Where were you on 9/11?

[Sith Commando]

Ok, I looked and looked to make sure this wasn`t already a thread and I didn`t see any, so.....yea.

where were you when you learned about the towers getting hit?

as for me, I was in 5th grade and we had just started our math part of class.
I was in florida, I had/have family up there, but not near manhatten. The realization of it all didn`t hit until I saw the first tower come down.

so there`s my little story, now what`s yours?

[wing]

i was in 4th grade, waiting in line for lunch. i could see the tv that was in the teachers lounge and that was on.

[smass]

I took the day off as 9/11 is my birthday. I turned 34 years old on 9/11/2001. I stayed home from work and slept in that day and was watching TV when it all went down. I had the Today show on and my wife was home as well. At first the reporters were speculating that it was some sort of accident. Then we all watched the second plane hit and I turned to my wife and said - this is a planned attack.

I live in Albany about 200 miles from the city but I am a fairly frequent visitor. I had been in the WTC many times on business. I did not know anyone who died that day but I have many friends who lost friends and relatives.

The one thing that still sticks with me everytime I read or watch a TV show about 9/11 and terrorism in general is just how life altering the event was and still is. Many people insist on playing the blame game with 9/11. And while I do agree that many mistakes were made leading up to the event - I have always insisted that to use 20/20 hindsight to second guess anyone is unrealistic. Until 9/11 happened no one could have conceived of a terror attack on that grand a scale. Its was a paradigm shift - and like all paradigm shifts they seem blatantly obvious after the fact - but before they happen they are just not part of the collective experience.

Anway thats what I remember about 9/11. And I will never forget or forgive...

[dragon wench]

I had just taken my son to school, he'd started in first grade. It was a beautiful crisp and bright morning, and I was in a particularly happy mood.... I cheerfully greeted another parent I knew.... and that was when I heard.

Later on that morning I had some business to attend to at the university and I spent a long time watching the TVs at the bar in stunned silence. It was eerie... there must have been about 300 people in that room, and it was utterly quiet.

[Xandax]

I was home playing Dark Age of Camelot when I got a text message/SMS saying world war 3 had started and I should turn on CNN.
I tried to access the CNN webpage and any other newswebpage and all were pretty much down, so I tuned in on the telly where I saw the first plane had hit the tower. Then I spend most of the rest of the day watching CNN and other news channels while trying to access news on the web.

[The Z]

My mom was driving me to school; it was grade 8, so my first year of high school. In fact it was still in the first week of school I think.

Anyways, it came in on the radio, but at school pretty much all the focus was on the tragedy. Our teachers were CNN correspondants that day.

[DesR85]

I was at my grandparent's house and was about to head for bed when my grandmother announced that the first plane hit one of the towers and to quickly switch on the TV and watch CNN. By the time I switched to CNN, there was smoke coming out of the building. It was somewhere around an hour into watching the breaking news when I saw the second plane struck the second tower. I kept watching until both of the towers collapsed. What a terrible sight. And as what the others here have said, I, too was also shocked and stunned, including those who were watching with me.

God be with them and rest in peace.

[Icaris]

I was playing my ps2 in my room and my mum said hey look at this! so i ran into the lounge and saw the twin towers on fire.. but then i went back to playing

[slade]

I was at home resting....errr sleeping when I overheard them saying something about a plane hitting the towers......I was too out of it to really understand what was going on until they came into my room and told me, however I still didnt comprehend what was happening until I looked at the screen and realised what was happening.For those of you who saw it live, it is even sadder because you saw it unedited and saw somethings that were not shown later on that day when it was being reshown .

[Xandax]

@Slade: I recall vividly the feeds displaying both the impact of the second plane into the tower and the feeds of people jumping from the windows.
I am thankfull - how cynical this may sound - that I was not there to view the events in real life person, but was fortunate enough to have them displayed (live) via newsfeeds.
It does make it possible to have another perspective on the matters I'm sure, then if I had stood at ground zero and looked up.

I'm sure the images will be something people will carry with them for years on end, even despite of what later may cloud the event.
For example I still vividly recall when I saw the Challenger shuttle blow up on live feed at the launch. These images will (while not in scope of course) stand as vividly for decades.

[DaemonJ]

My ex-wife and I were dropping my truck off to get an oil change. Everyone in the garage was standing around the radio like they were waiting for a lottery announcement or something. One of the guys made a mention that a plane crashed but we didn't think much of it.

We then drove down to pick up a load of bricks and everyone there was talking about a plane crash and an attack on the pentagon. Since I worked for the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Center I would have been notified if the pentagon had been attacked and had not received any such notification.

We then drove home and hit the Internet to begin working. On the opening page of Yahoo! News was the story as it was unfolding.

What a very surreal day for us since we did not own a TV and did not listen to the radio. We had no idea why everyone was looking like a zombie and hovering around radios until we got home and hit the web.

[Ashen]

I was at home watching some documentary when they interupted the show so I actually saw pretty much all of it live.
I remember calling my best friend, telling him to switch the channel and then spending some 15 minutes arguing with him trying to persuade him that yes this is real, and live, and no, not a hoax movie or a game. He wouldn't believe me. It was that surreal.

[mr_sir]

I was walking home from my teacher training college when my friend phoned me and told me what had happened. When I got home we then spent the next few hours in front of the tv trying to work out what had actually happened.

[VonDondu]

I was asleep in bed when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, but I woke up and heard about it a few minutes later when I checked the financial news (as I was in the habit of doing every time I woke up). I was tuned to three different news channels (on three separate TVs) when the second plane hit. After that, I did some research on the internet to get some information about the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 which killed six people and injured 1,042. (For those who don't realize it, 9/11 was not the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil.) I was trying to hunt for clues that might have shed some light on who might have been responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Osama bin Laden was widely believed to have been the mastermind of the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but he was never officially accused of being behind the 1993 bombing; Ramzi Yousef was the mastermind behind that attack. I tried to figure out what the effect on financial markets might be (for example, as we found out later, Enron was unable to make loan payments on time, resulting in a domino effect that brought the company down and exposed their scams), but the hysteria was just too overwhelming to predict what would happen in, say, three weeks time. A lot of people were afraid that the end of the world was upon us, so it gave us the opportunity to have a lot of sex.

[jopperm2]

I first heard about it in my car in the parking lot of the college I was going to. Howard Stern was talking about a fire he could see in the first tower, but he didn't know what was going on. It must have just happened as he was only reporting what he could see out the window from his studio, no one had told him the news yet.

I went to my first class and no one was talking about it. After that class, I heard what I thought were rumors in the stairwell on the way to my US National Government class. When I got there we spent the entire hour discussing it. I was fortunate, the teacher had worked in Washington for decades and was a bit of an insider. The towers hadn't even fallen yet and he knew already who was responsible for the attacks. To this day I don't know if that was his educated assumption, or if perhaps a friend still working in DC had called him.

I went to lunch not long after that where there was a tv set up in the dining room of the little NY style Italian place we ate every tuesday and thursday(ironic, huh?). We(my girlfriend and I) watched the coverage there during lunch. Then we went back and finished classes. We spent a lot of the rest of the day catching up on what we had missed. I think we probably watched foxnews all day.

I like what smass said about the paradigm change. I think that's really the biggest effect. Terrorists kill people all the time, so that's not really a big victory for them in the scope of things. The victory for them, is that America no longer feels safe like it did.

Great thread SC.