I was in the 6th grade during Language Arts. (English) class when the announcement happened and slowly between classes, kids were being pulled out. I saw it on tv at the library but didn’t understand the magnitude until days later.
10th grade, I just finished eating breakfast(1st period study hall) and went to my first class. Our teacher was always watching the news when we got to class and turned it off as we shuffled in, but she left it on and sat at her desk staring at it not addressing us at all. Obviously we started paying attention to it, seeing recording of the first plane hitting, and then the second plane hitting live. It wasn’t feasible for everyone to just pack up and go home, so we just went from class to class watching the news in all of them, with some teachers trying to talk to us about the events and some just sitting quietly with us after a quick comment about why we’re not doing any classwork that day.
My memory is pretty damn good as is, but I could literally write a very detailed script of that entire day, it was unreal to me that those events could happen.
I was in first grade during the attacks, it was only my second day in school. Got home and my parents were in our kitchen looking at the tiny screen of our CRT watching CNN live. 5 minutes after I had come in the second plane hit the towers. I just remember the shock that was on my parents faces, but could not really understand what was going on.
Have trouble keeping it together right now, some of your stories are fucking touching.
I was actually leading a weight training class at the University of Texas at Austin (I was a grad student and a T.A).
I was working for a Morgan Stanley owned Mutual Fund Company in Houston. We had the TVs on CNBC to watch the market, but mostly for background noise. The first plane hit. It took me back to the 1940’s when a B-17 ( I think) crashed into the Empire State Building. I thought it might have been an accident. When the second one hit it was all over. We closed the business. People were calling to close their accounts, but the market never opened so we could not fill their orders. My daughter was 6 months old and all I wanted to do was be at home with my wife and my daughter.
I was working until 6 am and then I went to sleep.
I woke up at around 1 pm, turned on my tv and saw planes hitting buildings and I was like,… whaaaat !?!
I was a senior in high school sitting in english class. After that I tried to enlist in the USMC.
I had just entered 7th grade at a new school and a completely new town. I remember my dad watching the news, but that’s it. As we had just immigrated to the U.S., I don’t think anyone in my family really recognized the severity and importance of what happened. My dad might have, but he didn’t say anything about it.
Heck, my school didn’t even shut down or do anything different iirc.
I cannot imagine how it must have felt for the average american.
I was very young when this all happened, too young to know exactly what was going on at the time. I was hanging out with my grand father drinking coke, playing cards, ect when he started paying attention to the radio.
[quote]theBeth wrote:
After that I tried to enlist in the USMC.[/quote]
I had never in my entire life seriously considered joining the armed forces in some manner until that one day myself. Never was much of a patriot or supporter of any type of military violence, but damn if something inside me didn’t change from seeing how the world around me get thrown out of wack.
There was a considerable population of people in Patterson NJ that was reported (and filmed) by news crews actually celebrating in the streets such an atrocious act against America. My brothers seemed to be seriously considering hopping into their cars and taking a trip to Jersey to “discuss” matters with these people. It was truly difficult to not want to do the same. The way I was feeling, it sounded like a perfectly sensible solution.
S
I had just finished the night shift at Gillette and I was working out at Worlds in dedham doing cardio when the first plane hit, I was in shock and thought it was just an accident. I then got into my '99 trans , and put on wbcn Stern was on and he was describing the second plane and the chaos. I was going through a really bad time, break up, loss of my awesome gym job, people who I thought where my friends abandoning me etc that I was already depressed so I just went to bed getting ready for my twelve hour shift at Gillette that day to stsrt so I didn’t know what had happened until my co worker told me the whole story.
Close enough to see the smoke from the Pentagon.
Shitting my pants coming home from school as an 8 year old child.
I’m from long island, NY, so I was only about 30 minutes from the happening. YIKEZ.
I remember it like it was yesterday I was at work in the middle of welding a cell tower in the shop when 1of the guys came outta the break room he heard on the radio that a plane struck 1 of the towers everyone stopped what they were doing and we piled into the break room to listen to it
I’m not in the US, but caught wind of this and thought it was really cool. They wanted to get 2M bikers, but estimates were at around the 880k - 1M number… very impressive.
I know we like to remember where we were when the event happened, but my question is, what are you we doing today or how have we changed our perspectives to prevent or counter such actions in the future. How are we remembering those who died in the towers, their families, the service men and women, and those in the military who have served and died in the conflicts that followed that day? I think that is far more important than what you were doing the day it happened.
In a bar a three blocks from the capitol watching on tv. surrounded by congressmen, with my most liberal friend going on and on about tracking down the terrorists and making them wear a pigs head before torturing them to death.
[quote]Quasi-Tech wrote:
…my question is, what are you we doing today or how have we changed our perspectives to prevent or counter such actions in the future.
[/quote]
We are watching as our government dismantles the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, militarizes the police force, increases the invasiveness of security procedures at schools, sporting venues and airports, incarcerates US citizens without due process, and carries out the most extensive and intensive domestic surveillance operation in the history of totalitarianism…while waving our flags and bragging about how proud we are to be Americans in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
That’s what we’re doing.
Waving the flag is important. If we stop, the terrorists win.
I was working as plane dispatcher at the time. I was actually on the phone right before the attacks happened trying to help some putz guide his plane to a safe landing. He barely spoke a word of english and I swear he must have been mixing up 99% of what I was telling him to do, so I gave up and ended the call on him.
2 minutes later, BAM, North tower gets hit.
I never found out what happened to that guy I was on the phone with, but I got fired the next day and honestly, for the life of me I still can’t figure out why.
[quote]RyuuKyuzo wrote:
I was working as plane dispatcher at the time. I was actually on the phone right before the attacks happened trying to help some putz guide his plane to a safe landing. He barely spoke a word of english and I swear he must have been mixing up 99% of what I was telling him to do, so I gave up and ended the call on him.
2 minutes later, BAM, North tower gets hit.
I never found out what happened to that guy I was on the phone with, but I got fired the next day and honestly, for the life of me I still can’t figure out why. [/quote]
Hahaha. That’s hilariously fucked up.
It’s all right because you’re Canadian. Tell a joke like that here and even now 12 years later people will look at you with a vague expression of horrified distaste. “Oh my gawd how can you joke about that? That’s so insensitive.”
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
We are watching as our government dismantles the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, militarizes the police force, increases the invasiveness of security procedures at schools, sporting venues and airports, incarcerates US citizens without due process, and carries out the most extensive and intensive domestic surveillance operation in the history of totalitarianism…while waving our flags and bragging about how proud we are to be Americans in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
That’s what we’re doing.
Waving the flag is important. If we stop, the terrorists win. [/quote]
Quoted for truth.