Where were you? What were you doing?

[TK0001]

I was sitting at my desk, tapping away at the keyboard. I hadn't yet donned my headphones, as the ambient noise in the cube farm hadn't yet reached a level that would distract me from my work. The co-worker over the wall from me mentioned, matter-of-factly, that a plane had just struck the WTC. That got the attention of his boss, and together they watched/read the news on CNN.com. Looking back, I can't believe that this news barely registered on my internal RADAR. I instantly assumed that a Cessna had accidentally clipped the building or something similar and my thoughts of the Cessna landing in Red Square some time before that entered my mind, then quickly exited as I returned to my work.

My co-worker and his boss continued to monitor the situation. This particular co-worker had just returned from Manhattan, where our company was installing a system, so he had a vested interest in what was happening. A couple days earlier, he had shown me pictures of the towers that he took from the cafe across the street, and tried to describe to me the awesome immensity of them as I feigned interest.

I had nearly forgotten about the plane incident when suddenly he loudly exlaimed, "Holy *****! Another plane just hit!".

Instantly I knew this was much bigger than I first realized. From that point on, I tried to get onto CNN.com, MSN.com, or any other news outlet, but all attempts timed out. So I scrambled over to my co-workers desk to see the North Tower on fire and smoking for the first time. My mind spun. How could a Cessna cause so much damage?

Quickly I learned this was no accident, and this was not the work of a pair of Cessnas. When my co-worker's connection to CNN would no longer refresh, I went back to my desk, put on my headphones, and tuned into Howard Stern, who did a remarkable job of broadcasting the news as it happened.

I didn't see the actual footage of the planes striking the towers and the collapses until I got home several hours later. My mother was visiting, and as I was soaking the footage in for the first time, she was trying to steal my attention away by complaining about some insignificant problem happening in her life. I clearly remembered snapping at her and saying, "Shut up for a minute! I know you've seen this all day, but I'm seeing it for the first time! My country is under attack, dammit!"

That shut her up, and to this day I hold no guilt for biting her head off at that moment. Whatever her problems were may've been, they were petty compared to what had happened to our nation that day.

I know this is probably in the wrong forum, but no other forum on this board is so 9/11-focused, so I appeal to the mods to keep it here.

[Bradk3]

I had just walked in the house from taking the dog out for a morning walk, when my wife called out to me from the bedroom that New York was under attack.

We spent the next few hours silently watching television, trying to make sense of it all.

[mrfreeze]

I was sitting in history class my senior year. Sadly at the time living in Michigan I didn't even know what the WTC was.

[Josh Redstone]

I was at lunch in my high school cafeteria. By the time someone had told me what happened and I had gotten to the library to see the television, the towers had both already fell, and the CBC was re-broadcasting footage of everything. It scared the heck out of me, needless to say.

[TK0001]

I remember standing outside our office building, looking up at the sky, and trying to take in the fact that no planes were flying overhead. We work about 5 miles from an international airport and the sky was completely clear.

I also mentioned, without thinking, that I had been listening to the Stern broadcast of the events to our office racist/anti-semite. He then took it upon himself to inform me not to trust anything that "filthy Jew" had to say. I somehow restrained myself from making him swallow his teeth.

[Dave_46]

I was working in the Cardington laboratory that gets a mention in part one or two of the loose change thread. A couple of my colleagues walked up to me and said "Dave, your not going to believe this ...". Even today I can remember Rogers words. We watched pictures on a TV with a poor signal because the lab is just a vast tin shed, and signals don't penetrate well.

I was supposed to be looking after a group of forensic scientists who were making and throwing petrol bombs at the time.

Dave

[Z]

I was on my way to work, after changing from P.T. that morning. We heard about it on the radio; the local Oklahoma jockeys were laughing about it, at first, talking about how it was probably a prank call they had gotten.

A few minutes later, the 'Morning Zoo' got awful quiet, when they heard from their news guy that it wasn't just a plane, but a large passenger aircraft.

