Special Ping out to the Lists.
Where were YOU on September 11th, 2001?
I was 13 Years old in 8th Grade. This we before the ear of Ubiquitous Cell Phones and Media so we were kept in the Dark until bout 10:50 CST when I arrived in History Class, which had a TV, Just in time watch the Towers Begin to Fall.
I literally couldn't believe it.
My middle daughter had been up a lot that night and I was still in my nightgown and housecoat when I saw the first plane hit (I was watching Fox news). Funny what you remember... I had a spit up stain on the left side of my gray housecoat. I can remember it so clearly. After the second plane hit.. we all knew. The rest of the day was just fear, sadness and anger. Out of all the pictures/video we saw that day, two stand out in my mind. The one image of the tall, black man covered in ash (his face devoid of any expression.. just shock) and when the fire department carried out the deceased priest. I think if I live to be a 100... those images are burned into my mind.
I was teaching high school at a small rural school district in upstate New York. I had gone into the office to check on some things when the administration was discussing how to tell the students.
I went back to my classroom that I shared with another teacher and waited as they made the announcement. After the announcement One of the students named Tonya asked when I thought they would hit us.
I explained that we were pretty much in the middle of no where and that we were probably safe. She asked if she could lead the class in prayer and I told her that she could.
I don't remember much after that, until I got home and watched the endless loop of coverage on the television. I went to our Church that night and just prayed over and over for the families and our country.
On Active Duty with the National Guard.
All leaves got stopped, but no one got called in except essential people.
The next Drill Weekend, you can imagine the briefings...
I was working contract for Xerox in their SOHO (small office/home office) multifunction laser printing support (call center) Normally there would be well over a thousand calls in queue-it was a BIG call center in Webster NY. We had giant jumbo-tron boards with all the queues and how many calls were in queue. The calls went to ZERO (except for a few calls from Canada) Our web servers crashed because everyone there was looking at the news (as was the world). Very eerie.
I shall forever remember where I was and what I was doing. My memories are clear and vivid. I can still feel the visceral, encompassing lust for revenge that I felt that day.
There were already a half dozen officers and NCOs there watching the attack unfold. We all watched the second tower get hit. A very surreal and sobering moment that I'll never forget.
Of course, no one knew at that first moment that it was a terrorist attack, but I then saw the second plane coming in a short time afterwards. A co-worker said to me "Look at that!" I said "Holy s---, we're being attacked" and then saw the unthinkable..... the plane actually hitting the building. We evacuated and somehow made it back to NJ before they closed the train tunnels.
Needless to say, I hope I never witness anything so awful ever again.
Was in my apartment watching it on tv. Went outside and saw that the sky was beginning to turn black. Went back inside and closed all the windows because of the stink from the burning buildings. Had a fight with my husband who still wanted to go to work. Lived far enough away (uptown) that I wasn’t entirely impacted - physically. Just watched it on Channel 4 this morning and it was still so upsetting.
That’s one of those days that none of us will ever forget where we were or what we were doing then and did later that day.
I was the angriest that day than any other day in my life.
Where were YOU on September 11th, 2001?
We were in Dallas at the time. We had just returned home late the night before from a job interview in Wisconsin. My MIL woke us up to let us know what happened. We sat on the floor so our then 1-year old baby girl could toddle between us. She learned to walk that day. That is our bittersweet memory.
Heading for the dining car for breakfast, one of our group heard on his radio that the World Trade Center towers had been hit by airliners and had collapsed. He also said that the Pentagon had been attacked.
We were at war.
We debarked at San Jose and took Caltrain to the suburb of the meeting where we checked in to our motel and spent the day watching events unfold on CNN. The skies overhead were silent except for the occasional military fighter jet.
The meeting never took place. The Oregon contingent opted to fly to San Jose, and their plane never got off the ground. The California contingent was at their emergency stations.
The next day we boarded the Coast Starlight at San Jose to return to Seattle. The train was three hours late, which was normal for Amtrak, and we got later and later as we missed every dispatching window on the Union Pacific. We were held up on a siding near Dunsmuir (CA) for five hours because of a rail terror scare in Utah, which turned out to be nothing more than an engineer running a red block signal.
By the time we reached Portland, we were ten hours late.
North of Portland we entered the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, and I could feel the BNSF dispatchers in Fort Worth moving us from track to track to get us around slower freight trains. They did their best.
