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.
We must have been pretty close by one another that day. I was working at Southroads in Bellevue. I remember that the internet was not working well that day. I kept trying to refresh FR and Drudge and it would not update. I had a little AM/FM radio that I gave to my manager who listened and emailed out what he was hearing since my team members and I were still taking calls. We would each walk up to our break room to check out the TV in shifts. I happened to be up there when the first tower fell down. I thought that I had just watched 10,000 people die in real time. It was unreal taking calls and the amount of people who didn’t know anything had happened and were angry that the market was closed. I told a lot of people that day that they needed to turn on their TV and see for themselves what was going on.
All of the folks in my department got sent home at 10AM except for my team. I got a call from one of my co workers who lived down by the base to tell us that Air Force 1 had just flown over her apartment building while landing at Offutt with two fighter jets escorting. One of my team mates had a buddy who was stationed there and had called him earlier to say that the scuttlebutt was that GWB was coming for an extended stay. Also had an incoming call from some alphabet agency guy asking to speak to a manager that came to the same guy. He got mad when my friend thought it was his buddy from the base calling to mess with him. My friend kept calling BS until the guy threatened to have him arrested if he didn’t comply. Our manager told us that they were considering taking over our facility since we were the business in closest proximity to the base with hundreds of phone lines if the president stayed at Offutt.
Interesting day to say the least.