Where were you on 9/11?

I had just got home from work and bedded down, my wife had left for her job. She called me and said get up, turn the TV on, an airplane just crashed into a building in NY City. She had to get off the phone and get back to work, but I tuned in just in time to see the second plane come in. I was like, WTF??? A day I can never forget.

I was up on the computer before work, when I heard about the first plane. I turned on the TV and watched the second tower get hit live.
I went to work, but was focused on the attack all day.

It was my second year of college. I was getting ready for class when my mother told me to turn on the news. The first plane had already hit, and everyone still thought it was an accident. Then the second plane hit, and we knew—instinctively, viscerally—that it was an attack. And it all just kept getting worse. The news said a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, and suddenly my mother had to wonder if her sister was alive. We couldn’t reach her on the phone, nor anyone else in her office. When the South Tower collapsed, it felt unreal. I spent the next half hour just willing the North Tower to stay up, but of course it collapsed as well.

Eventually, I went to class. But all that anyone wanted to talk about—students and teachers alike—was the attack. There were whispers about tanks guarding Washington, D.C. and Saudi Arabia being behind it all. Everything was horror and disbelief. The world seemed split between those who were utterly lost and those who were convinced they had some special insight into what was going on. One person claimed to be getting inside information from someone he knew who worked for the government. I asked if he could find out about my aunt, but he looked at me awkwardly and said the phone lines weren’t working anymore. I let it go. People cope in different ways.

The rest of the day is a blur. Roaming from place to place. Having the same conversation over and over again. Wanting to have the same conversation over and over again. Maybe even needing it. At some point, someone told me about the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. My aunt got in touch with us late in the afternoon. She told us that none of the phones in her office were working and that the cell phone network had been overloaded. That’s why we couldn’t get in touch with her. Other than that, she didn’t know anything that we hadn’t already seen on the news. And that’s everything I remember that can be described in words.

I was in San Francisco in the hospital with my new baby. It was 5:30 am there. My baby shrieked like she had been hurt. It was terrifying. She was tiny, almost premie small. It was hard to believe such a squeal had come from her.
I picked her up and looked her over. She stopped crying when I picked her up, but her eyes looked frightened. There were no marks, no pins to have hurt her, nothing. I decided I should try to feed her to comfort whatever was wrong.
Becaise it was so early, I turned on the tv so I wouldn’t fall asleep and drop her.
The news was on.
At first she wouldn’t nurse, but finally she did, but staring at me with her tiny little blonde eyebrows scrunched.
Suddenly, the tv was different. The news crew was gone, and some woman was saying something hit a building but they didn’t know yet if it was a missile, or meteor, or what.
I felt panic and confusion. I thought I must have dozed off and a movie started or something. They had switched over without warning.
I watched, horrified, as the second plane hit.
I looked down at my baby, and whispered, crying, “Oh gawd, we’re going to have a war.”
My daughter’s heart had stopped during the birth, so we were supposed to stay a couple of extra days.
When this happened, SF went into emergency mode.
Pretty much everybody in the hospital who wasn’t on life support was released.
Paperwork was rushed at me.
Cabs were impossible to get.
Anywhere thete were government buildings employees were sent home, the street closed, and everything was taped off.
Two of the planes were supposed to have flown to SF, so they went on the assumption it might also be under attack.
Before they told me I was going to be released, I took my baby to the nursery and went in search of a soda machine. I saw two nurses with their heads together. One told the other, “He said they have to do something. I don’t think I’m ever going to see him again.” There was sobbing, and hugging, and I wished I wasn’t waiting for an elevator.
Later, when I heard about the plane that went down in Pennsylvania, I put it all together. I knew she had been talking to someone on the plane, and that somehow it had been ditched intentionally in a harmless place.
Watching that first tower crumble was impossible to fathom. I wanted it to go back. I know that isn’t rational, but I had no other way to face it.
Nothing could rewind, it wasn’t an awful dream, I was powerless and far away. Being far away didn’t help. I wanted to help. I wanted to make it stop.
When I finally had a cab it was evening. I was exhausted.

To this day, I believe my daughter screamed because something, somehow, made her feel, sense, something when that first plane struck.

I walked into work at a stock exchange in San Francisco five minutes after the first plane hit. As head of operations, I called contacts at the NYSE to see if they would open. The response I got was ” a second plane just hit, we don’t know. There are sirens everywhere.”

We were discussing our course of action when the plane hit the Pentagon. Getting credible information on what was going on was difficult.