By the time we got to work, it was apparent that no one would be working today. We were all told to go home, spend some time with our families, and stand by for further instructions. We were all certain we'd be on planes, headed to the Middle East, in a few hours. As it turns out, it would be another two months before my unit deployed - by which time, I was already out of the military.

In some ways, I regret the timing of my E.T.S.; in most ways, though, I'm very grateful.

[Twilek]

I was working alone in a small warehouse in Plattsburgh NY and heard the initial report about the North tower on the radio, right as I was walking out of my office to go inventory some pallets.

At the time I was such a noob on computers that I didn't know to pull up CNN live or something to watch. Instead I made a beeline for a bulletin board on which I knew folks.

The very first thread at the top simply said "Dude", and I knew that was the one. We spent pretty much the whole day talking about it as it was happening. Many of them were in front of TVs (some were also in NYC themselves) so I was actually getting details more quickly from them than Canadian radio. I didn't get to see any footage until I got home that night.

I must say, 9/11 was when I became a news junkie. I had newspapers, TV and radio surrounding me constantly for about the next 3 days, and I haven't slacked off much since. I just get most of it from the internet and papers nowadays.

[DarkMagician]

Electricity and Electronics class, high school, Junior Year.

[sophia8]

I wrote a lot about this in my personal diary. So here's a summary.
I was on my way home. Feeling very pissed off. I was working part-time, somebody had got the schedules mixed, and I had turned up for an afternoon's work when I should have come in the morning. So I'd had to turn around and get back on the bus.
I needed some shopping, so I got off several stops early to pop into the supermarket. That would have been about 1.45pm UK time. Just about the time the first plane was about to hit.
There was no hurry, so I took my time. While I was picking up a loaf of bread and a carton of milk, wondering which breakfast cereal to buy, wondering if I needed to get potatoes, buying a lottery ticket, people were burning to death or jumping out of windows.
I would have got home about 2.20 - after the second plane hit. My teenage son was home early from college and already had the TV on. He was shouting, practically screaming at me to come and look.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I had to tell myself it wasn't some movie. I had to keep asking "That couldn't have been a passenger plane, could it? It must have been some little executive jet, surely? Not a full passenger plane!"
I literally couldn't believe it. My son had to keep repeating to me what the news people were saying.
It sunk in eventually.

[chipmunk stew]

I was getting ready for work (I had a mid-shift that day) when my sister called to tell me a plane hit the WTC. My stomach dropped at the news as I imagined the horror the people there were experiencing, but I continued getting on with my morning without turning on the news.

My sister called back just as I was about to head out the door to tell me a second one hit. I rushed out the door and drove to my fiancee's house.

My fiancee was sitting on the floor in front of the TV bawling her eyes out. We didn't say much, just held each other. She had recently applied for the foreign service and missed the cutoff by a fraction. She had been planning on trying again, but she knew that this would drastically change our country's relationship with the world, and she was sure it would not be the relationship she had envisioned being a part of.

As we watched the first tower collapse and then the next, I remember feeling numb by that point. It seemed so unreal, watching it play out flatly on our small screen. I recognized this in retrospect as an effect of the shock and trauma.

I was late for work that day. No one cared.

[B-Man]

Sitting in the Mercure Hotel, in Algiers, Algeria.
We packed up shop the next day and left the country.

[TheCzech]

At the time, I lived in a high rise in Crystal City, a neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia which is within walking distance of the Pentagon.

I was at a dental appointment which I left shortly after the first plane hit. My car radio was not operational, so I didn't hear any news at all. I called into my job in Downtown DC since I was running a little late, and my co-worker made a cryptic comment about a plane crash in New York. I didn't think anything of it.

I then drove home to drop off my car. Oblivious, I walked over to the Metrorail station to commute into work. My train was stopped in the Pentagon City Metro station (the one just before the Pentagon station itself) and the messages over the intercom were cryptic. The train was offloaded with little explanation.

