Glad you were spared on 9-11, hope the movie is cathartic and makes you proud to be an American where we fight back against evil at great cost. The Religion of Death can never defeat the shining city on the hill.
My mother saw the planes crash into the buildings on her way to work; I saw the 2nd tower fall from my office window. A close friend of the family was on the phone with his sister's husband only minutes before he was killed. A friend of mine got a Blackberry message from another friend -- and it was the last any of us ever heard from him. Two close friends of mine were among those covered in dust who had to find ways to get home. Another friend had a 2-week-old baby and 2 other children under the age of 7 who had to evacuate their apartment in Battery Park City...without her husband, who worked on the other side of the WTC from their apartment.
The landlines were out of whack that day, and they asked people not to use cell phones (saving cells for emergencies) so the only way I could contact my father (on Long Island) and let him know my mother was safe and sound in my apartment was to e-mail my brother (in LA) over my cable modem. My brother then phoned my father to pass along the message. I will never, EVER forget walking up 2nd Avenue with thousands upon thousands of other people. ATMs had long lines. Grocery stores had long lines. For the rest of the week, during the ban on air travel over NYC airspace, the silence was eerie, and people stopped dead in their tracks to look at the fighter planes that would periodically swoop over the city.
I will never forget that week. I will never forget the anger, the pain, the sheer fury I felt at those who did this to us.
And then, one year later, I was in Montreal for a long weekend. I went to Mass at the Anglican Cathedral and had to listen to the priest give a sermon on how the Americans deserved what they got. As I walked out, I said to him "I'm from New York, and I knew people who died in the Towers. And I can assure you that they did not deserve it." He hemmed and hawed and I walked out. A few minutes later, I was at a McDonalds getting some coffee, and a man who'd also been at the Mass came up to me and said he was from Connecticut and that he wanted to thank me for what I'd said. I know I should separate the priest from the man, but I just couldn't do it. I was sickened.