Do you remember where you were on 9/11?

[LAHomedog]

My account is no doubt the account of numerous others. I was just a couple miles from WTC. I heard the first impact and immediately felt like something was wrong because of the quality and proximity of the resulting boom. However, we’ve had transformer explosions and the like so I just turned on the news expecting to see a matter like that on the breaking news. As soon as I heard something was going on down there, I raced up to the roof and saw the tower smoking, prominent as they used to be in the lower Manhattan skyline. Over the next several minutes, all the rooftops around me started filling up with people from their apartments below. That's not unusual on, say, the 4th of July when people come up to watch the fireworks, but I'd never seen it quite so busy up there. The second plane came in and struck. Everyone was shocked and terrified and frantically asking what was happening. It was just a cacophony of confused voices.

I remember seeing the towers collapse right in front of me. However, what really sticks out in my mind, more than anything else that day, is the ungodly sound of a multitude of voices wailing all at once. It wasn't like hearing a bunch of people screaming. It was deeply ominous, full of haunting inflections, each expressing a genuine degree of anguish. It was like we were all a bunch of macabre foley artists, generating a ghastly roar to provide a sound effect for the otherwise silently crumbling tower in the distance. -- I can still recall it perfectly in my head and it still unnerves me in precisely the same way.

Later, I looked down at the avenue nearby and saw a grim scene; a handful of people in suits powdered in white dust that must have just walked blocks and blocks like that to get as far away as possible, toward wherever their homes were. They must have been numerous more, drifting in all directions across the city. They looked like stunned ghosts. I was close enough that my neighborhood was shut down to traffic and I had to take proof that I lived there to get back if I wandered out, which I did. Eventually, I visited a series of blocks by one of the National Guard headquarters which had become a sort of Missing Persons Row. It was positively wallpapered in images of missing loved ones, hung with such hasty desperation that there were signs on top of signs, which inevitably peeled off and were left to become trampled. No space was left bare. Even mailboxes were covered in flapping pieces of paper with family photos and pleas for help. It was a frustrating, depressing scene, not just because of the sheer magnitude of it, but also because you couldn't help but leave there with such a blur of countless faces that one couldn't possibly provide any one of them with the dignity or attention that their families wished for. Wanting to do something, I remember strolling into a makeshift site for providing aid and immediately volunteered but was sent away as they were already at capacity. Thus, I went home and sat helplessly in front of the television along with everyone else.

Thank you for taking the time to share such a powerful, emotional memory.

 

[Healwsteel]

At home in Providence, RI freaking out watching Headline News. At first no one knew what was going on. I thought the whole country would come under attack. When they figured out that most of the planes had come from the Providence Airport (TF Green), it got really creepy. Were these people who had set up cells here I had met?

The most frightened I had been in my life.

 

[NoJo]

It would give away too much personal information if I were to relate my experience of 9/11. Two close colleagues of mine were killed and I consider myself lucky to be alive. It changed my life seismically and permanently.

 

[LAHomedog]

It would give away too much personal information if I were to relate my experience of 9/11. Two close colleagues of mine were killed and I consider myself lucky to be alive. It changed my life seismically and permanently.

I am sorry to read this, and I hope you are healing.

 

[LAHomedog]

I think there are moments in our lives of such shocking public tragedy, that the shear horror of the indescribable nightmare is seared into our brains forever.

I'm sure we are all the same on this. Maybe the events are different depending upon our ages and location, but the same common emotional experience.

Like 9/11, I know exactly where I was when I heard that Kennedy was shot. 8th grade, Jr. High cafeteria and Miss Hayes the history teacher stood on a table crying to tell us the news.

I know exactly where I was when watching Monday Night Football to hear Howard Cosell announce that John Lennon had been shot and killed.

The same for the killing of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk in San Francisco, and when Reagan got shot.

I don't mean to compare the next two to any of those, but I know where I was and what I was doing when I heard that Magic Johnson had HIV, and I have never seen an entire community so universally shocked and grieving together as when Kobe Bryant was killed in the helicopter crash.

I think we all have those in our lives. They are burned into our memories until the day we die.

I have publicly cried at two memorial sites. The first time was when we went down to visit the WTC memorial for the first time. We were all tearing up on the subway down, actually.

The second was unexpected. When we went to the site and memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing. I had no idea to what to expect and both my wife and I were emotionally floored. And when I was walking the part with the 168 empty metal chairs I broke down and had to sit on the grass sobbing.

I've never had the guts to go to the concentration camps, but my wife has. But I have been to Pearl Harbor.

It's important to remember and share for our humanity.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I worked in an international workplace in London - maybe a quarter of the 800 of us were American or.married to one or had recently lived there for a few years.

