On A Pale Horse....

[Kantarii]

This is a small tribute to the people of 9/11. My heart still feels the pain after 15 years for the loss.

So to keep the thead in guidelines, "Do you remember the book you were reading at the time you heard the devastating news?" Mine is in the title by Piece Anthony

 

[PennLady]

I don't remember, because I was at work, about a mile or so from the Pentagon, when it happened. Can't remember what I might have had going at the time.

I did write an essay, just for myself afterwards, on what I did and thought that day. Unfortunately I'm not sure where it is. I think I still have the computer it was on, just not sure it's still there.

 

[lovecraft68]

I was at work when it happened.

I remember a woman from the office that was over the factory opening the window and yelling down to people that someone had attacked New York.

A bunch of ran into the break room and put the TV on. We sat there for two hours and the owner was right there with us. I remember he was crying and he sent everyone home with pay for the rest of the day.

Book wise I was rereading F Paul Wilson's the Keep. I probably only remember that because I was walking out of the building in a daze like everyone else and someone called out to me that I'd left my book on my desk and handed it to me.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I was actually checking code I had written earlier that morning. I was working from home at the time when the news flash came across the TV that was on in the living room. What a horrifying day.

 

[GoldenCojones]

I was at work when it happened. I was scheduled to fly to Chicago the next week. I seriously considered not going but my boss convinced me to go. The planes were mostly empty and the airport while not at all full, was in chaos.

I was somewhere in the middle of the "Wheel of Time" series, but I don't recall which book I was reading.

 

[Carnal_Flower]

Such a sad day. Beautiful here in NYC, too.

I think I was reading the Golden Compass series.

 

[legerdemer]

I was in a car, driving to an airport in a rush to take my partner so he would not to miss a flight. I finally had the time to get a call that we kept putting off answering. When I turned on the car radio, we sat there for a while. The turned around, drove home, and turned on the TV. Crying. Dumbstruck.

Then calling and emailing friends in NYC to ask if they were OK.

 

[lovecraft68]

Just saw something on the Patriots website that brought back a memory.

On 9/11 Patriots offensive linemen Joe Andruzzi's three brothers were Firemen in the city of New York and a couple of them I believe were in the building at one point. They ended up getting out safely. But I remember his news conference saying they were safe and just balling.

The Pats honored his three brothers the following week when the season re-started after cancelling all the games the prior week.

 

[lovecraft68]

I find it telling where our society is now. After 9/11 all the Police involved were hailed as heroes as they should be.

Now in 2016 cops are vilified and its becoming okay to kill them, thank you progressives.

 

[rjordan]

I find it telling where our society is now. After 9/11 all the Police involved were hailed as heroes as they should be.

Now in 2016 cops are vilified and its becoming okay to kill them, thank you progressives.

You must be a Republican. They always find ways to politicize 9/11 to push their own agenda. Save it for later.

rj

 

[sr71plt]

The nonfiction I was reading at the time was Daniel Boorstin’s The Creators and the fiction was P.D. James’s Death of an Expert Witness (I don’t know this from memory—I keep lists and looked it up). What I was editing for a publisher when it all started being reported on the TV behind me (with the first airplane going into the first tower) was Brassey’s Eurasian Security Yearbook, by Ustima Markus and Daniel Nelson. I remember at the time being glad that I had something other than a book on Mideast terrorism to edit.

As soon as the plane hit the Pentagon, I was on the phone trying to raise my daughter, who lived in a high rise just up river from the Pentagon in Roslyn. I knew she had a briefing to give in the Pentagon that afternoon. When she answered, she was on the street, as they’d evacuated her building, not knowing if there’d be other planes, and the apartment house was in the river approach path to the Pentagon from the west. She’d been dressing when the plane went by her window, at the same level as her twelfth-floor apartment and the explosion rattled her windows—and her.

We were having a fence put in our backyard and I went out there to tell the workers what had happened. They were Hispanic and I had to explain what the World Trade Center was and even what terrorism was. Just as soon as I asked if any of them had family in New York City, though, they all took off.

The next day I was in Washington myself, where all hands who had ever worked Mideast terrorism were gathering. I stayed in my daughter’s apartment. She wasn’t there, because she was at a girlfriend’s house helping the woman through a death watch for a husband who worked in the West block of the Pentagon. He was found a day and a half later, walking, disheveled, bruised, and in shock, in a Crystal City shopping mall, but still alive.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

I was driving into work. It was one of those days I didn't have the radio on, so when I got into the office I was startled to see the cube farm empty of life. I checked the conference room and everyone was glued to the screen; the first plane had hit the tower not long before. Reporters were still speculating about how it might have been an accident; a speculation that didn't last long.

I found out two days later I'd lost a friend on one of the other downed flights.

 

[Hypoxia]

My partner and I were doing our usual telecommuting systems work on laptops at the dining table at home, an hour north of San Francisco. The TV was off. The phone rang -- my mom, saying my sister was okay. Why shouldn't she be? Sis was a NY transit cop. Her office was in WTC 1 but she was out leading her team to pick up the night's corpses from the subway tubes. Then my partner's sister called to say she was okay, too. Her financial firm had WTC offices but she was in an uptown meeting. Both sisters lost more than a few co-workers. We turned on the TV and got little work done that day.

Yes, it's personal.