Posted on 09/11/2012 6:34:33 AM PDT by US Navy Vet
I was working at Air Force Weather Agency providing Weather Data to Units Worldwide including Air Force 1.
At home on the West Coast. Got a call from my S-I-L back East telling me to turn on the TV.
My late Uncle’s Best Friend, a Port Authority Police Officer, was killed in the collapse. He called his Wife after the first plane hit to tell her he was on his way to help evacuate Tower One.
Last thing she ever heard from him. To my knowledge, his body was never recovered.
I was standing in my office, torn between staying at work in defiance or going home to be with my family. I thought about 10 minutes and went home.
However, I do remember looking out and reflecting that 1) this was probably Islamic-based, and 2) some would justify it, especially in my oh-so-tolerant Atlanta, and 3) in the end it would work to the advantage of the Islamists in the any reaction would be perceived as intolerant, and in the end Islam would be given special “do not criticize” status.
When George Bush said that Islam is a religion of peace, I knew it had happened.
Was watching CNBC, broke in with a story of small, twin engine plane/accident...immediately thought, no small plane, no accident. Shortly after, got a call from my brother-in-law who had recently retired, and was a Vietnam Vet...I’m sure his thoughts were for HIS son and what his calling/future might be. My nephew did not enter military service but none the less he would have made his father proud...as a responsible husband and father of 2. My nephew unfortunately lost his dad from cancer in 2004.
Indeed. My youngest was just barely passed his first birthday in 2001. He recently surprised me with something he just made from his Lego set. It was two twin towers with flowers at the bottom and a figure wearing a fireman's hat on one side and a policeman on the other.
I was driving for a limo company out of Dutchess County, NY ans had just dropped a couple off at the Empire State building for a day of sight-seeing. I was sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on the northbound side of the West Side Highway, up the hill, not too far past the Intrepid and heard a large noise from behind me. I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw the first tower already burning and debris flying everywhere. I had 77 WABC radio on and they announced that a small plane had hit the WTC. I immediately thought that was not a small plane and probably was not an accident. Everyone in traffic was now out of their cars watching and we saw the second plane approach and turn into the other tower. There was no dount in any of our minds that this was a terrorist attack. People were crying, myself included. We all knew many innocent people had died.
I just wanted to get home to Dutchess County and it was not and easy task. Traffic started moving and I just wanted to get across that little bridge on the Henry Hudson, get on the Taconic Parkway and go home. I made it about 5 minutes before they closed all the bridges. I was crying and shaking all the way home. As I was driving north on the Taconic there were hundreds of fire trucks and emergeny response vehicles driving southbound into the city.
The only other female driver at the limo company I worked for at the time lost her husband. They had four children. He worked in the first tower and his floor took a direct hit from the first plane. The principal at my daughter’s high school also lost her husband. In the days that followed I found out that five people I knew had perished.
September 11, 2001 will be forever burned in my memory. The most surreal day I have ever experienced. I am crying now and I will take my dog for a walk and clear my head. Today, also a Tuesday, looks just like that fateful day. The most beautiful blue sky and not a cloud anywhere on the horizon.
Heh, I retired from all of that stuff 19 years ago. Interesting and fun stuff at the time and not as exciting as teaching college classes these days but a lot less hectic.
I still live in the same house and am out at Offutt at least once a week. Lot of interesting aircraft come and goe from there.
Thanks for the shout out. Once we knew it was safe to enter the streets, I headed up to Lenox Hill Hospital to donate blood.
Many of us had portable radios tuned to 1010 WINS as we waited outside the hospital. After hours, a spokesperson came out to address the expanding crowd. Net-net of the message: They weren’t finding any injured - only fatalities - so go home and thank you.
Most of the restaurants and bars were closed around our location near Times Square, so I walked to the upper 70’s and 80’s to find some normalcy. And I did. The crowds in the restaurants and bars were unified in this spirit: “THEY F**KED WITH THE WRONG COUNTRY AND THE F**KED WITH WRONG CITY!!!”
Wow...thank God she survived the ordeal. My son was living 3 blocks from the WTC, but was at work in midtown at the time. He could not get into his apartment for two weeks. His is now NYPD.
We were on our first leg of a 2 week vacation.