The exchange in San Francisco is a half block from the Bank of America building, at the time the biggest target for a similar attack. We did not know if it was going to be hit, so it was prudent to get everyone away.

After the first tower collapsed, we knew that business was not going to go on, and we sent people home to be with their families.

Celebrating my one year wedding anniversary.

Divorced soon thereafter.

I was spending my first day at primary school. I was too busy being an idiotic kid. And no one ever talked about it. It took me 5 more years to know what it was about.

Well, you can’t expect much from someone who lives on the other side of the planet right?

Sleeping. We didn’t find out about it until the next morning. I remember waking up and my daughter who was up and getting ready for school saying, ‘Mum, there’s something weird on the TV’. We went and looked and saw the footage of the planes hitting the towers. We turned it off once we realised it was real. I didn’t want my children watching that vision over and over again. I had to teach a class that day and when I arrived, the students who had come in, and many did not, were in shock. We sat and talked about what had happened and then all went home.

Just arriving at work.

At school. They dragged us all out to the assembly hall to force us to partake in a “moment of silence”.
And then the telly was full of news reports, unjustifiably disrupting normal programming.
Could not watch my favourite anime that day.
So annoying.

I was in South Carolina on a hotel inspection. The manager and I were in the breakfast area and caught the first report on the large screen TV of a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers. I recall thinking, “What yahoo accidentally crashed into the side of a huge building?”

Once the story started to unfold, I asked the manager if he would prefer to stop the inspection in order to deal with the attack’s impact on business. He requested to have it finished. Once done, I started the drive back to Memphis, TN.

The trip was surreal. It was hours of driving in fairly heavy traffic since all US airports were closed. It was hours of listening to news reports as more information slowly dribbled in.

Back at the office, the customer call centre needed extra people to take calls on the hotline set up for 9/11 hotel concerns, so I volunteered. The first wave of calls to come in was from people hoping for information on their loved ones who were staying at one of several of our hotels near Ground Zero.

The second wave of calls were from those who had been guests at one of our hotels. They wanted to know when they would be able to retrieve their belongings. The third wave of calls came from those that had near future reservations and events booked at the hotel. Imagine having all of your wedding plans set up only to find out that the location was severely enough damaged that everything would have to be changed. Whether out of empathy or exhaustion, there were a few times when I cried along with a caller.

I was a freelance designer at the time, so I worked from home. I had just gotten dressed for the day, kissed my wife, and called my client.

She said, “Why are you calling me? Turn on the television.”

I tuned in and saw the second plane hit live, as it happened.

My wife and I spent the whole day in front of the tv in shock.

In NC. I was just waking up, put on the TV without sound, and saw the towers on TV with one that had a hole in it. A minute later my sister called asking if I saw it. She lived downtown in NYC. I told her I hadn’t been sure what I was looking at. Seriously, I was confused. The picture in front of me wasn’t quite computing in my brain. My sister was upset, and she was saying something, and then in front of me live on TV the second plane hit. I immediately told her, “I’ll call you back I need to see what building mommy is in today.”

My mom worked for the federal government in Maryland. Sometimes she was in federal buildings, and sometimes she was in space the agency she works for rents that isn’t a mark so to speak. Remember, I did not have the sound on on the TV, but I instantly knew the government might be a target. I called my dad at home and he told me my mom was in the innocuous building far out in the suburbs. He seemed to not understand my worry, maybe he just didn’t want me to worry (my dad usually isn’t good at that though).

I tried to call my sister back, but couldn’t get through the lines were so tied in NY.

Shortly after the pentagon was hit. I guess my gut had been right. What I don’t get is why officials hadn’t realized it.

For days afterwards my sister called me crying from the streets of NYC. She was a visiting nurse and there was no public transportation where she was, carrying heavy bags, doing double work because nurses who lived in the outer buroughs couldn’t get into Manhattan. The cops constantly carding her. It was really really horrible.

I was a technician getting thermistor strings ready for a big hydrothermal test. We had a little tv set up in the break room where we all gathered and watched.

Junior year of high school, American history class with my favorite teacher.

We’re getting wrapped up for the day, and he says, “Tomorrow we’re going to talk about the Shot Heard Round The World.”

And the teacher from next door slammed the door open and told us to turn on the television NOW.

I was in Florida already, but my father was 1 year away from retirement from the NYPD, and my cousin worked in building B. I was a mess.

I found out later my cousin was in Orlando for a meeting, and my dad was assigned to a bridge for transit duty, and so I’m one of the lucky few native New Yorkers who doesn’t know a victim personally.

