Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Where were you on 9/11?

I thought I'd start a thread for 9/11 since today marks it's 9th anniversary. I really want to keep this thread about the memory of those who died and not about all the mosque controversy going on.

It's strange how when something significant happens, you always remember what you were doing when the event took place. Since I don't know anyone personally who died on that day, I'm just going to say what I was doing when the attacks happened.

I was a freshman at my University and was in my morning 8-10AM class, Old Testament. We got out a little early, which was unusual, probably around 9:30AM. None of us knew what had happened/was happening. When I got back to the dorm, a TON of people were standing in the lobby watching television. I remember being really annoyed because I thought it was a class or something and that they were using the Women's dorm lobby as their classroom. When I got back to my suite, all my suite mates and then some were watching television in our suite, which also annoyed me. I thought, "Geez, doesn't anyone do anything besides watch tv around here." I went into my room and layed down on my bed. I kept hearing gasps and 'oh my gosh' from the living room so finally went out of my room to see what everyone was talking about. That's when I FINALLY saw what was happening. It was around 10AM. My dad worked for a network television station at the time so I called him to see what was going on.

God bless all the families that lost loved ones on that day.

We were asleep in bed when the phone rang with a call from my mother at 6 a.m. Pacific time. Being an early bird, she had turned on the morning news and was in a panic because she thought our son worked in the World Trade Center. We were able to assure her he worked in the building next door, but that didn't mean he was out of danger.
So we turned on the TV and followed the various reports and fielded phone calls from the family.
Nobody on the East Coast really knew anything concrete until our son finally called from his brother-in-law's office uptown.

Our son was fine. When they were told to evacuate, he ran uptown to BIL's office. The whole area was in a panic (as you can see by the newscast images.) We told him what the news was saying and that it was planes fully loaded with passengers and aviation fuel. That was the real horror of it. No one had ever done that before.

We asked him what he had seen. He said he had gotten into work early (banker's hours, you know) and had just bought coffee at Starbucks by the WTC. He was sitting at his desk by his windows facing the WTC when things began falling from the sky. They didn't really hear an explosion because the first airplane hit many floors above where he was in the building next door. At first they didn't understand what they were seeing and then they did.

Also Deutchebank across the street was on fire from the debris spray. His Navy training took over and he got out of there fast, much to the relief of the whole family.

Almost as bad was the blackout a little over two years later. Everyone in New York wondered if it was another attack. Even the cell phone towers weren't working. He called us then from a pay phone by the Brooklyn Bridge and asked if it was another attack. We were able to tell him no, that it was just a power grid failure. Buses and trains were out and he had to hike miles to get home. Thank goodness for a quiet few years recently.

Almost worse for us was the airplane into the Pentagon, because we had worked there. No one we knew was killed then.

It is so easy to ignite and inflame a devastating political fire and not know how to put it out.
Remembering 9/11
Artemis

We were sleeping. The only day off for DH during the week [he usually interned on Tuesdays but wasn't for some reason]. My sister called and woke us up sometime after the 2nd tower was hit. My thought was that 10s of 1000s would be dead before it was all over. It didn't take LONG for the towers to fall, but it was long enough for most people to get out. We watched the first one. We were in the car on the way to Lamaze for the second one. We'd heard our medium sized city was at risk because of the Federal Medical Prison here [the sheik guy from the first attacks was housed here at the time] and he'd recently been to the hospital where we were headed so it was supposedly a target as well.

We went to Lamaze where none of us could concentrate then came home and were glued to the TV again.

I remember that day so vividly.

My husband had died 2 weeks before, and I wasn't sleeping very well. I hadn't slept more than an hour the night before, so I decided to get the television on for background noise to see if I could lull myself to sleep. Instead, the view of those towers on fire and the constant re-running of the planes hitting the buildings made it impossible to sleep. I remembered the old radio hoax of War of the Worlds, and wondered for a second if that was what was going on (but I couldn't fathom why someone would want to run such a thing on a beautiful September morning.) I stayed glued to the television until my eyes refused to stay open.

Pat

I was in Antalya, Turkey at the time. I think I had just gotten there about an hour before it happened; I had spent the evening in JFK and we flew out the night before.

It was kind of unreal being so far away, especially in a place where life doesn't stop because of a tragedy in another country. But everyone was real sympathetic about it, and very. very. quick to sincerely beg me to not judge the Islamic community because of these actions. We did a lot of bonding that first week.

Peace and love. It's been such a quiet and unremarkable day here; not a single person around me has brought up the day. I'm glad we can share some memories together and remember our heroes.
Jen

It was a beautiful sunny Tuesday in my hometown of Malmö, or was it a Wednesday? Surely it wasn't a Monday? I got home early from work that day for some reason, and I strolled across Gustav Adolfs Torg, the Square of Gustav Adolf, and bought some strawberries there. Nobody acted as if anything unusual had happened. I don't think anything had by that time.