The night before we had checked in for a week at a beautiful and secluded resort on the Oregon coast.
I woke first and had the tv on watching the news with the mute button pushed. They were showing the people running from the first attack.
I turned up the volume and was trying to figure out what had happened, and then the tv showed the second plane hitting the second tower. My wife woke a little before and wonder what war movie I was watching. I told her that it was not a movie.
She woke up and took a shower, and so did I, because we figured our two week vacation was changed. While I was showering, she said that the Pentagon had been attacked.
We decided to check out and go home. I drove out of the compound to fill up, and other people were filling up and heading home. My wife tried to call our son and family in California and the midwest, and she couldn’t get a line out on the cell or lodge’s phone.
I stopped by the desk to check out and cancel the week’s stay, and the management was great and wished us good luck and gave us a sack of fruit, pastries and other goodies for our trip down the Oregon coast.
While I was standing there with my sack the first of two unpleasant events happened. A lesbo librarian from Canada was there for a meeting and was yelling that we deserved it. I and a few other told her to shut her mouth before we did it. The manager told her to pack her bags and be gone in 10 minutes.
As my wife and I were leaving, a couple staying, in the place next to us came back from a round of tennis. My wife asked them if they were checking out to go home, and they said what happened in NYC didn’t impact them. We just shook our heads and got into our suv and headed south on the coast.
Radio coastal coverage was bad and we really had no news until about 11:30. We pulled into a little coastal town, Depoe Bay and headed to one of Oregon’s small coastal chain restaurants. Usually’ you got into line and waited for at least a half hour before getting seated and more wait for your order to be taken.
There was no line, and the waitress took us to a table. She claimed to know nothing. So I gave her my order and went to the bar to watch tv and eat my order when it was ready. My wife didn’t really want more news. She stayed at the table and tried to use our cell phone and couldn’t make any connections.
In the bar I heard about the plane going down in PA, and most of us figured out what had happened.
After our lunch, we left. The gas stations were packed. Again going down the coast, the radio reception was poor. When we heard something, it wasn’t new to us.
At Gold Beach, we stopped and cancelled our stay for the next week and my fishing guide. The manager called a motel in Brookings, we used, and got us a resie for that night. We had planned on a couple of nights in the motel on our return home before the terrible events of 9/11.
I decided to fill up the suv in Brookings, and things were getting tense at the filling station. The manager had signs posted re no fillup of gas cans and a 20 gallon limit. I thought that one customer was going to start shooting to get his many gas cans filled. Several of us informed the customer, to take his best shot as it would be his last. He left. A friend of the manager was sitting by the office door with a 12 gauge pump across his lap.
A few minutes later, we pulled in the parking lot of the motel in Brookings. As I was pulling in 3 black suvs with G guys and gals in black suits were pulling in. The Leader came in and started the process of his people checking in.
He and I started talking. After a couple of minutes of getting to know each other, he said that they were heading up North from SF/Oakland to help protect dams and other sites. I looked at him and asked him to let me know if he got called out early.
The check in clerk told me that I could stay for a couple of nights extra if we wanted to. The clerk then made reservations at our favorite pizza place.
My wife drove down to our room while I talked with a few other people checking in. It was a mixed crowd of Oregonians cancelling their California vacations and heading home, and Californians like us cancelling our Oregon vacations and heading home.
While heading to our SUV and room, the first of many coastal flyovers of Airforce combat jets went north, very fast and very low. My wife had gotten through to our DIL in California, and they were okay and worried about us.
After a quick shower we went to the pizza place and the owner had the tvs off so kids could celebrate their birthdays. There were 3 Birthday parties going on. The parents and grandparents were doing a good job of letting the kids have fun. The rest of us were very quiet, which was not normal for the pizza place
After eating and buying pizza for the road for the next day. We went back to the motel. We were unable to phone our son in Portland. Turned out that he had been on an organized cross country bike ride in very remote SE Oregon. The ride had been cancelled, and he was spending the night before heading back to Portland. The limited cell phone sites were overloaded and the land lines were still closed down where he was.
We decided that our trip home would be decided by news and what the Gman’s morning info was.
