Posted on 09/11/2019 6:47:01 AM PDT by RinaseaofDs
Where were you on 9/11/2001?
A plane had hit one of the towers and it was on fire. A minute after I woke and we were watching the second plane hit the other tower.
I told my wife, "We're at war. Fill the bathtubs with water and make sure both cars are full of gas."
The Pentagon got hit next. Around the same time all the aircraft were grounded.
It was a perfect blue sky day in the Seattle area, and I was outside on my deck looking at the greenbelt. It was completely silent.
There were no cars, no airplanes, nothing.
Then, directly over my house two fighter jets screamed over my house going south. Rattled the windows.
My wife was crying and asking me what was going to happen next.
We were glued to the TV for two days or more.
I was RIGHT HERE, in real time.
Our threads that day were totally amazing.
You can read the suspended disbelief AS the 2nd plane hits, the gnawing realization that instead of the first plane being a random accident, that it was DELIBERATE.
Part of a much bigger plot.
The thread went on into the THOUSANDS of posts.
A totally amazing thread.
What follows is my annual retelling of my story from downtown Brooklyn on that morning of September 11. It was originally posted in (I think) 2005 in the Freeper Canteen thread.
At about 8:40am on that morning, I was walking into the Court building on Adams Street (actually, the Court St. entrance) in Downtown Brooklyn to start serving jury duty. As luck would have it, I had been halfway to the train station before I’d realized that I’d left my Walkman on the kitchen table, so I didn’t bother going back for it. I figured I’d just get a newspaper. Besides, I didn’t know how well I’d be able to pick up AM inside the building anyway.
I sat in a dark room watching a video on How to Be a Good Juror, oblivious to what was going on right across the river. We were told to relax in the room that they have and I looked out the window at the Marriot Hotel. Traffic on Adams St was snarled, not moving. Must’ve been an accident on the Brooklyn Bridge, I thought. (It was a block away.)
People were standing around outside the hotel. Must be waiting for a tour bus or something. What did I know.
Fire trucks and ambulances started flying by on the wrong side of Adams Street, which had no traffic. Okay, traffic doesn’t come into Brooklyn much in the morning, but something was odd here. I had been facing 180 degrees from where I needed to be looking.
Finally, they had made an announcement. America was at war, under attack. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been destroyed. The were trying to get coverage on the TV sets in the jury rooms. I don’t think they succeeded. Even if they wanted to, only CBS would be available because it still broadcast from the Empire State Building.
People were beside themselves, many broke down, everyone was rushing for the payphones. I met a woman who had been listening to her radio. She let me share her earbuds. She was shaken and needed a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but I walked her to the smoking room. (There was one on the floor. Quite a few people were there.)
We were dismissed. Not much was going to get done in the Court building that week. Groups of people huddled outside with questions, comments, gossip and hearsay. Some of the lawyers said they saw it happen. What kind of plane was it?
Does anyone know if the trains are running? What about the buses? No trains. No LIRR. A few buses and they’re all packed. It was time to start walking and no one wanted to walk alone. We walked in groups.
Dust was falling from the sky in downtown Brooklyn like a dirty snow that was covering the cars. Papers fell too. We started walking up Atlantic Avenue. People were wandering around with their cell phones out trying to get a signal. no luck.
We took a turn down Third Avenue. I needed to. I wanted to stop at my mother’s house. It was a good resting point for me. The group I’d tagged along with decided to join me. One guy stopped in a hardware store for masks and passed them out.
When we passed Third St and reached the Gowanus Canal, we had our first real look. It was like a scene out of a bad movie. The skyline was there. But the Towers were missing. Just a terrible column of smoke and a cloud drifting our way.
We didn’t stay long. We kept walking. I made it to my mother’s house and said good-bye to the others. Some were walking all the way to Staten Island. One who had joined our group had walked over the Brooklyn Bridge — after having walked down 50 floors of Tower 1. God was looking out for him.
I watched some of the coverage until the trains were running again. I took one that left me about a mile or so from my inlaws, the meeting place for the rest of the family. I stopped in at St. Athanasius on the way. I hadn’t been there since a wedding about 15-20 years earlier. I stayed for a little while and walked the rest of the way.
Thankfully, my wife, who worked at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side had evacuated immediately before the trains had stopped running.
It’s not a walk that I’ll forget ever forget.
TS
I already had been aware of the historic hit by a lost B-25 of the Empire State Building, that there had been clouds, they’d been unable to see, that it had been a legit ACCIDENT.
And so when I heard over the radio of the first hit, I thought, good God, it has gone and happened again, how puzzling that their GPS didn’t manage to help them out.
And I assumed at first it had been a small twin-engine private aircraft, etc.
I immediately thought of that old B-25 from WW2.
I was at college. Saw people gathered around the TV when I stopped between classes for a coffee. Not a lot of folks made to class the rest of the day.
I was at my desk in Elk Grove drinking my first coffee reading WND when a link to a two sentence AP story popped up on the top of the front page. “Small plane hits the top of the World Trade Center.”