The radio was on, and a report that a plane had hit the WTC. My boss asked me to find the BBC on the internet, website news being in its infancy so no-one else read online news. Someone rigged up a giant TV in the lounge.

Then the second tower was hit and 100 colleagues went silent.
Then the exodus as people made frantic phone calls. And the political predictions, generally of a huge military overreaction, started immediately. I remember one guy asking, "do you think Americans will stop supporting the IRA now?", and my boss saying "there will be carnage," and his boss (American) saying "now America realises it is part of the rest of the world".

I knew about the World Trade Centre but to me and other Brits, even if we'd been to NY, one rectangular skyscraper looks like another - I'd never heard of 'the twin towers'. Also most of us spent the next week going "wtf is a box cutter?"

A friend's fiancé died - I only knew him online but for years people would occasionally go "haven't heard from $username for ages" and they'd have to be told.

I learnt about Bhopal in high school chemistry, but vaguely remember it from Newsround (a 10-min news show for kids that's in the middle of the other children's TV on the BBC). Chernobyl. Lockerbie (the end of Pan Am), Hungerford (the mass shooting that resulted in stricter gun laws in the UK), Zeebrugge (the sinking of the ferry Herald of Free Enterprise), and, much more happily, the fall of the Berlin Wall. My grandparents were from Eastern Europe but went to America before WWI, and had always dreamed that one day it might be possible to go back. They were too elderly by then but my grandfather got a new lease of life from the mere possibility.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've never had the guts to go to the concentration camps, but my wife has. But I have been to Pearl Harbor.

It's important to remember and share for our humanity.

Here in Australia war memorials have lists of names and the wars the soldiers died in - some towns, a couple of dozen names, in cities, more. But always their names are listed.

In Russia (I went across it by train in the early eighties) the war memorials in each town the train stopped at stated how many thousands or tens of thousands served from that town or city during the Great Patriotic War, and how many returned. In Irkutsk, the numbers were 80,000 and 5,000 respectively. There were no old men in Russia that year, but many, many old women.

War is cruel, in whatever numbers it is measured, but the alternatives would have been far, far worse. I fear, sometimes, that we have short memories - but I hope there is still wisdom when it is needed most.

 

[lovecraft68]

Where I was is irrelevant, what is is that 20 years later an entire country has been taken over by the next generation of that group

Shows what a half ass job we did in not just revenge, but eradicating them from that day forward. A failure on every president since to spend billions occupying and doing nothing, they knew they were in the mountains and in other places hiding out, did nothing, didn't make it the real war it should have been.

Hell, Obama only finally got Bin Laden because he needed a spike in popularity, they knew where he was for years before that.

It was a horrific tragedy, but also a disgrace, because we could have stopped it then, and once we didn't could have rid the world of those maggots and never did, now an entire country us enslaved and we aren't doing anything.

And because of that? Get ready for a major hit on US soil soon, because we've shown to be cowards, and when they do? Our Gov...will do nothing, be like Benghazi...oh, sorry, our fault our infidel asses pissed you off....

Honoring the victims is something that should be done, but their memory and death is being dragged through the mud because it was never avenged and look where we are now.

One more little truth bomb. 20 years ago New Yorkers heralded the NYPD and other responders as heroes and they were.

Now they throw bags of shit at them and scream defund the police.

How's that for being "progressive?"

 

[Zeb_Carter]

In Atlanta, at work. The entire office was gathered in the auditorium watching things unfold on about six different TVs. The entire network at work was crumbling as everyone who couldn't get to a TV was trying to watch things on their workstations.

When the President of the company showed up, he sent everyone home.

 

[vanmyers86]

It would give away too much personal information if I were to relate my experience of 9/11. Two close colleagues of mine were killed and I consider myself lucky to be alive. It changed my life seismically and permanently.

Thank you for sharing, NoJo. I'm so sorry about your colleagues and friends, and I hope you are doing OK.

The second was unexpected. When we went to the site and memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing. I had no idea to what to expect and both my wife and I were emotionally floored. And when I was walking the part with the 168 empty metal chairs I broke down and had to sit on the grass sobbing.

LAHomedog, I have visited the OKC memorial museum twice and cried both times. The room with the children's shoes always gets me.

 

[vanmyers86]

Bumping up this old thread, as it contains some amazing stories and memories. If you've joined Lit in the last couple of years and would like to share your own story, please do.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I have at one time or another, but it isn't anything I want to revisit.

Bumping up this old thread, as it contains some amazing stories and memories. If you've joined Lit in the last couple of years and would like to share your own story, please do.

 

[alohadave]

I was in the Navy coming back from a WestPac deployment. We were 3 days from Pearl Harbor, our home port.

I had just gotten off watch and sat down in the berthing compartment where the TV was on showing live coverage. The first tower had been hit, and while I watched, the second tower was hit, the. Watched them fall.