We hit Seattle’s King Street Station at 5 AM, roughly ten hours late. Never did the lights of that station look so welcoming. The Amtrak people were there to greet us, despite the hour, and I was home before 6 AM.
People who were stranded by the closed skies were trying to find buses, rental cars, and some even tried hitchhiking. Practically no one knew we had a national rail system, which despite being severely strained, performed well. I couldn’t have made it home without it.
I was driving in to the lab where I worked at around 8:50 and heard on the Howard Stern show of all places about how a plane hit one of the towers. I immediately thought of that famous story of a prop plane hitting the Empire State Building, thinking that it was a similar kind of plane and dismissed it as nothing big.
Right after I heard the news I got out of my car and went into the lab to start an important experiment that I had been performing the last few days before, and intended to repeat in hopes of getting a confirming result. So it was something that was going to take my full attention.
As the day went on, and I was working on the experiment, I was using a lab computer to keep up with news of the day and FR was one of the sites I had started visiting. A few weeks before my mother had told me about it and I was already getting hooked. But I didn't register yet I was just lurking. But as the day went on and I was intermittently checking the various news sites I went to, I noticed a few more threads on FR about this plane that hit the tower and a few more articles about it on Fox News but nothing a lot more that caught my attention (at this time I still had the mistaken impression it was just some prop plane that hit and it would be only a matter of time before the fire was put out. And then we would get back to the "real" news of the day, like more info on the Chandra Leevy case or more news on the Firestone tire problems. )
Affer taking in the websites one final time around 10, I focused on the experiment and couldn't check again until 11. By then I had heard people waking a bit faster outside the lab and, right around 11, I went outside for a cigarette and sensed others seemed anxious and overheard some saying "I can't believe this" or similar sentences. At a certain moment as I was going back to the lab after the cigarette I passed this woman on a cellphone coming out of the elevator I was about to get on and I'll never forget what I heard her saying at that moment. She said to whoever she was calling, "I don't know where I can go to be safe I mean it's like we are at war or something..."
"Af WAR or something?" I was amazed and remember thinking "Gosh lady, don't you think you're overhyping a stupid plane crash a bit?!"
I went back up to the lab and checked the news sites again. At this time, FR wasn't loading at all and FOX News was slowed to a crawl. The only thing that would load off Fox was a page that had bold yellow letters that were saying something like "Terror Strike!" It didn't load much more than that banner at the top of the page. At this moment, I started to think "Maybe this is more than some prop plane hitting the tower". I didn't even know the second tower had been hit st this time.
I went down to the end of the hall where there was a break room with a TV. I figured I'd turn that TV on and get the real story. When I got there, a group of people were already huddled around the TV. I asked what was going on and someone said the towers were hit by JET planes and they just announced the fires were out of control.
I really don't remember much about the order of events after that, but I remember going back to the lab in a state of shock, thinking about all the people in the towers, I figured there must be at least 10,000 people in them and they were all in danger of dying! I completely abandoned the experiment at this point and just tried to get focused on the news. Then I heard one of the towers had collapsed and I started loosing it, thinking of thousands upon thousands of people dying so instantaneously. It was like I could feel each of them cry out in sheer terror!
All of the emotions of anger and sadness can't help but come forth again remembering the events of that day, how a normal Tuesday morning was flipped upside down in almost an instant. The course of humanity forever altered. Terrorist animals felt they had scored a major victory. Our nation became patriotic and resolved to mete out justice. A real sense that things had changed and never again would we care about a missing intern, tire blowouts or sharks off the east coast beaches. All those stories and more had become so small, so insignificant in comparison, there was almost, at least for me, a sense of nostalgia for those "innocent" days of summer. Oh, if only that were all we had to worry about.
Now, I wonder if that nostalgia wasn't shared by everyone and indeed it's this sense of nostalgia for those bygone days of innocence that has enabled us to apparently, collectively, as a nation seem to have done what we all thought so unthinkable Wednesday September 12, 2001: we have forgotten. We now have stories about sharks off the east coast again. Stories about the Clintons. Stories about the latest Hollywood news. All with as much if not more weight as the latest news on our efforts to defeat terrorism world wide. At best. Usually actually we hardly even think about killing terrorists, except for our latest efforts against ISIS, which again don't dominate the news. "News" such as the latest "controversey" about the presidential primaries dominates, or Hillary's latest efforts to cover up her and her husband's lies. It's like we've gone back in time to the 90's. We can just stream video better than back then, that's pretty much the only difference anymore. How sad.