At dawn the next morning there was another flight north along the coast of Air Force fighter jocks. There were no commercial flights north or south along a very busy route. We found out later that all commercial flights were cancelled for a few days post 9/11. We had friends and people we knew stranded in Russia, Europe, Greenland, Canada, Mexico and all over America. Our mayor and 4 council members were in DC and got a rental van and were driving home. It took them close to 3 days to get home.
The clerk at the front desk was very busy with people checking out and people wanting to check in. She told me that the GMan and his people got calls in the early am and left. He left me an envelope and a short note in side suggesting that we head home. He noted that he would do the same if he was me.
I told the clerk to tell my wife we were checking out. The clerk handed me two sacks, one with breakfast goodies and one with fruit and cookies for the road. That and our pizza got us home. So I checked out and headed back to our suv and put the food in and went to our room.
My wife was ready to do by the time I got there. We had decided not to unpack incase we left early. She got our DIL as we were leaving and told her, we were heading home. We stopped at the front office and got more coffee, thanked the clerk for her help and gave her a hug with good wishes.
The trip home was interesting, we kept seeing vehicles and bikers with flags. Later, we found out that basically every flag in America was sold to fly on vehicles, bikes and homes. We made a couple of pit stops at rest areas and didn’t need gas for the trip home. Which as good as many gas stations were not open on our trip home. I did fill up our SUV when we got into our city as I had no idea what would happen to our gas supply.
That afternoon and evening, we talked to our local family/friends and relatives across the country. Our son hadn’t got back to Portland yet. He called later that night.
He said that the planes we saw were probably doing some fending off of planes wanting to land in PDX from Canada and Pacific sites.
My parents and grandparents remember where they were when Pearl Harbor was attacked for the rest of their lives.
Pearl Harbor being attacked was one of my first memories, I had no idea what happened. I knew that something bad had happened that made my family sad, mad and in tears.
I hope that I don’t have a third such memory.
God Bless America.
I was working at a major U.S. corporation in the southern tier of NY state. TVs were on throughout the building a lot of the time. A co-worker passed my desk and told me about the first plane. We all gathered around various TVs to get the news (about a small plane, we assumed). Then we saw the second one hit.
One thing I’ll never forget is the absence of certain employees in the groups of TV watchers. Those were the ex-pats, shipped in from various countries, and they continued quitely working at their desks. It still gives me the creeps to remember the vibes I got from them. (Sometimes “celebrating diversity” goes way too far.)
How about the fighter jets doing flyovers and constant sirens? And that SMELL!!!
Lucky for me, I found a boutique hotel close to the Sheraton where I discovered a neglected roof garden via an unmarked staircase where I could sit for hours each day as nobody thought it was accessible. The roof garden was right out of Grey Gardens: A solarium with broken windows, rusting metal structures and crumbling cement benches.
I was in Atlanta, staying at a hotel next to Hartsfield, waiting to deadhead to Amsterdam that evening. I flew B-747’s on long haul freight operations. I was on the phone with my wife in Italy (Captain-USN), she told me about it and I switched channels from the History channel. After the second plane I knew we were under attack. Shortly there after the busiest airport in the world was silent. May God bless all those who are no longer with us.
I had jury duty in October that year (the courts are about 1/2 mile from the WTC as the crow flies) and the smell down there was unbelievable. They dismissed anyone with lung disease from jury duty. I remember saying to the uniformed officer outside the court that I was a physician and that he should wear a mask while down here. He said that the cops recommended it, but it was too annoying. Hope that guy is OK today.
Semper Weather! Former AF Forecaster here. I was driving a truckload of paper rolls from Lowell, Ark to Wichita, KS. Stopped about 0745 Central to phone home (southern Kansas still had payphones at that time, try to find one nowadays) to tell the other-half to turn on the TV. Had been listening to Kansas City radio (WDAF 610) that had gone live with the network. When I got to Wichita the dock super had the radio on at his desk and several of us truckers gathered round to listen to the latest details. Didn’t see the video of the attack until I got home later that week.
At a company seminar with a couple of our other offices, at the Jersey Shore’s Waterview Pavilion overlooking the marina.
A couple of the staff began whispering to others, and all of them disappeared for awhile. When some came back they were obviously upset. There was a small TV in one of the coat rooms; as I was leaving I got my first glimpse of the horror.
on 9/11/01, Islam gave us a clue about what they are really up to. We already forgot the lesson.
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