I was just arriving at work near the Minneapolis airport flight path. Eerie feeling with no planes at that time of day.
Huge tv screen in the big conference room had the live coverage on.
In the break room, where the only TV in our office was located at the time. Everyone was huddled around as pictures of two columns of smoke were set oblique into the blue skies of Manhattan. While not completely silent, the conversation was spartan of verbosity and contemplative, which was unusual for our group.
I remember bringing up the knowledge I gained in University of structural design with concrete and steel in high rises, and predicting that those towers would come down if they didn’t get the fires out. Steel softens and bows to stresses when it gets hot. It was a prediction that I don’t gloat about, but I bring up often when remembering that day because of the 911 deniers who claimed the buildings were demolished, and anyone who knows about structural engineering would have, and did, predict it.
I’m sure many of the FDNY and first responders did too. They may have held hope that they had time, but I believe that kind of courage should be remembered.
I was sitting at my desk in my post military retirement job listening to the news on my earphones. When they finally reported that it was a airliner that hit, I walked back to a coworker who was also a vet and asked him what he thought. We both agreed it was an attack while most of our coworkers didn’t think so. Later on the highway heading home, traffic was stopped as we watched AF1 landing at Offutt AFB. Later found that a Navy P3 pilot I knew died at the Pentagon.
Just waking up and hearing some strange stuff on the radio, went to the TV room and started watching. Didn’t go to work that day.
I was right across the river.
After having been in WTC2 for the first attack 8 years earlier and predicted this very kind of double-strike followup attack that same day, it was my worst nightmare come true.
“We are AT WAR..!”
Even though it was finally clear it was a terror attack, I was still THEN dubious at the notion that the USA was really at war:
That was melodrama, I thought.
Yet in time it was clear that first impulse was CORRECT —the USA was in fact at war.
“If we let the terrorists change the way we live EVEN A LITTLE BIT, then THEY WIN..!”
I heard that assertion a million times, injected even for stupid, trifling things.
Yet in fact the way we live HAS UTTERLY AND TOTALLY CHANGED, perhaps forever.
They do NOT envy our booz, our bikini beaches, our Universities, crowded and finally now dominated by women.
We CANNOT re-create the American mid-West in the Middle-East and we should NEVER try to, not even a little bit:
Let us guard our OWN immigration, our OWN borders, and let them play in sand, dirty, disease and illiteracy.
Getting ready for work in Stamford, CT. From the beach we could see the plume of smoke. It took awhile for me to feel it was real, seemed like a movie. When I got to work many of our officers had lived through the earlier bombing in the Trade Center and had relocated the offices to Stamford as a result. They were really shaken and left immediately to get home to their families.
My first thought when I heard it was “Pilots should not drink and drive”.
Then I realized I was in my office high up in a glass tower in another city—and then learned it was not a drunk pilot.
Gulp.
Sitting at my desk at work. The girl who worked in the opposite cube had just come in. Her phone rang. It was another co-worker calling to tell her a plane had hit the World Trade Center and he would be late as he was watching the news coverage.
We went into the lounge and turned on the TV. Got there just in time to see the second plane strike the other tower. The bimbo NBC reporter said “obviously we’re having air traffic control issues”. I immediately thought “no, dimwit, that’s some sort of terrorist attack”.
Things were tense for awhile because we were getting calls from customers in D.C. about the flight that ultimately crashed in Shanksville, PA. They were warning us that it was headed for Pittsburgh. The US Steel Tower in downtown Pittsburgh is one of the tallest in the country so we assumed someone was targeting all tall buildings.
Our boss, who had been on a long conference call since before we got there, finally came out and had NO idea what had been happening. He closed the office and sent us all home.
Same here. My wife and I were driving to work in Houston. We were listening to a book on tape, so we did not get any reports. After I dropped her at her work, I switched to the radio and started hearing reports. The first plane had already hit. At first I thought it was just an accident. Before I reached my work, the second plane hit. At that point, I knew it was no accident. I spent the rest of the day following the story on Free Republic.
One other thing I remember about that day was that it was our first cool day of the year here in Houston. My wife and I were enjoying driving with the sun roof open in our car. Seemed like the start of a perfect day...
There has been a long history of fires in steel and concrete high rises collapsing buildings all over the world.
or something like that....
I was in my kitchen having coffee and watching Fox and Friends. My daughter was overdue with her first baby and we just prayed she wouldn’t go into labor that day. Our Dr. set her up to deliver at out local hospital instead of going into Boston. My husband was on business and had just driven from Long island to Northern N.J. He had no idea how he would get home but the Tappen Zee had not been closed.
That baby was born 4 days later and we’re celebrating his 18th ,this weekend in California.
My daughter’ 16th birthday.
They were reading the list of dead at the Trade Center moments ago on Fox News.
One of the readers had "Some People Did Something", Omar's message on his shirt.
I believe that he was not allowed to continue.
Too controversial??
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