I just thought it all seemed odd, so I started to make my way up the escalators to the street level. Just before I made it, another announcement came on saying the Pentagon Station was closed until further notice because of terrorist attack. I said "Oh [expletive]" and hurried up to the surface.

The surface escalator at Pentagon City brings you up facing directly away from the Pentagon, so what I saw were lots of gaping people. I turned around and saw the thick column of black smoke. That is the image that I will remember from the day.

After finding I couldn't get a cell phone line, I trekked home. I had only gone one station anyway. I called the office to find that pretty much everyone had cleared out and everyone else was on the way out. The office was only a block and a half from the White House. We couldn't go to work the next day either because of security barriers.

It turns out I was on the first train to be stopped. That was a lucky thing too because it saved me the trouble of having to get home in the mess. Other people I worked with who lived in my area had to spend the night with friends in other areas of town. As it was, I had no choice but to be anywhere but home. The streets in my neighborhood were closed down.

I had the TV on for a while, but after I saw the first tower collapse, I turned it off. I couldn't take any more. After calling my parents to let them know I was alright, I spent the rest of the day in what felt like slow motion...occasionally looking out my eighth story window to see the smoke.

[TheCzech]

Just realized that was my first post. How depressing...

[chipmunk stew]

Originally Posted by TheCzech

Just realized that was my first post. How depressing...

Welcome. Thank you for sharing your story.

[TobiasTheViking]

seconded. welcome

:

[gfunkusarelius]

was at work, went home to fix the printer for my wife (lived a half mile from work) and when i got back, someone told me a plane hit the tower. we thought it was a cesna, didnt take it too strongly and went down for a soda and was in the breakfrom for the next hour watching in disbelief. one on my co-worker's fathers worked there

[TK0001]

Originally Posted by gfunkusarelius

one on my co-worker's fathers worked there

Did he make it out?

[Quinn]

I was on the west coast, so I was still asleep when it happened. My then-wife woke me with the words, "You need to get up, something's happened. It's not your family... but it's bad."

[Tamarillicent]

I was showing up late for work on W 30th Street in Manhattan. I arrived in the lobby of work and the receptionist told me a plane had hit the WTC. By the time I got upstairs someone else told me about the second plane. I listened to the radio because we didn't have TV's at work and listened to the drama and rumers unfold. I didn't see anything until I went home to Staten Island. We were trying to figure out how to even get home, since everything south of 14th Street was blocked off we couldn't get to the Staten Island Ferry. It wasn't runing anyway. I remember standing in Union Square and looking south. All you could see was smoke.

Then, we finally found a bus that was going to SI. The bus took the BQE which runs parallel to lower Manhattan at points. We were driving under this massive cloud of smoke and debris. I didn't see any footage until I actually got home. SInce we didn't have cable, we could only get a few channles and Telemundo had the best reception, so I followed the action in Spanish.
I was stuck on SI for 2 days. The first day, it was just impossible to get in since the ferry wasn't running. The second day, the island was on "lock-down" because of a suspicious truck seen on the Verrazzano Bridge. The third day I made it into work by a very crowded bus.

Once the ferry started running again, it was the only reason average people were going south of 14th street so it was VERY eerily quiet. Just military and emergency vehicles, and folks taking the ferry. The tourists didn't really come back until St. Patricks day. That's when things started to become mormal again.

Sorry it's so long. I didn't loose any friends or family. The day wasn't really traumatic in the way it would be had I seen the whole thing in person. But it was still pretty sucky in it's own way. I had nightmares about planes falling from the sky in random places in Manhattan for a few months.

Sorry it's so long.

Tam

[Stellafane]

I had just started my weekly Monday 9:00 AM 1/1 meeting with my boss. A few minutes into it, his AA called and informed him that a plane hit the first tower. He guessed right away it was a terrorist attack, I thought it might be an accident. A few minutes later we went down to the lunch room because there was a TV there. The tower was burning. I went a way for a few minutes, and came back. In that time the second plane had hit. I still was trying to make a case that it was an accident, maybe the second plane was a news plane that got too close (I was in deniel most of that day and wasn't thinking clearly).