Well, I was curious about an election in Norway that had taken place the day before, so I decided to go home and hear the news about that election. I think the time was about half past three when I got home, and I didn't expect any news about the election in Norway until the news at four, but I turned on the radio anyway. There was some sort of usual music and talk show on, and I wasn't prepared to hear anything interesting, but then the hostess said that it was hard to think about ordinary things "on a day like this". I had no idea what she meant, and she didn't elaborate, but I turned on the television anyway in case something had happened that warranted some extra news transmissions. Well, suffice it to say that after I had turned the TV on I sat riveted in front of it for at least three hours. Both attacks on the Twin Towers had already happened when I started watching TV, but none of the towers had fallen yet. Also, no one knew by then if there would be more attacks, and no one knew who was behind them.

The world was very different on September 10, 2001, from what it is today. America was different. The United States was very rich, with a great budget surplus. America was at peace. Unemployment levels were low. American houses were expensive and getting more expensive still, and still people were able to buy more houses. The world seemed flush, fairly safe and fairly predictable.

The 9/11 happened.

Ann

Let's see... that morning, I was at church, at a meeting for stay-at-home moms. It was the first meeting of the new school year. Perfectly unremarkable... and then the cell phones started ringing. One of the ladies there was a military wife, and had only recently transferred from the Pentagon. She was frantic. The meeting broke up early; I collected my 2-year-old daughter from the nursery and drove home. The radio was on to the news channel. I had to keep telling myself that I didn't need to go get my son from preschool -- a preschool in North Carolina was probably not on their target list. But we didn't have any idea how many more attacks there would be.

I remember hearing on the radio that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania; I just knew that it had been a foiled attack.

I am ashamed to say I was not glued to the television all day. That was too horrible to watch; I couldn't do it. Most of the day, actually, I was online -- they took the password off the IRC channel and invited everyone.

I did call the Red Cross around lunch time, though, and made an appointment to donate blood at 4:30pm. Turns out to have been a good thing; I got to skip a hugely long line. There just didn't seem to be anything else I could do.

I couldn't decide, that day, whether I was glad that my kids were too young (4 and 2) to understand what was happening, or sad that they would never remember a world where this sort of thing simply didn't happen. Both, probably.

PJ

I had just come back from class and was grading assignments. I even remember that I was in the process of exchanging students' floppy discs in the disc drive when my office phone rang. My then-husband had called to see how I was doing. My first thought was that it was just a "thinking of you" call and I told him that it was sweet of him to call. From my reaction, he realized that I hadn't yet heard the news that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. He had been watching the TV as we talked, and the second tower was hit as he was telling me about the first one. It was then that we realized that the first "accident" was no accident at all, but rather was an act of terrorism. By the time the third plane came down, I remember being out in the college's hallway, rubbing my then-very-large belly, and wondering whether we would all live long enough for our baby to be born. (We live within nuclear fallout range of several large cities -- we're about an hour's drive from Philly and Baltimore, and two to two-and-a-half hours' drive to Washington, D.C. and New York City.)

I was suddenly able to relate to my parents' experiences of hearing about Pearl Harbor, or even of hearing about JFK's assassination. I knew even then that I would remember 9/11/01 to my dying day, and would remember the circumstances under which I had heard the news. (The closest I had come heretofore had been when I had heard about the Challenger shuttle explosion.)

I was very fortunate in that I didn't lose anyone who was near and dear to me, but my heart went out then, and continues to go out now, to all those who did.

In Remembrance,
Lynn

First of all, it is very shocking to hear the stories from all the people who were in the US and worried about your loved ones, so let me offer to you some *hugs*.

I was at home, since school hadn't started yet. I think I was home alone (I remember the house being very quiet) and had slept in, then had gotten ready because my cousin would stop by to pick me up so we could go out.

When she arrived, she told me "turn the TV on, quickly!"

"Why, what happened?"

"You didn't hear??"

I turned the TV on and I was at a loss at what I was seeing.

Because of 9/11, my father and my grandfather soon got into a huge fight, because my grandfather, God bless him, is that sort of conspiracy theorist who thinks "the Americans" are to blame for everything that's wrong in the world and "they deserved it". My father reacted badly to that. They still don't speak to each other.

