Or maybe the Airborne Command Post aka "Looking Glass" pictured above. This plane, tankers and AF1 would have been the only other large aircraft aloft that late in the day.
Posted on 09/10/2007 6:41:30 PM PDT by Milwaukee_Guy
Might be a good time to revisit how we all heard about the the attack on 9/11 and how we reacted to the darkest day in American history.
What emotions were strongest for you on that day?
How did you find out? Did you stay at work? Did you go Home? Who did you call?
I was working in a Surgery Center...when my wife called me on my cell to tell me what was going on...
My Dad worked down by Wall Street, and I have many friends from HS who worked down there. I found out that my Dad didn’t go to work that day because he had a dental appointment which was a huge relief...he had taken the day off.
The ENT surgeon I was working with that day is also from NY, we always talked NY sports ad nauseum. Turns out, his cousin worked for Cantor Fitzgerald...which I only found out after I told him what was happening that morning between cases.
We both went to the TV and stared in disbelief...he immediately called his mother and realized that his cousin was in the towers...he was very close to his cousin who was the same age, from large, close catholic families....they grew up together. He was understandable distraught and cancelled the rest of his cases for the day...his cousin was never heard from again and later confirmed as one of the dead.
Words cannot describe my feelings adequately about that day...
I didn’t see it on TV, either. I had taken my computer and TV’s to my mother’s house in Virginia a few days earlier so they wouldn’t get broken in the moving truck. I retrieved them on 12 September. It wasn’t until a year later on the anniversary date that I saw some of the video that the rest of the country had seen while it was happening. I didn’t even know that video of people jumping from the towers existed until the next year. It was shocking.
Woke up 5:00am PDT. Went to get coffee, and the rest of my breakfast sat down turned on the TV. Coming to life, I saw the first tower on fire. SHOCKED awake, I was listening to the reporter saying what a terrible accident it was as I saw first hand the second plane curving toward the second tower. I said to myself, “ THIS IS NO ACCIDENT!!!!”
HEAR HEAR!
Tell your Grandaughter Happy Birthday from Freeperland. Oh, BTW, Congratulations. :^)
My youngest son’s elementary sent a slip home on Friday reminding everyone that Tuesday Is Patriot Day and asking all the kids to wear red white and blue. Nothing from my older son’s middle school though.
I was at home in Brooklyn Heights, getting ready for my third day of grad school at NYU. I was brushing my teeth when I heard on the radio that a small plane had hit the WTC. Turned on the TV, saw the gaping hole in the North Tower, thought how awful it looked for a commuter plane, and got my books together to leave the house, planning on stopping on the Promenade to see for myself what was going on at the Towers, which dominated the view from the Brooklyn Promenade.
As I walked toward the Promenade, I heard a tremendous hollow “thud.” The windows in the building I was passing were leaded, and I remember hearing them shake. This sounds melodramatic, but the closest I can come to describing the sound is the sound a kneeler makes when it hits the floor in an empty Cathedral, amplified by ten. The sound scared me, so I turned away from the Promenade, thinking that there had been some kind of explosion in the tower that was hit by the plane. Then I got my courage back up, walked to the Promenade, and saw both Towers engulfed in flames.
I think my brain stopped working rationally at that point. I turned to one of the hundred of people on the Promenade and asked him if the fire had somehow jumped buildings. He told me that they had all seen the second plane.
People always say that it looked like a scene from a movie; when you were there live it didn’t look like a movie at all. No special effects techie ever thought about all the paper in our major office buildings. The massive amounts of paper being sucked out of the flaming buildings, just floating southeast on the pitch black smoke against a deep blue sky, is still my most vivid memory of that day.
I called my parents to tell them that I had been running late for school — had I not been running late, I would have been on the N/R subway about a block away from the Trade Center when the first plane hit — and told them that I was going to come home to their house on Long Island when they told me that the Pentagon had just been hit as well. I jumped on a subway, thinking in my frazzled state that it was heading east toward the Long Island Rail Road station. But I had gotten on the wrong line, and it was headed west. The trains were, at that point, still running into Manhattan. Luckily, the trains stopped about 2 minutes after I got on, and everyone was told to get out of the subway, that the subway was closed.
So I went to a law officein downtown Brooklyn where I used to work, and where a vague acquaintance from law school still worked. I was in their conference room when I heard screams from the lawyers upstairs. There was one window in the building that we always used to gather around to watch the Twin Towers get hit by lightning during thunderstorms, and a bunch of attorneys had gathered around that window. They were screaming because the first tower had fallen. Twenty minutes later I heard them shouting “They’re gone! They’re gone!” when the second tower fell. We went upstairs, and the window through which we used to watch the Towers had a view of only sky - and the grey smoke billowing up.