The first thing I did was to get on the satellite phone and call my wife. I knew they were going to lock down comms for an indefinite time, and I wanted to tell her that we were okay and I'd call again when I could.

My wife was part of the wive's committee and they were locked out of the base. They had a big welcome planned and it all had to be scrapped. For a time, they weren't going to be let on to meet us at the pier, but the base finally let them come on base for that.

My wife is from Boston and is a travel agent. She had planned on bringing her parents out to meet the ship, and she would have flown them out on 9/11 and that would have been Flight 11. The decided not to come because her father was a chain smoker at the time and wouldn't take that long of a flight.

She did have a colleague that was on the flight.

An interesting thing about that time, is that I can clearly remember the first tower and the Pentagon already being hit when the second tower was hit. But it's a trick of my memory because the two towers were hit before the Pentagon was.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Do you remember where you were on 9/11?​

Without being facetious, I was in Pre-K.

It’s also my Mom’s birthday. Not the happiest of anniversaries to have.

I knew something bad had happened, but that was about it.

Em

 

[KeithD]

I heard a new vignette on 9/11 stories a couple of weeks ago. The son of good friends of ours had cancer at a very young age (in this twenties). We knew it went into remission. His mother is widowed now and the last time we went through D.C. we took her to dinner. We remarked on how sad it was he'd gone through cancer so early in life, but she told us for the first time that it had saved his life at the time. He had a chemo appointment on the morning of 9/11 and thus wasn't in his office. He worked in the section of the Pentagon that was totally obliterated by the third hijacked plane.

 

[AchtungNight]

I was asleep when the planes first crashed. I remember waking up suddenly startled, as if I had felt a great disturbance in the Force. I was working security at Walmart at the time, that day I saw a lot of worried people. Others, including my relatives and friends, called me and expressed their fear. A favorite newspaper columnist summarized my feelings best- “these terrorists have done something incredibly brutal and unnecessary. They did not know the consequences of their actions. But they are about to learn.”

 

[Djmac1031]

I was working part time then, so had the day off.

Got up that morning, got my daughter off to school, then went back to bed and put the radio on.

Was listening to Howard Stern on the Philly simulcast station.

They started talking about a plane crash into the WTC. As they started getting more reports, I decided to go turn on the TV to see what was up.

Just in time to witness the second plane crash. That's when it really hit home to me (and everyone, obviously,) that this was no mere accident.

Called my daughter's school; they had no plans for dismissal so allowed her to stay.

My (now ex) wife worked in Philly, one of the biggest high rises in Center City.

Called her, (took awhile to get through,) and she said while there was no real directive from her managers on what to do, they could leave if they wanted to.

I of course encouraged her to get the hell out of the building ASAP. Because who knew where was next?

Skip ahead a few days to that Friday.

I was scheduled to DJ a fireman's convention in Wildwood NJ. One I'd done for years, many of them coming down from NYC.

To my surprise, they didn't cancel the event.

The "party" was pretty somber early on, obviously, and I was terrified of playing the wrong thing. Because who wanted happy, upbeat dance music, right?

So they ate, gave some speeches, then asked for two songs:

God Bless America, then God Bless The USA by Lee Greenwood.

Tears and singing during both.

I had no idea what to follow up with, then it hit me.

My next song was Coming To America by Neil Diamond.

I just expected maybe some singing.

Instead, next thing you know, they were dancing!

The party carried on from there, people determined to carry on and celebrate and enjoy despite the tragedy.

I'll never forget it.

 

[One_ping_only]

I was working for a courier company and we had a clear view of the towers that morning. Having a roof top parking on top of the Javitz Center on 34st on a crystal clear day we could see everything including the collapse of both towers.

Sirens blaring all day and the chaos that ensued for hours on end has definitely embedded bad memories for that day but needless to say it was a day of blessing for me. My fiancee then and my wife now had gotten out of the first tower earlier in the morning and managed to actually walk up to midtown and taken the ferry to cross back home. I didn't know her status until late into the afternoon.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

(I just scanned through the older posts and found I already mentioned this. Sorry for the repetition. )

Someone mentioned the OKC bombing memorial, and I thought of this:

Part of the Family Resource Center was a cafeteria (because there were people there from all different agencies, all day long). About halfway through my time with the Red Cross, I was eating lunch and a group of survivors and families from OK City, who'd started a support and outreach group came in, and a couple of them sat with me. A few minutes later a few NYPD officers sat down.

One of the women, right across from me, was wearing a University of OK Sooners t-shirt, and she and I started talking college football. There was a lot of good natured ribbing about whose team was better, but we both agreed that FSU, and Bobby Bowden in particular sucked (kinda like everyone hates on Alabama now). We talked about the season that had just started. Probably a good 15 min conversation.

