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Thank You for posting this Pollster.

I encourage all FReepers to get the word out to any lists they may have.

This is to Sarah's List and a couple of other freepers.

Where were YOU 16 years ago today?

I was 13 years old in 8th Grade, before the era of ubiquitous televisions in Classrooms. I had to wait until 5th hour and history class to see any of it.

Just in time to watch the towers begin to fall.

As for the rest of the day, everyone kept to their usual routine.

I was stunned even then.

I was also worried the terrorists would come and attack schools.

Since that is what I would do, if I was a terrorist.

Randomly attack Schools, McDonalds, Malls, Hospitals, throw grenades in Traffic.

They have no limit to their hate.

I was working in Reston, VA in Reston Town Center, in one of the newest office buildings. Reston is one of the towns outside of the Washington DC beltway, near Dulles Airport.

Word came in on CNN that an airplane had hit one of the World Trade Center twin towers. We initially thought that it was a small plane that had run off course. We didn’t think much of it until news broke of a second plane striking the other tower. We then all gathered around the break room TV to see what was going on.

Soon, news came that a third plane had struck the Pentagon, and we were told to evacuate our building. It took an hour to get out of our parking garage (so much for an “evacuation”). Then getting home from Reston to Alexandria (normally a 40-minute drive) took 3-4 hours.

Two additional stories:

My daughter was at the Pentagon Metro/Bus depot when the 3rd plane hit. She heard the explosion. She’d just left Ft. Myer, visiting her boyfriend (soon to be husband) and was getting ready to get on the Metro to Huntington. She got on the last Metrorail before it shut down.

As for my Son-in-Law, he was a soldier at Ft. Myer as I mentioned above (a member of the Old Guard). He saw the plane flying overhead and also heard the explosion. He and his company were detailed to dig out the rubble at the Pentagon. They worked 12-hour shifts for weeks. At one point, they had to lift up a big concrete slab. All got together to pick it up. Underneath the slab was the body of a little girl, maybe 7-8 years old. She was still wearing her little polka-dot dress. Many other bodies were dug out that day, but the memory of that little girl’s crushed body still haunts him.

My Son-in-Law still experiences PTSD from those weeks digging out the Pentagon rubble.

“Where were you...?”

My oldest and I were watching the morning news (he had afternoon kindergarten). I was wearing my gray housecoat and it had spit up stains on the left shoulder (my one year old daughter still asleep upstairs). I was defrosting hamburger on the stove and debating between spaghetti or meatloaf for the dinner that night. The plane into the first tower... saw it on Fox. I awoke my husband who had worked a midnight shift the night before. Plane two.... I ran upstairs and told him that this wasn’t random. After that, the day was a mix of raw emotion, fear, anger and anxiety. The false reports of car bombs in the District, snipers everywhere... One brother accounted for and two missing in D.C. (they checked in much later). No.. I’ll never forget. If I close my eyes, I can point to the baby stain and even remember the smell.. a mix of baby and formula. Funny what stays with you. My son does remember some... he remembers not going to school and everyone glued to the tv. He remembers an argument I had with my husband who wanted us to leave to relatives and me saying no... we should stay together. He and his two younger sisters hardly remember a time that we weren’t in “war”. For that... I weep. They are growing up with a perpetual one... and it doesn’t seem to even have an ending.

My memory?

I was walking through the house while getting ready for work, when I glanced at the TV, which I don’t usually watch. There was a view of the WTC with smoke pouring out the upper floors, and the reporter on Fox News was saying that a plane of some kind had hit the building. There was no panic, just reporting the incident and wondering how it happened and what kind of plane it was. While I stood there, the 2nd plane hit the other tower. My heart nearly stopped and of course, like everyone else, I KNEW that was no accident.

I went to work and everyone was scared and glued to the tiny TV we had in the back room of the store. I worked in the mall, and we finally closed at 1 and went home because it was pretty much empty. Not only did I work in Bush’s hometown, but his mother in law still lived there, and we all feared that Midland, Texas, would be a prime target for people who hated the president. We also found out that the Pentagon had been hit and the plane had gone down in PA.

For the rest of that day and the rest of the week, I, like the whole country, was glued to the set, my heart breaking.

I went to some friends’ house to pick up a ladder, or some other tools I needed for a job; he was talking to me, she was talking to her sister and her sister told her to turn on CNN or whatever, that the WTC had just had a plane fly into it. He turned on the TV and got it tuned. I started to bore them with a recounting of how a US plane had flown into the Empire State Bldg years ago, when the second plane hit.

On the way to the job I was (for the first and perhaps only time) listening to Howard Stern. He was blaming the muzzies, and called for their genocide, actually using the word genocide.

And he was right. He still is. Repudiate Islam or die.

A Nobel Peace Prize Winner’s Shame: Aung San Suu Kyi, a beloved Nobel Peace Prize [tr]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3584965/posts

I was a month shy of 18, my mom woke me up, said “You better wake up, we’ve been attacked”. I wondered if it was “Palestinians”. She was driving my little brothers to school and turned right around when she heard on the radio.

The internet was slow (er than usual for the time, dialup was unusable), I hogged our one computer with broadband and wouldn’t let my brothers use it so she went to Best Buy to get another broadband modem.

I was newly a lurker here at FR, I probably read one of these threads that day.