Weirdest part of the day: Got back to my office, my ex-wife had just sent me an email that contained an audio file of some Canadian singer singing this viciously nasty anti-American song. The chorus went "Burn, burn, burn," in apparent reference to the burning of the White House during the War of 1812. Of all days to get something like that. Got another email that the Pentagon had been hit, now things were starting to get really scary.

A little while later I was in a meeting. Someone was calling in, while watching CNN. He was reporting the latest. It was he who told us that the first tower had fallen, something that hadn't even crossed my mind as a possibility for some reason. I vividly remember my highly intelligent response: "Fallen? To the ground?" (Is there any other place a skyscraper falls to?) After that I was speechless; I just called off the meeting.

Got back to my office, and my wife called. She was scared, crying, wanted me to come home. I asked my boss if I could leave, he immediately sent out an email to everyone suggesting they go home and be with their loved ones if possible. In the car I turned on the radio, only to learn the second tower had fallen. Listened to Howard Stern's live broadcast the rest of the way home. (Whatever you think of the man, his crew did an incredible job reporting live from the scene that day. I swear if it had been anyone other than Stern, he would have won a Peabody or some other award.) Got home, and spent the rest of the day watching CNN.

That's it. Hate to be melodamatic, but that just took a lot out of me to write -- or more accurately, remember.

[TK0001]

Originally Posted by Tamarillicent

Sorry it's so long.

Not at all. I'm always fascinated by stories from those who were in Manhattan and DC that day. Thanks for sharing.

[CFLarsen]

NYC

[Patricio Elicer]

I vividly remember that day. It was an off work day for me. Around 9:30 am (same time NY zone I guess) I was in bed watching a dull Animal Planet program when I got a phone call from my brother. ¿Did you know, a plane hit one of the Twin Towers? (we'd visited the towers the very previous year, BTW).

I rapidly switched to CNN, and there it was, one of the towers enrolled in smoke. From my brother's account I thought it was just a small plane, just an accident. But then I saw a replay, and it was ... a commercial plane!

The rest was simply aweful. Every event was followed by a more aweful and awesome one. When I watched the first tower falling down, I simply couldn't believe my eyes. I must be dreaming I told myself, a kinda surreal dream, this cannot be happening in reality. Sadly it turned out to be real. This is by far the most horrendous real life event I've ever watched.

[jhunter1163]

I was on my way to work when the news of the first plane hitting came over the radio. It literally never occurred to me that it might be anything but a small plane. I thought "some idiot flew his Cessna into the WTC"... I said as much to our receptionist when I walked into the office. She looked at me with wide eyes and said "noooooo...."

We pulled a TV out of the conference room, set it up in the common area of the office and tuned it to CNN. I watched for a minute, then went to my desk to bring up MSN to see what I could find out. I checked every news site I could think of, then went into a chat room to see if anyone there knew more than me. I talked to everyone there, like a maniac. Over and over, "what do you know? what do you hear?" There was this overriding sense of fear... what would happen next? were there more planes? what else might they use? bombs, anthrax, chemicals? We placed frantic calls to our home office in the WTC, trying to find out what we could.. then we were left to wonder, after the collapses... did our co-workers and friends there get out? (Three of them didn't.)

In the chat I was in, there was one woman who was as calm as could be, even when others were freaking out. I started talking more to her, mostly because I needed calming myself. Ms. GoldFaerieDust02 and I talked for hours, about life, fear, all sorts of things. I had always looked at Internet chatrooms as vaguely geeky places, not worthy of serious attention. But on this day, here I was, pouring out my heart to a total stranger.

