer.

When they were leaving he commented on my attention and helpfulness and I'll always remember what she said: "You're the first person in three days that's treated me like a human being. Thank you for not judging me because three days ago we ALL became Americans. May your God bless you always."

Eighteen years later, too much of the country STILL can't see how much those simple things are what makes the difference.

.

 

[PrincepsCyberius]

On 11 September 2001, I was driving with one of my law partners from Racine, WI, to Fergus Falls, MN, for oral arguments against a motion for summary judgment in a federal lawsuit in which we represented the plaintiff. As we pulled off I-94 for breakfast a little southeast of Eau Claire, WI, the news on the radio mentioned a plane had hit one of the towers of the WTC. We assumed it was a tragic accident.

At breakfast, I overheard a lady in another booth say that the news had reported that the airplane that hit the WTC had been hijacked. I mentioned to my traveling companion that it sounded like the crash had been an act of terrorism, but still assumed it was an isolated incident.

By the time we finished breakfast, got back into the firm's SUV, pulled back on the highway, and turned on the radio, the second tower had been hit. Soon thereafter, we heard that the Pentagon had been hit. Then the first tower fell, all described by reporters on NPR. I remember even as we cruised down the freeway, my partner and I just turning and staring at each other in shock.

We called the federal courthouse to which we were headed and were told they planned to go ahead with court the next day. I suppose they figured the small wing of the Fergus Falls Post Office holding the federal court there would not be much of a target for terrorism.

That night I sat in the hotel bar watching the news and having a couple drinks. It all felt rather surrealistic. A group of European tourists, they sounded German, sat at a nearby table, drinking and laughing like a normal evening. While I could not understand what they said, they did not seem to be disrespectful or making fun of the situation. They simply seemed unaffected by it.

I went back to my suite and HBO was airing a marathon of Band of Brothers, I think in place of their scheduled programming, since it had premiered only a couple of days before. I watched that for a while and then managed to sleep a bit.

The next day we proceeded to Court, which was a good distraction for all that had happened. We defeated the summary judgment motion and went on to eventually settle the case for seven figures, which intertwines two major but otherwise totally unrelated events of my life forever together in my mind.

 

[beachbum1958]

I was in the Accident & Emergency waiting room at University College Hospital, London, on-duty because they were a couple of doctors down due to staff sickness. It was that strange, transition hour between clearing down the late-night/early-morning drunks, OD'd junkies, crackheads, and accident victims and gearing-up for the usual afternoon influx, and everyone was speechless, glued to the TV bolted to the wall as the whole thing unfolded; it's normally like a mosh-pit in there, raucous drunks, mutterers, the morning's shouters, spitters, and screamers usually making an ear-splitting din, but that morning you could hear a pin drop, and the strange, collective moan as the second aircraft slammed into the tower was like nothing I'd ever heard before, or since. My American wife called me to tell me to turn on the news, and to cry down the phone at me, but even I, in my insulated medical world on the other side of the planet, knew that this was just the beginning.

 

[LupusDei]

I'm at GMT+3 and wandered into a room full of people glued to a TV with CNN on. I suppose it was the small architect's office I was working in, but could be another similar I was frequently visiting around that time. In any case, I wondered why the whole office would watch a movie in the middle of a workday -- it was implausible, but knowing the people, not impossible -- and tried to joke about that. Then some girl said "it's for real," in a completely bland voice. Then the next news loop started on TV and I tuned in to the reality of the events. Almost no more work was done that day here either, although people generally remained in place, but the news topic was overwhelming.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

I was at home in Montreal; no classes that day, so I slept in a bit. Turned on the TV and stared in disbelief. The news kept describing it as an accident, but it didn't seem likely to me. Then I saw the second plane fly in and knew for sure it was no accident.
I was in school in lower Manhattan, and working nights on Wall street when the World Trade Center was being built; it was disheartening to see them fall. Even more disheartening to think of the people inside, people who worked at jobs as I had back in the day, and their undeserved fate. I worried also about a nephew of mine who worked out of the Manhattan South Precinct; I knew he would have been there. Later I found that he had barely cleared people from the second tower when it collapsed.

 

[Handley_Page]

Riveted to the TV in the Crew room at work

 

[RetroFan]

It was very late at night in Australia for us, getting close to midnight in Melbourne.

On this topic, have you ever referenced September 11 in any of your works, either in hindsight or foreshadowing? I've done it quite a few times.

 

[OneAuthor]

On Sept. 11, 2001

I was driving to work and my wife called me, saying that she had just heard on the news that a plane crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. At that time, they were speculating about whether it was a horrible accident or an act of terrorism. Just before I arrived at my office, my wife called again...saying another plane crashed into the second tower. I was in shock, then horrified that such an act of terrorism would happen.

My productivity at work was practically zero, as the news of more events involving plane crashes came in over the next few hours. I ended up leaving work early to go home, and stared at the television for the next six or seven hours...staring almost in disbelief at the images of the carnage and chaos happening in a city only about 90 minutes away from where I lived.