We Will Never Forget - Where Were You?

I was 14 at the time, and my dad told me when he picked me up from school. Being in Europe, life went on that day, a Wednesday if I recall. As a USA-lover (I did think at the time and still think it’s the greatest nation in the world), I just sat in front of the television the whole afternoon.
I didn’t have internet yet at home.

The next day, I spent my weekly allowance on buying 8 different newspapers. I still have those in the attic somewhere.

Bless all the American people impacted by this.

Edit: looked it up. It was a Tuesday. It happened just before school was out (6 hours behind East Coast time here).

 

I was at home listening to the radio when they announce the first plane had struck the WTC. I also thought it was probably one of the little private planes. When they announced a second plane had also hit, I knew it was no coincidence and turned on the tv and saw the coverage.

I called a friend to see if she was watching the news. She then told me her FIL who I have known forever was on a plane from Newark that morning and no one could get through to him. He luckily wasn’t on one of hijacked planes, but it was a tense few hours until his plane was diverted and he could call family.

Living in the Chicago area it was beyond surreal not to hear planes overhead. When you did hear one it was military flying air coverage over Chicago.

 

I was having breakfast with my Dad before work.
The kitchen TV was on with the later Peter Jennings on with breaking news on the 1st tower.
It was Peter or nothing for any type of news for my Dad.
Then both of us were watching live tower two.
Went to work, but once I arrived the employer told workers to go home and bring work home with you.
Worked in financial services and the markets were closed.

 

laying in bed on vacation in Reno-wife was watching Today show-poked me awake to say that the tower was hit-in a grog I didn't believe it was happening..watching the live feed heart dropped when the tower crumbled, getting that same feeling now remembering it,,,couldn't get a call through to home (New York) to check on family until about 6:30 PM Reno time..finally went out to get something to eat,, and spent the rest of the week in a daze

 

In Arizona, it was my day off from working at AOL. I was awakened at 7 pdt by a call from my mom telling me to get up and turn on the tv. Spent the day surfing the internet for news and the AOL chatrooms to see what people were saying.

 

I was at work in Manhattan. I wrote about it here: https://iputmylifeonashelf.com/oh-you-are-from-new-york-were-you-there-on-september-11/

 

Thank you for sharing your account. That sounds just....crazy. Sad and crazy.

 

I was asleep when the first one hit, at a girl's apartment. I woke up apparently just after it happened. I did my walk of shame and heard the news on the radio on the short drive home, and speculation about what a plane was doing there, and whether or not it was an accident. And just as I got home and turned on the TV news, the second one hit. Then news of 4 or 5 other planes tracking or not responding and then hearing about the full ground stop. My older brother was an active duty air force pilot at the time, and I was living in a fraternity house with two residents from manhattan and 2 or 3 others from NY and NJ and remember them reaching out to people furiously, and all the varied reactions from a house full of late teens and early 20s guys. Some angry, some just "wtf" and some crying.

I guess my biggest personal connection and immediate concern was my brother, who ran out and got married, then left the country for most of the next year and a half.

I went ahead and called in sick to my job just because I knew this was some historically significant event and was concerned what might happen where over the next several hours, and our house was about 5 or 6 blocks from the Floroda capitol, where our governor at the time was the president's brother, so we felt like that might make the area a target, plus the capitol is a 28 story tower surrounded at the time by almost nothing taller than 4 or 5 floors. I recall all the taller state buildings were evacuated and closed.

And I too remember how unifying it was nationally, and especially in NYC and how I've never seen so many American flags flying everywhere.