How sad for our country and our own humanity, that so many can forget so much. As I said on the other memorial thread: May God help us. And have mercy on our souls.
Driving to junior college on a bright, sunny day. Second plane hit live on the radio, I was on a bridge over the Arkansas River. Almost drove off in surprise.
Special Ping out to the Lists.
Where were YOU on September 11th, 2001?
I was 13 Years old in 8th Grade. This we before the ear of Ubiquitous Cell Phones and Media so we were kept in the Dark until bout 10:50 CST when I arrived in History Class, which had a TV, Just in time watch the Towers Begin to Fall.
I literally couldn't believe it.
“Where were YOU on September 11th, 2001?”
I was on my job on the 5th floor of the Social Security Building in downtown Baltimore. I had just started on some paperwork when I overheard some co-workers talking about a plane crashing, at first I didn’t think it was much more than a plane crashing on land somewhere, but I got curious and turned on my radio and found out what they were really talking about and started to panic as I was in a federal building, which seemed at the time to be a target for some crazy nutters. I was still in disbelief and shock when I was hearing about the first plane going into the first building of the World Trade Center and then another into the Pentagon. I filled out a leave slip so fast and slapped it on my managers desk before she even got into work. I was so scared I didn’t know what was happening.
“Where were YOU on September 11th, 2001?”
On my way to Kindergarten. I do remember that day, however. One of my earliest memories.
Where was I?
Running sick call at the AIT Troop Medical Clinic at Fort Huachuca. Bunch of young Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen learning the craft of Military Intel and future drone pilots.
We were busy as hell, as usual. Open every morning at 0500. Saw a patient every 6 minutes.
I called my next patient and I heard my civilian desk clerk say a plane flew into the World Trade Center. Remember thinking what the hell? Thought maybe it was a private plane that got lost some fog.
Wasn’t aware of how much time passed and I heard her say another plane flew into the WTC. I walked over and in a command voice demanded to know
“WTF is going on.” They were all shocked because I never talk like that.
She pointed at her monitor and I saw some pictures and headlines.
Went back into my office and opened FR and scanned a few comments. Started shaking.
Called my team together and told them to call their families, instruct them not to leave the post and get back to work taking care of the troops. I called home and Mrs Gamecock answered the phone, asked her if she had the TV on. She said no, told her to turn it on. She asked what channel, told her it probably didn’t matter. I waited a second and she gasped. I told her under no circumstance was she to leave post, which for us meant the kids weren’t going to school that day, or as it turned out for a few days after that.
My buddy/neighbor was in Egypt for Bright Star and my wife ran next door to hug and pray with his wife.
Couple of the MI Drill Sergeants popped into my office during the morning to check on us. One of them said “I $h^t you not Sir, Bin Laden did this.” I learned early in my tour there to take these guys seriously, so I totally believed them..
Every time I finished seeing a patient I hit refresh on FR and Drudge, just taking a few seconds to see what was happening.
We finished sick call and I went to our quarters. Mrs. Gamecock asked what was happening and I told her “Baby, we are at war.” We sat glued in front of the TV til about midnight and I went to bed numb.
The next morning I headed down the mountain just a few minutes late, at 0500 the radio station played “God Bless The USA.” I pulled over and cried like a baby.
Post was locked down tight. Cooks couldn’t get to work, the troops ate MREs that day, IIRC.
Sick call was eerily quite that day. We all sat glued to our computers looking for any bit of news. About 1000 Mrs Gamecock called and asked what we were doing for lunch. I told her I had no idea as everything was closed. She then asked how many of my team were working that day and I told her 12. She told me to tell them to stand fast at noon. Sure enough she brought hot meals for 12 to the clinic.
From that day forward we felt a new sense of urgency, getting these kids medically ready to go do what they would soon be doing.
For the rest on my time there the best place in the world to hear what was going on was the sauna at the MI gym. The Drills would openly talk about what was happening, as long as they knew who was in there and trusted you.
I was 13 Years old in 8th Grade. This we before the ear of Ubiquitous Cell Phones and Media so we were kept in the Dark until bout 10:50 CST when I arrived in History Class, which had a TV, Just in time watch the Towers Begin to Fall.
I literally couldn't believe it.
We had been scheduled to fly back to the states that day. Needless to say that didn't happen....