She was on vacation that week. We talked again the next day, and the next. One thing led to another, as they say, and in June of 2004 we were married. I know that many, if not most, of the people on this forum don't believe in God, or fate, or anything like that. I'm an agnostic myself in these matters, but if there IS a God, I would thank him every day for the angel he sent to me on the day the devil walked the streets of New York.

[Arkan_Wolfshade]

I remember the US based news sites becoming so bogged down we couldn't access them. So, a number of us switched over to things like bbc.co.uk and guardian.co.uk so we could stay up to speed on what was going on.

[joobz]

A graduate student in Philadelphia, sitting in lab avoiding starting my experiment.

Got a call from my advisor telling me what happend and to go home. Didn't start the experiment.

[Morwen]

I was sleeping, in Oregon. My father phoned me from Spain, "A plane has crashed into the WTC", he said. I switched the TV on and I saw the second plane hit. The day went by as if shrouded in cotton. We had lab meeting, nobody came. I had my walkman on all day long, trying to make sense of it all, failing. It only hit me four days later, at night. The three thousand deaths hit me then, and I wept most of the night away. Delayed shock, maybe. Also, I was very very scared for the whole world in general and myself in particular. For a day after the attacks, I wasn't at all sure that WWIII wouldn't start and I would never be able to go home to my family again.

[Sword_Of_Truth]

Copy/paste from the same thread over at Screw Loose Change forum -

Quote:

I was sleeping late, I had the day off. One of my roommates worked with my sister mowing lawns over the summer. So she came to pick him up every morning. When she came that day, she knocked on my door and told me "Hey Aaron, go turn on the TV! One of the Wolrd Trade Center buildings has been destroyed and the White House is on fire!"

"Ha, ha... very funny" I groggily said back to her. "I'm serious" she said, Go turn on the TV!"

To humor her, I got up, slipped my pants on, stepped across the hall into the living room and turned on the TV. I didn't even have to change from the channel it was on to CNN or anything like that. It was on every channel. Me, my sister and my roommate sat and watched in silent horror. My sister heard over the radio on her way to my place and hadn't actually seen it yet.

Then the second tower came down before our eyes. Oddly enough it was this shock that snapped her out of her stupor, she grabbed my roomie and left to go to work.

As I had the day off, I turned on my comp and started to attempt to play some Tribes 2. The chatrooms on the matching server were all flooded with chatter and the servers themselves were largely empty. I hooked up with my clan and was told that our match against a competing clan that afternoon was cancelled. We spent a couple hours trying to figure out if a couple of our New York members were OK.

So we sat in the chatrooms watching and making the odd comment on what was happening.

CNN eventually started reporting explosions the capital of Afghanistan, where it was just past midnight local time. The explosions later turned out to be a mortar attack by the anti-taliban "Nothern Alliance" in retaliation for the perhaps not coincedental assisination of thier leader a few days earlier. But we wouldn't learn this for at least another 24 hours. I quickly alerted my clanmates to turbn thier TV volumes up and get back to CNN (as if any of them had turned it off). "THEY'RE BOMBING KABUL!!!" I pounded out with one finger on the shift key.

Our clan leaders girlfriend typed back...
"Oh my God... we're at war..."

[Omnilingual]

I woke up and turned on the TV. (I live in California, so the planes had already hit, but the towers were still standing. I'm pretty sure the footage of the second plane hitting I saw was a rerun, not real-time.) After a couple of minutes, I called my mom to ask if she possibly made a mistake about the date of my birth. (She hadn't.) I sent e-mail to some friends canceling the plans we had made for the day and spent the rest of the day avoiding the news and thinking dismal thoughts about human nature.

[Bradk3]

Thanks everyone for posting these. It brings back tears, but it's good to remember.

[TobiasTheViking]

i agree.

[Pardalis]

Originally Posted by Bradk3

Thanks everyone for posting these. It brings back tears, but it's good to remember.

Yes, it's important that we do.