 

https://tomatonation.com/stories-true-and-otherwise/for-thou-art-with-us/

 

Was home on a day off and just doing the usual with coffee and the news..Greg Gumble sp? announced that a plane hit a tower and they showed a small shot of it from a camera in midtown...just thinking a small plane either accident or suicide by a pilot..... had to go to the store and get gas in the car and some food for dinner and by the time I got back it was just as the second plane hit..and that was the holy shit scary realization that the USA was under attack..
Had Howard Stern on the radio and his sidekick Robin emotional commenting when the first tower fell...tried to call my mother in NJ and could not get through....Her TV reception was lost as one of the towers provided the antenna broadcast to the Jersey Shore...A friend of mine said the air had a distinct nasty smell all the way down in Pt.Pleasant Beach..Some of the saddest photos I have seen that look innocent are the train station parking lots with car's whose owners never came back to.. Fucking A Never Forget

 

I was driving to work, listening to a local morning radio talk show, they had Thomas Hayden Church as an in studio guest. I was sitting at the stop light 5 minutes from the shop when one of the dj’s said they had to break in with an announcement and said the first tower had been hit. When I got to work I ran in and told everyone what I’d heard and my boss went upstairs and took the tv from the break room and brought it to our office where we watched the rest of the morning unfold in stunned silence. I will never forget watching in silent horror, praying for everyone in those buildings, on those planes, their families, the first responders.
I found out a few years later at a class reunion that one of my classmates was one of the pilots in one of the fighter jets that flanked President Bush’s plane on his way back to DC that day.

I will never forget those who lost their lives that day.

 

I was actually in lower Manhattan that morning. My wife, 1 year old son, and I were staying at a hotel in Greenwich Village. We were visiting for a wedding that was planned for the upcoming weekend, and had just arrived the day before. We were having breakfast in the lobby of the hotel, I remember it was a crystal clear beautiful late Summer morning. Suddenly it seemed like there were lots of sirens, but I just figured, hey, this in New York City, right? But after a while it seemed like the wail of sirens was almost continuous, and I noticed one of the waitresses getting wildly emotional and being consoled by a co-worker.
My wife and I knew something was up, but this was (of course) before the days of smart phones, so we paid the bill and got back to the room asap. We turned on CNN to see the terrible live footage. My wife started making phone calls to assure family that we were safe, but it was hard to get through. I took the stairs to the roof but couldn't see much other than the smoke, so came back down.
My wife and I spent the next hour watching the live footage, while simultaneously keeping an eye out the window at a crowd of people below that had gathered on Varick Street, they had a clear line of site to the towers. What was bizarre, when the towers fell, is that I heard the gasps and shrieks from the crowd outside at the same instant as I watched the towers fall on the TV. I'll never forget that.
The next few days were a blur.
All traffic below 14th street was closed to anything but emergency vehicles. Packs of skateboarders cruised down the empty streets. There seemed to be a cop on every corner. Fighter jets patrolling the airspace was a common sighting. The makeshift memorials and missing person posters were especially sad. Every day around 4 pm the winds would shift and the smoke would start blowing uptown, and you needed to get indoors for the next few hours.
By some miracle, the wedding went on as planned, but it was pretty surreal. Our flight out the next week was one of the first to leave since the grounding, and no-one could say for sure if it would be cancelled or not. The airline was just telling people to show up and be ready to depart. I remember the Red Cross was at LaGuardia handing out little pins for people to wear, they had a red, white, and blue crossed ribbon. Everyone put theirs on. People were a little freaked out about flying, and I think those ribbons made us feel that we were all in it together. I still have that ribbon.

 

I was pregnant and almost due with my first kid. I was on my way to an OB appointment when I heard them talking about it on the radio station. However, it was a radio host team that was pretty crude and always doing outrageous pranks. Just from the little comments they made I thought they were up to some sketch, I didn't realize it was real until I got to the doctors office and saw the news on the tv.

 

Almost exactly my story. Was driving home from dropping my son off at school, was listening to the wacky morning show when their sports guy (calling in from DC) said something like "Can you guys see a TV? Looks like the World Trade Center is on fire". I was only a few blocks from home and when I did, I commandeered the remote from my 3-year old daughter (they started so young even back then) to watch "The Big Fire".

