I’m on the west coast. I was listening to a regular morning news radio show when they interrupted to bring in a breathless reporter who stated that one of the World Trade Center towers had been hit by a small commuter plane, just as you described them saying. They said the building was on fire as a result. At first, I didn’t think much of it, I pictured a small plane and a little fire, maybe smoke coming out a window.
I turned on the TV, I think to Fox news. The video showed a serious fire and a huge, gaping hole. It was an inferno. The building looked to me like a torch on fire, and I knew that there were lots of casualties. It did not seem to me like it could have been a small plane, but I shrugged that off as bad information in the heat of the moment. I woke up my wife and told her she needed to see this. She woke right up. We watched and then the second plane came in and hit the other tower. It hit me instantly. We were under attack.
Anyway, they did initially think the first one was a commuter plane, I don’t know what made them think that, maybe they just couldn’t believe it was anything else and there was no debris.
Fox’s report on the commuter plane said it was an eyewitness report. Obviously a near-sighted eye witness.
I was in MA and retired for a few years, so just sat there and watched for days straight, changing tapes. Called my childhood next door neighbor, with whom I’d just reconnected, and he was at work in NYC, just needing to get home. He’d been a rescue pilot in the Coast Guard during Nam and all he could think about was his son at school.
Life just stopped, turned upside down, and you felt it might never turn rightside up again. Now it feels like you had to have been sitting there to still remember. It’s become inconvenient.