She got up to leave, and the cops sitting next to me started shaking his head, I looked at him, and he said "I've literally never seen two women argue about football before."

I wish I could remember what I said back, I just remember laughing. And then sort of wondering at the little bit of levity in the middle of a really stressful couple of weeks.

 

[MetaBob]

FWIW, MetaBob, I think a lot of us just shared a tear with you too after reading your post. Intense, moving, and a stark reminder of how the impact of the 3,000 that died that day so quickly multiplied exponentially into their families and friends, and eventually the entire population as a whole.

Every year, for the rest of my life. It doesn't get easier. Yes, I'm crying now.

 

[Throwaway256897q6r72]

I was a freshman in high school. Me and three other classmates were transfered from one class to another because we were ahead of the other class. Same teacher, just a different class. We were waiting at her desk for her to come in and tell us where to sit. She ran into the room, turned on the TV and told us just to sit somewhere.

A short time later, the second tower was hit. She was a great teacher to have for it, really was able to talk us through it and what her and the other teachers were thinking.

All my classes were the same, besides math. That teacher refused to turn on the TV and just wanted to teach. Kept telling us that school was more important. I was angry at the time, but I can only imagine what she was going through.

My biggest memory is of a bunch of seniors saying that they had better enjoy the year, as they all thought they would be forced to join the military after they graduated. Not sure if any ended up joining or not, but I know a few in my class did.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

This is NOT an attempt to make this about me. On 09/11/2001 I was getting pneumonia, at a time when my wife and I were both free-lancing and our family doctor had just moved away. It was the 'managed care' era, and we were up a creek. I raced several rats, and eventually got treatment. The upshot was, in the aftermath of 9-11 I wanted to donate blood, and for several weeks, I couldn't.

 

[CyranoJ]

I was on my way to work. There was an electronics store on my usual route that had demo TVs in the windows. That's where I saw the first tower smoking after it had been struck. I saw the second plane hit when I arrived at work, where my colleagues were watching the news. We were speechless. Rest of the day was a write-off.

My brother was, that same morning, interviewing for a job as a flight attendant for WestJet. He saw the news when he came out of the interview. Needless to say, he did not wind up pursuing that line of work.

 

[SmoothAndSweet]

pretty sure a good part of me was dripping out of my momma's pussy

 

[stonedinstilletos]

I was at work. I had just lost my office to a more senior person so I was back to using a cubicle. Which was ok because I was still the new person in our group.

Anyways, the paralegal in our group suddenly said “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.” And we were all very confused. How did a plane hit one of the towers. And then a few moments later, she refrushed the story and announced it wasn’t a small plane but a passenger plane. We were all still really confused.

The morning meeting was just ending in the main conference room and the senior attorneys always kept a tv in there tuned to ESPN. So the woman who had just taken my office and I walked over and switched it over ABC affiliate (it was the first one we got to with the remote). And we saw the tower smoking. And less than a minute later, we watched the second plane hit the other tower.

I had a dozen friends from law school and undergrad who I knew worked in those two buildings. I remember sitting there praying for the buildings to not collapse just yet because I wanted my friends to all get out. Then there was a report of the plane hitting the Pentagon. Things just seemed so chaotic but calm at the same time. No one seemed to be able to give any idea of why this was happening. There were assumptions, but I dont remember ever hearing the word “Al Qaeda” or Bin Laden until much later that day.

After a while, someone noticed on the screen something falling from one of the towers. Later we found out it was some of the people who were trapped above the crashes.

A few minutes after that, the first tower (the South Tower) collapsed. I remember thinking this can’t be happening, this looks too movie-like. And I kept praying. I just anted people to get out of those buildings. And then about a 20 minutes later, the North Tower collapsed.

We got sent home a little while after that. We were a government office and no one was sure if our building might be next on the list. The cellphone lines were overloaded so it was almost impossible to call people on the East Coast in the NY/Mid Atlantic area that I was in. Oddly enough I could get through to my friends on the west coast easier. So my friends and I were all calling to find out if we knew where our friends were. One of my favorite guys from undergrad was the first we found. He’d been offsite doing a training for the new system he was supposed to install. A couple of our friends were quickly accounted for because they were travelling for work or were at home. By the evening we had accounted for everyone in my friend groups except for one. And we were really scared he was dead. We all knew which tower he worked in North Tower and was somehwere in the 80s.

His wife (we were on the outs because I didn’t like the way she was treated him) only intermittently able to respond or call out because the phones were so messed up. She was starting to lose hope when just after midnight her husband (our friend) showed up completely covered head to toe in dust from the collapse. He had walked down 80 some-odd flights (the plane had crashed on the other side a couple of floors above his office). He had started to go back up when they said people should go back to their desks, but decided he would go down anyways. And that saved his life most likely.

So I got pretty lucky that day. None of my friends died.