I had just driven past the Pentagon, on my way to work, mere minutes before the airplane crashed.

I got to my office and learned about the incident (I’m not in the habit of listening to a car radio, so I hadn’t heard the news). My employer was located on a higher floor in a tall building, so we all looked out the windows and saw heavy smoke in the distance.

No one told me till later that night. I was playing command and conquer. At the morning.

At work, in an building in downtown Atlanta. I was about to go into a meeting when we got a call saying “evacuate”:

My building was just across the street from one of the tallest buildings in downtown, and nobody knew what was next, so they evacuated anything nearby.

We were closed for a couple of days.

I was a brand new CPS worker, in my last week of training in Albany (about three hours north of NYC and two hours north of where I lived at the time). We had training every other week, and the job put us up at a hotel for the week. This was legal training, and there was a lawyer there from Manhattan.

The lawyer had trouble with the computer and he really didn’t even start yet. He said let’s give it a little break and he was working on trying to fix the issue he was having. The lead trainer said “while we wait for him to fix the computer, I just saw on the news that a plane hit the World Trade Center.” A few minutes later, she said “another plane hit the World Trade Center.” We all ran off to watch the various TV’s in the facility.

My mom worked right near Grand Central. I tried to call her work number (this was before everyone in the world had a cell phone). The lines weren’t working, I got busy signals, no signals, it was very frustrating and scary. The lawyer told us that his daughter went to the high school that was right near the World Trade Center. He said he was going down there, and he would do what he had to do to get past whatever barriers would be there and he would find his daughter. The lead trainer told us let’s take a break and reconvene tomorrow morning.

We went back to the hotel, in a daze. I was very scared and crying, worried about my mom. I called my stepfather who was home and he said he spoke to her and he told her just get out. At the hotel, there were a lot of airline personnel (pilots, airline attendants) and the hotel set up a free buffet for us. We were all in the lounge, eating the buffet, drinking drinks (not free, of course) and watching the TV screens. The news was all talking about “Bin Laden.” Everyone said “who’s Bin Laden?” We’d never heard of him.

We spent the day in the lounge. I spoke to my stepfather again and he said my mom had to walk from Grand Central to somewhere else – I don’t remember now if it was 125th St station (Grand Central is 42nd St) or if she had to get to Rockland. Anyway, luckily she was in good shape.

Later on that afternoon I took my friends out for a ride around Albany and the streets were desserted. We tried to go to a shopping mall and it was closed.

I was very happy I wasn’t at work at the time because it was hard enough to process all this information without having to deal with the stress of being at work. The next day we took a vote and voted to leave and go home and return at a later date (in about two months from that).

I didn’t know anybody personally that died that day.

I had just dropped my twins off at school and was pulling into the driveway at the house. I had seen that Denver Broncos wide receiver had been injured in a game the previous day, so I tuned into the local news/sports radio station to see if I could hear any updates. That’s when I heard it.

At first I thought it was a joke. They were talking about the first plane that hit the building. By the time I got out of the car, came inside and was getting ready to tell my wife, she was telling me that the second plane had hit.

With an eye and ear on the news, I continued to get ready, and went on to work. I was working for a wholesale distributor of paper, janitorial and sanitation supplies. The manager took the unusual move of putting it on the television. We didn’t have internet, only the company intranet for order entry and tracking, so at that point, the TV was our only source of information.

I don’t don’t think there was any business conducted that day; we ended up closing the office early and going home.

I had to go to work at Red Lobster. I was a waiter at the time. We had historically low turn out that day. I think we had 3 tables all day…

I was at home before. Saw the second plane fly in. Saw the ensuing craziness. Went to work that afternoon.

All of the above stories made feel that I was you and going through what you went through on that day. Thank you.

I had just dropped my, then, 13 year old daughter at her bus stop when another parent mentioned something about a plane crashing into a building in NYC. Drove home, walked in the house and turned on the TV just in time to see the 2nd plane hit the 2nd tower. Crazy!
It was a very shocking and sad situation but all these years later I really don’t see the point in keeping the ghost of 9–11 alive.

It happened, everyone remembers unless you are a child or teenager, the end. I don’t believe in yearly anniversary tributes.

@Coloma: Then, by all means, feel free to avoid these threads.

I was just watching morning news, getting ready for a meeting, then watching the live action playing out in front of me. It was very surreal, deciding whether or not to take a chance on frightening children by showing up at the school. My bank was on the 96th floor of one of the towers, it was many days before I found out that my friends had survived.

So much needless loss.