I had gotten up and fed the budgie, and as I turned on the tube I saw the first tower on fire. I switched the channels and every one of them was broadcasting the same event. Like everybody else I thought that it was a devastating accident, but at the same time I was sure that the people would eventually be rescued by the roof. That thought kind of reassured me so I didn't take much notice of it until when a few minutes later, I saw that black plane coming towards the WTC towers.

It was black because it was in the shadow of the tower, but as I saw it approach, for these few seconds, I am convinced I saw Evil (maybe the blackness helped creating that impression). I am agnotisc, but that was as close to Evil as you can get. If I have to put an image on the word 'Evil', that is it. That was a deliberate act, a geste as we say in French, which made it even more sickening. It was also a frightening statement.

I was about to leave for work when the news reported an explosion at the Pentagon. I had to go to work, to a company ironically called 'Jet Films', and on my way, I thought to myself : "This is WW3". When I arrived at work, everybody was in the conference room watching the news, the last tower had fell. I was shocked, I never expected them to fail. The images of that greyish powder covering everything, the people covered with it on the streets, the devastation... It was too much and I went to the bathroom and cried. I couldn't understand how people could do this to other people.

Needless to say I couldn't concentrate on my work that day, my hand just didn't want to draw.

[Z]

I honestly don't know that many of us did work that day - unless you were in rescue services, medicine, or some immediate security or quick-response military unit, you probably went home and sat in shock, or stayed at the workplace, glued to whatever media you could get.

It was a very unusual day, to put it mildly.

[chran]

I was coming home from shopping, when a friend of mine called me and told me that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and that one had hit the Pentagon.

I ran the rest of the way home, and sat in stunned disbelief with my friend on the phone, watching the news. I got to see both towers collapsing live. The reporters on the TV station I was watching didn't report the collapse at first, they just didn't mention all the dust and smoke in the air where a tower had once stood. I thought that was strange.

I vividly remember the drive to work the next day on the bus. Usually there's a lot of talk and laughing. This morning it was quiet. Everybody was lost in thought.

[russell_morris]

I was in a suit-and-tie out in front of the student center at my college waiting for the shuttle that ferried kids back-and-forth to the career fair for graduating seniors. A good friend came out of the student center and told me that two planes had hit the two WTC towers, and that both were wobbling badly and would probably collapse.

I remember my reaction vividly. I was angry at him for a split second (for no rational reason of course). I guess I had that little flash of denial you sometimes get when presented with extraordinarily world-shaking news. I remember thinking "sky-scrapers are supposed to wobble a bit you idiot - that's how they're built!". But of course once I followed him into the student center and saw the whole horror on TV, my silly "denial phase" ended quite abruptly.

I still think back to those initial seconds whenever I'm confronted with really bad news: you can't trust your initial emotional reactions to extraordinary circumstances like that any more than you can keep yourself from having them. You have to do your best to calm down and then re-analyze the situation. I don't know how many other people that applies to - but my initial reactions to jarring situations like that are almost always somewhere between useless and mind-numbingly idiotic.

I sort of stared at the TV, along with everyone else in the main hallway of the student center at the time, until I got my bearings again. I decided that the only thing I could do was go back outside and wait for the shuttle again. I took the shuttle down to the fair, made out a nametag for myself, and walked inside.

The towers had collapsed during my shuttle ride to the fair, which was held in the concourse of the school's (Georgia Tech's) basketball stadium. Being a stadium as such, the concourse was lined with TV's every 20 or 30 feet. I stood near some company's booth and watched the towers collapse for the first time. I remember saying "Oh... God...", turning to look away, and then seeing the same horror repeated on the long string of TV's all the way down the concourse.

At this point it dawns on me that nobody's doing career-fair stuff anymore (obvious, I know, but I was still in shock at this point). I was graduating that semester with a degree in Computer Science, and I had no job leads whatsoever. I didn't get any leads the previous day at the fair, but I wasn't worried because that day the big established companies (i.e. the one's that weren't completely decimated after the dot-com bust that occured less than 6 months earlier) were scheduled.