Several minutes later, we had a light dust shower as the particles from the tower collapse descended on Brooklyn. It wasn’t has heavy where we were as it was in other places in Brooklyn, but it did pass over our neighbhorhood. And then another lawyer from Long Island offered to take those of us heading to LI home in his car.
We couldn’t get on the highway, so we drove on the surface streets, and I remember seeing the massive exodus of dust-covered people coming over the bridge and walking to the Long Island Rail Road terminal at Flatbush. I curse the LIRR every day of my life, but God bless em that day they never stopped running and they got people home.
I went out to my parents house for a week, NYU having been shut down for the rest of the week, and when I returned to Brooklyn the Sunday after 9/11 I could smell the acrid smell that lingered in the air for the next month whenever the wind was blowing in a certain direction. I got used to taking subways that slowed down and crept through the Cortlandt Street station, which was shut down for a year after the attacks, and was kept in a state of semi-darkness, but someone had managed within the first few days to tack a large American flag on the tile wall of the station. I never got used to the military jets that would occassionally fly overhead, and nearly died of fright when one buzzed Brooklyn at 4am in the morning one day, rattling the windows in my apartment.
And to this day, I hope that when our government does find Bin Laden, they cut off his genitals, wrap them with pork, stick them in his mouth, and string him up still alive at the WTC site, and everyone who was touched by 9/11 can beat that bastard with a NY Yankee baseball bat until all that remains is a bloody pulp, covered in bacon grease.
Yes, she was. It was a little funny hearing her then because for so many years my Dad used to say that. He swore that the Media was an enemy. We used to tease him when he yelled at the TV anchors during the evening news. Then we stopped rolling our eyes and realized he was right.
“I was in grad school in Illinois, and didn’t have TV or internet”
What, you had to read.... books???!!!
Keep her flyin'!!!
Thank you so much for your kind words.
A few weeks after 9/11, Madison Square Garden held a Concert for New York.
It was held for all the rescue workers and their families.
My family and I went with the Foley family.
We had to listen to the likes of Susand Sarandon, Richard Gere, and Bill & Hillary.
I’m happy to say they were all booed, but Hillary was actually booed right off the stage. She couldn’t recover and stopped talking after under a minute. Then she introduced Bill. He too was booed, but he’s much slicker than she.
He would refer to the firemen, and the crowd had to stop booing.
Anyway, tomorrow night, 9/11, MSG channel is replaying that concert. You know they are going to cut out use booing Hillary off the stage.
Or maybe the Airborne Command Post aka "Looking Glass" pictured above. This plane, tankers and AF1 would have been the only other large aircraft aloft that late in the day.
He called again a few moments later and said a second plane just hit the other tower and that it was terrorism.
I finally got down to his apartment and saw the WTC smoking and burning while a split screen showed the second impact. Then, CNN switched to the Taliban spokesmen in Pakistan and I thought about Osama bin Laden for the first time in years.
I called my boss at work, but the call went straight to voice mail. I called another friend's cell phone and he said that the CEO cancelled work for the day and sent everyone home.
Without TV, I spent all of my time on FR and various news sites thinking about war.
Driving to work, stuck in Atlanta traffic, listening to WSB initially reporting a small commuter plane hitting the WTC. Less than 10 minutes later, that report turned into two passenger jets crashed into both towers.
On the road, it was as if everyone else was hearing the same thing I was. Despite the horrid traffic, everyone was moving very orderly, more interested in the events that were transpiring than getting to where they were going.
I remember right as I got to work, just pulling to the parking lot, hearing on WSB that the Pentagon had been hit.
I work in Downtown Atlanta, and honestly at that moment, my gaze turned to the sky, thinking who might be next. Lots of tall buildings and a very busy airport in this city, and I work in one of those tall buildings.
We had a TV at work, and I watched the days events unfold along with others, nobody really working...
The thing about 9/11, is that two days before on Sunday afternoon 9/9, a friend who was practically a member of my family passed, at the young age of 25. Had known him since he was 14, he dated my sister for awhile, and they were still close friends. He was like a brother to me.
I was still in shock, and then the horror of 9/11 occured. The magnitude of everything all at once hit me so gradually, before I knew it I was really really in a bad place emotionally.
Thankfully we all heal, which is important. But it’s even more important that we never forget all who died on 9/11, just like I’ll never forget my friend who left us two days earlier.
You were there, but hopefully outside of harm, thank goodness. America was reeling by the time you were a witness. I will never forget. The rage can be inspired on a moments notice.
My son’s Catholic High School has covered the grounds with 2977 flags to remember those who have died, is having a moment of silence at 9:11 am and an hour mass/prayer service at 2:30. This is why he goes there and not to public school.
Hat tip: Hot Air
Was at home, my sister called. Stayed home watching TV most of the day. Went to church to pray that evening, been going to church ever since.
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