At home watching Cartoon Network. It wasn’t until after the towers fell that I tuned in. (I was so surprised that no body called to alert me of what was going on!)

I was driving to work. I was listening to a talk radio program, and the host said that the first tower was on the ground. At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he was practically screaming, and then I understood. I pulled off the freeway and called my parents to tell them to turn on the news.

Then I drove to work. Before I got there, the newscasters were saying that they believed another plane was headed towards Los Angeles, so I was pretty scared.

My boss at the time was kind of a jerk. Two of the women I worked with had relatives that worked in the World Trade Center buildings, so they were in the office on the phone, frantically trying to find out if their family members were OK. The boss was irritated that they were not working, and that the rest of us were huddled around the radio. Then we heard that the second tower had collapsed. We sort of tried to go about our work, but I was still worried that another plane was headed our way.

At noon, our boss reluctantly said anyone who wished to, could leave. I left, but I was pretty sure our boss was resentful of anyone leaving.

I thought that I would prefer to be with my family, if anything else happened. So I went home and we were glued to the TV until after midnight. It was soon found out that the third plane crashed in a field, rather than coming to Los Angeles.

In a staff meeting. The mother of one of my cow-workers called in the middle of it to tell us. Kind of broke that meeting up.

I was at work when one of my colleagues came round and said a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Centre. I didn’t know what the World Trade Centre was and I assumed it was an accident involving a light plane.

The phones went more quiet than they had ever been before and we all began checking the internet for news and speculating on what was going on. The pictures from New York were apocalyptic and we were all on edge wondering what would happen next.

We could think and talk of nothing else and it became apparent that these events would change America and the world and not for the better.

Yeah. Pretty much wrecked the meeting and all the business for that day. Customers only came in to see if we had a radio or TV. That is all that was discussed.

@Coloma I don’t see the need in annually being forced to recall it either. Like Pearl Harbor, it was a tragedy, people died, but it’s history, over and done with. We’d to belter o pressure our representatives to pressure our Intelligence (?) Agencies o do their job and not go to sleep at the switches again. Isn’t that their job?

I think it is an important thing to talk about.
It helps social understanding to know what other people went through. For instance, many people were worried whether friends and relatives had been killed.
I had just given birth, and was wondering whether my baby would begin life in a country at war within its own borders.
A huge number of humans were affected by the events of that day.
It isn’t something to just turn our backs on.
Yes, the attack on Pearl Harbor faded from memories. Had it not, we may have had more vigilance in keeping our borders and airspace secure.
When we try to escape these memories, we lessen the sense of urgency in preventing them.

These accounts are drenched in emotion, loss, and guarded relief. That is not something to turn our backs to.

A few of these stories make mention of close calls.
I am happy for everyone who got good news for the people they worried about.

@Coloma I tend to agree. I’m ready for it to not be so in front of our face every anniversary. I think it’s an important day on the calendar, but it’s been enough years that I’m not sure it needs to be done up to such an extreme.

I wonder how my sister thinks about it. That day was very traumatic for her. I wonder how my ex-boss thinks about it, his brother died in the towers.

Do we do the same for the Oklahoma bombing? Maybe we do and I don’t realize it.

I was in 1st grade. They didn’t tell us, but we knew something was up. My parents later told me that night.

Were you living in Florida then?

I was just finishing my initial med rounds at a hospice in a big, regional VA hospital. I noticed an unusual amount of gab coming from the nurse’s station. There were doctors, aids and nurses all gathered at the TV there. Dead silence as the second plane hit the tower. Then I heard one of our doctors mutter something like “We need to get the motherfuckers who did this to us.” A statement of sheer hatred like that by a doctor in front of subordinate staff is unheard of in a big hospital. Some of the nurses had tears streaming down their cheeks. Other staff were glaring at the TV with cold enmity. Nobody said anything but the one doctor who’d been a fighter pilot. Slowly the group broke up and we all went back to our patients.

There was a lot of hostile feeling in Texas too. Misdirected by ignorant people at the wrong targets. A Sikh store clerk was shot in a nearby town, I guess the assailant thought the turban made him a Muslim. And some idiot drove his car into a mosque at 80 miles an hour. Thankfully no one was inside. Violence begets more violence.

I was performing a dental cleaning and had an animal under anesthesia when someone came to the back and turned the radio to the news. I just remember a feeling of stunned disbelief and then later in the day, tears. I had a friend and her husband living in Manhattan at the time, and it was several hours before I heard they were safe.

@Patty_Melt No Providence.