I worked a data entry job for the TennCare office in Nashville. A lot of us in data entry used headphones because we weren't supposed to talk while we were keying in documents. I liked listening to books on tape but my co-worker Eriko was listening to the radio. She said "they crashed into the towers" all of a sudden with some urgency, but she's native Japanese and kind of hard to understand. I was on closest terms with her and asked what she meant and she said it again, "they crashed the planes into the twin towers." At the time I thought, "must be those big ones in Mylasia" because terrorism always happens overseas, not here. Then our supervisor announced they were bringing a TV into the office. We all stopped working and watched. I know my first thoughts were "how many more are coming?" and "I've gotta get to my kids" We were all stunned, I think we were all thinking the same thing.

When my hubby and I got together at home we just talked and talked about it. When my kids were home we sat the oldest down and tried to explain to her what was happening. Her face broke up and she started crying asking if we were all going to die and I told her I thought we were definitely at war and it was hard to tell what would happen, but that her daddy and I would always protect her and her sister.

My brother and his wife came to our apartment that evening as they were both in the army reserve and had been called to Nashville that morning. I think we stayed up late into the evening watching it happen over and over again.

I have had a hard time watching it since then, knowing there were babies on a couple of those planes. Where I live now there are flags put up for every victim, and there are a couple of flags with little teddybears tied to them.

I was at work in London. Someone came in with the news, without many details, and I said it must have been a light aircraft like the one that crashed into the Empire State Building in the 1940s (I was wrong about that one too, that was a bomber). Didn't find out what was really going on until later in the day.

The odd coincidence... two weeks earlier I was in Boston, and went to dinner with friends in a restaurant on the 30th or so floor of a building that seemed to be in the direct flight path from the airport, with a clear view out over the city towards the main runway. I remember saying that I hoped that the building had plenty of lights to warn off aircraft. That was probably the runway used for some of the 9-11 planes...

I was at work in Parsippany, NJ about 25 miles east of the city. Many of my friends had family who worked at or near the WTC or who took the subway that stopped at the WTC station. They were all waiting by their phones waiting for a call, fortunatly everyone was ok. My friend and his son were on separate subway trains heading into the WTC station. Kevin was hit by debris coming from the second tower as he was making his way onto the street, looking for his son. They finally found each other and were both fine, except for gash on Kevin's head.

I will never forget seeing a coworker (from New Zealand) run past our cubicles faster than I have ever seen him run and dash into his car. He had just learned that his neighbor was on an upper floor and he rushed to console their family.

I drove to the blood center to donate platelets and could see the smoke and dust rising from NYC. The news was on while we donated, it was a very somber donation center.

Yesterday we had our "Parade of 1000 Flags" in memory of 9/11. It's a simple parade. Individuals carry the flags down the street to our humble Civic Center and put them up in rows. We have a picture wall of local folks who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't think anyone from here was killed in the twin towers or the Pentagon. I know no one was on the plane that went into Pennsylvania.
Also we have the traveling Vietnam Veterans Wall here for a week. It is 1/2 scale, which makes it still pretty big. It's lit at night and guarded all the time, but anyone can come see it anytime. We're going to do that today. Hubby took a shift at guard duty last night. Several people came out although it was late at night.
Artemis

I was in London at the time, two weeks into a three-month work visa. My co-workers and I heard about the first plane on the radio, and I remember thinking that the pilot must have been drunk, because how else could someone hit a building that big? It didn't occur to any of us at the time that it was deliberate. A bit later we heard about the second plane and knew it was something very different. We watched the towers fall on television, and then closed up shop and headed home because there was talk of the Tube possibly being closed. When I exited the Tube station at Tottenham Court Rd., the evening papers already carried the headlines, only about four hours after the first plane hit. Someone must have literally stopped the presses.

I lived in a hostel with about 20 others, people from the U.S. and Canada and other places, including a lady from Afghanistan. We collectively spent the next two days in front of the TV, and tensions were a bit high. The first night a few of the Americans went to Heathrow to try to catch a flight home, but they soon returned because there were no flights to America. Around the same time a new arrival showed up - he had flown out of JFK about 8am NYC time, and had no idea what was going on.

There was a memorial at St. Paul's on Friday. I went but despite arriving several hours early, the cathedral was full. I stood outside with thousands of other people of all nationalities, and we listed to the service on loudspeakers. It was a beautiful day and American flags were flying all around the block. We sang "Battle Hymn of the Republic", and that was when I finally lost it. I cried for hours. Later there was a city-wide three minutes of silence, and I swear it seemed like everyone, every car, every bus, everything was completely still. I have never heard London so silent.

The thing I remember most was how sympathetic all the people I met were. As soon as people realized I was American (as soon as I spoke!), they said how sorry they were. There were American flags in shops windows and bus windows. And Tony Blair said "we support our American cousins" and "we will not rest until we eradicate this evil from our world". I really had no concept of what that meant, but at the time it was a great comfort and I fell a little bit in love with him.