I walked out of the fair and walked all the way back to the student center (where I had parked my car). I felt like my entire world had come completely unanchored. The industry which I was about to step into had just collapsed, leaving behind a sea of experienced people that would compete with me for any job available. I had no job leads with less than 3 months left before graduation. My best hope for job leads was just cancelled. And my country was literally under attack. Things only grew worse on the walk back, as it started to dawn on me how many people must have died, and how my worries were so completely trivial compared to what their friends, families, and loved-ones must be going through, and to what the country and world would inevitably have to go through in reaction to this.

I had been a fence sitter between deism and atheism up until this point. Being at a science-focused school like Georgia Tech whittled away at my deism a good bit, but I still held on to it, all be it more and more abstractly. I prayed on 9/11, and for the the next few days. With all the soul-searching I was doing at that point, it soon became undeniable to me that my deism/Christianity was a crutch I used when I was scared. I didn't really believe those things. I've considered myself an atheist (weak atheist, to be precise) ever since.

Please understand that I don't present the last part of this as an affront to religous folks or as some sort of '9/11 is proof that there is no God' argument. I do not want to polarize the mourning or remembrence in any way. I mention it in answer to the "What were you doing?" portion of the title: I was experiencing my world-view being refuted and crushed.

[T.A.M.]

Five years ago today I woke up in my small city 2000 miles from Ground Zero, even further from DC, and I went to play a round of golf with my Father In Law. On the way to the course we heard on the radio that a plane, believed to be a commuter plane, had struck one of the twin towers in NYC. I looked at my In-law, and he at me. We shook our heads, but then I said,

"Probably just a freak accident."

He nodded, and we drove on. We played our round of golf, not thinking about much more than how odd the event seemed, and mainly, on the wonderful weather we were having.

After the round we came into the club house. I remember going to the bar for a beer, and turning around to the big screen TV that everyone had suspiciously gathered around. I think my heart sunk into my golf shoes when I read the caption on the screen as people were running along a city street, chased by a cloud of dust.

"America Under Attack" was all it said. I moved to get a better look, and to hear what was being said. Over the next ten minutes my heart sank further, and I could feel that lump you get in your throat that you can't swallow.

We drove home, silence for most of it, occasional comments of disbelief the rest of the way. When I got home my wife, mother in law, and my brother in law were all gathered around the TV, watching, like the rest of the world...we watched the entire day........

TAM

[stateofgrace]

I remember 911 very well.

Over in the UK I first heard about something was going on in one of the Towers on the radio, it was sometime in the afternoon. Anyway we just went about our normal business and never really gave it a second thought. We went shopping, me and my wife and started off back home. During the car journey home more news flashes kept coming on the radio.

By the time I got home and switched on the news it was clear that it was very serious. It was on every single channel. The Towers were in flames and more and more reports were coming in.

I honestly can’t remember whether I actually saw the first Tower go live or whether it was reruns but I remember vividly the unedited screams and gasps of horror as it fell. It was strange but we knew, we just knew the second Tower was going to go.

We watched it all for as long as we could and finally my wife simply said" Please turn it off" So we did.

Later that night I switched the TV back on, when my family was asleep. Maybe it was the couple of glasses of wine or just the shear shock of it all. I wept.

[gtc]

It was late evening in Australia. Like many Australians I was already asleep, although some of my colleagues were watching the late night news when they started reporting the events.

The next morning I turned on the breakfast news and saw footage of the second plane hitting the WTC. Because it was breakfast TV, I assumed it was a trailer for a new film.

I don't think anyone missed work that day. We were all glad to hear that the workers in our New York branch, which was across the road from the WTC, were safe although their offices were extensively damaged.

[Tamarillicent]

Originally Posted by Bradk3

Thanks everyone for posting these. It brings back tears, but it's good to remember.

I agree, too. It's really interesting to read other people's recounting of their day. Sometimes here in the city, it's easy to forget how much the rest of the country was shocked, too.