I was at a conference in Brazil and was presenting my research at exactly the time of the attack. Interestingly enough, my presentation prompted a professor from a U.S. University to come talk to me about my research (even though my presentation was in Portuguese) and invite me to do my Ph.D. in the U.S.

It was later in the day that someone mentioned to us what had happened and that we noticed that all Americans had disappeared from the meeting. I didn't meet that professor again in person until I arrived in the U.S. almost a year later to start my Ph.D.

Even though I was nowhere close to NYC (not even in the U.S.) when the attacks happened, that day truly changed my life.

malu

I was at work that morning. We are allowed to listen to the radio with earphones and of course heard it there. At lunchtime i walked a couple of blocks to the fitness center i belonged to at the time because it was the nearest place i knew had a tv. I spent my lunch time on an exercise bike staring just stunned at the horrible images on the screen.
I remember walking back to work in tears. I spent hours that night watching tv. I still remember the clearest (other than the images of the plane hitting the tower and the towers burning) the sad, sad relatives and friends of the missing that put up all those missing posters hoping their loved one would be found alive in a hospital or something. It was just hearbreaking watching them. In a lot of ways i am nostalgic for 09-10-01.

I had taken some time the morning of 9/11 to meet with an agent about life insurance. As we were wrapping up his secretary came in and said that planes had been crashed into the World Trade Center. Thinking they were talking about a small plane (i.e.Cessna) and having no idea of the magnitude of the situation I said, “Well the truck bomb in 1993 didn’t work so, what’s his name—Osama Bin Laden—is trying planes now.” I was running late so I skirted the people in the lobby watching television and started driving to work. I wish someone had grabbed me so I had seen it then. I heard what happened on the radio and was still driving when I heard that the towers were falling and about Flight 93.

I worked in the Detroit landmark, the Renaissance Center on the 35 floor. For those of you not familiar, the Detroit river separates the U.S. and Windsor, Canada and the Detroit-Windsor border crossing is one of the busiest in the United States. The company I worked for had made an announcement that the building was open but attendance was not mandatory. All flights in the United States were grounded at that point but Canada is only a few hundred yards away from Detroit and there was speculation that the Renaissance Center would be an easy target if more attacks were on the way. After hearing about Flight 93 I was feeling defiant and decided to go to work anyway. When I finally made it downtown the building security had decided to close the building regardless of the announcement.

On September 12th the building was open for business again but things were understanbly quiet. Around lunchtime there was a stir as people started congregating at the South windows overlooking Windsor. I went over to see what was going on and stood there transfixed. On the Windsor side of the river there were thousands of Canadians waving hundreds of United States flags and banners that read “God Bless America”. Every now and then the crowd would start chanting “U.SA!, U.S.A!, U.S.A!” It was overwhelming. Many of my coworkers were openly crying.

As I’m writing this, nine years later I have tears in my eyes. I would have a hard time finding one Canadian flag on short notice but these people literally found hundreds of them in a day. You might have heard of the small towns that hosted stranded airline passengers but I’ve never heard anyone mention this. To any Canadians reading this out there—THANKS. It was a sight I will never forget.

Well, my 9/11/01 was rather usual. It was the time of summer break before my sophomore year, and I was working (at McDonald's, actually). It was indeed a very beautiful day, not only in Germany, but probably most of Europe (as other people have already stated), and after work I was going to meet a friend. As you can imagine, I was in an excellent mood by the time I first heard about it. Wonderful summer day, almost done with work (I was supposed to be off work at 4 pm - that's 10 am EST), plans for my evening...
Anyway, one customer noticed my good mood and asked me how I could be so happy after what happened with the WTC. I was all "Huh, what the heck are you talking about?" and was given the very short version of the planes crashing into the towers.

Still, I thought this was some kind of sick joke, and I was discreetly checking for cameras. I mean, who'd believe it if he hadn't known it for fact? Planes simply aren't supposed to crash into skyscrapers.

Anyway, once I was off work, I walked to my friend's place. Still uneasy about what that "crazy person" had told me, I asked my friend if he had heard anything strange from the US today. He simply took me into his living room, where he had been watching CNN. I think we've been watching the vids being replayed time and again until very late into the night. We also discussed the possible ramifications and reasons behind the attack, but neither of us could imagine what would follow. Okay, so we could imagine the US would enter a war, but neither of us could imagine how civil rights would suffer.

I was at home taking care of my 18-month old son. Right after I put him down for a nap is when I got a phone call telling me to turn on the TV. That was after the first one hit the towers. I had the TV on when the second one was hit.

When the second one hit, that's when I knew this nation was at war and would be for a long time to come.

At the pediatrician's office for my youngest child's one month well baby visit