I think I had on ABC News, and they were talking with a guest with the shot of the North building burning when we could clearly see the second plane hit... but probably none of the on-air people were paying attention as it took almost a minute before someone even mentioned the second tower being on fire. Needless to say, I found another news source at that time.

So around 11:00 AM CDT, my (now ex-) wife called and she found a second car for us, so I had to run over to buy it. Now the event had been going on almost four hours at this time, and the guy we bought the car from didn't know what was going on as he had been playing video games all morning.

Little known fact, George HW Bush (#41) was in Milwaukee the previous night and we was actually at Mitchell Int'l Airport to leave when everything happened and all flights were grounded. He had to be driven back to Maine.

So speaking of planes being grounded, fast forward to that Saturday morning when planes were to resume flights. My son had a youth soccer game in the early AM, and as I'm watching, I note a plane in the air. It just struck me then and there how that plane - one of the first ones in the air after the terrorist attack - was a potential weapon. I just shuddered while thinking about it.

 

I posted my story last year. You can go to the 2020 post on this. Nothing has changed. I don’t know why we don’t just have one thread and people that haven’t post add on to that.
I know I won’t forget it because I was watching live.

 

I was 20 years old attending college at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, a small town between Milwaukee and Madison. I was hungover and living in my fraternity house when I got a knocked on the door to wake up and turn the tv on. A lot of us just sat there and watched the news all day to see what was going on around us.

 

I was asleep when the first plane hit.

I worked for a company based in Westchester County, had coworkers who lived in Manhattan - but I was based in San Francisco Bay. I awoke to Katie Couric and Matt Lauer on Today discussing the video of the North tower burning, speculating that it was a commuter plane etc. Watching the second plane hitting and realizing, with millions, that it was act of terrorism. I don't know why, but odd random images plant themselves in our brains. Mine were watching the WTC coverage when NBC correspondent Jim Miklaczewski said the Pentagon where he was sitting shook. And then an hour later, Ron Insana, a financial reporter entered the studio, covered in debris from the collapse... and the look of fear on the faces of others in the Studio was so apparent, so abnormal for professional commentators.... it somehow made an image on TV seem that much more real.

And then, I drove to work, where we went through the motions, but spent a great deal of time on the phone connecting with coworkers in NY, who were understandably much more shaken, concerned about friends and relatives, etc.

 

I was working on contract in downtown Toronto and heading downtown with the windows open in my car and had ZERO idea what was going on. I turned on the radio and the local DJ was all but in tears and trying to explain what was going on. At that time I had a flip phone and no real way to confirm what was happening. I tried to flip between radio stations and found it tough to determine what was going on. Obviously knowing something was VERY wrong.

When I finally arrived at the office I was working in, they had a TV setup in the boardroom and there was dead silence when I arrived. I finally realised the enormity of the events and called my wife and told her what had happened. She was working totally away from any external sources of information and she could not understand what I had told her. After some time she called me back at the office and told me they were both home safe. It was one of the most emotional phone calls I ever had in my life.

Later that day myself and a close friend walked out on Yonge St and walked our way to the US embassy (not on purpose) and there were heavily armed guards outside at street level. It was absolutely surreal.

I walked my way back to the office, got in my car and drove out near Pearson, there was obviously zero air traffic. I stood there for maybe an hour just in awe.

Like millions I will not forget the events of that tragic day. I have to say about 5 years ago my wife and I finally got to visit ground zero and we both openly wept. We were not directly impacted by loss of life, but we were like all of us impacted by how it changed all of our lives collectively. It moved us both like no other event.

God bless America.

 

I can't recall what station it was, but I've never seen news broadcasters so rattled. I definitely remember something along the lines of a reporter saying, "one of the towers just collapsed", the anchors saying, "you mean the top floors collapsed?", and the on-site person responding, "no, the entire tower". It was silent for about an entire minute.

I think just nobody knew how to process it. At first they were saying things like, "someone landed a plane on the roof of the WTC". For people of our generation, this wasn't anything that'd we'd ever come close to experiencing.

 

I flew home from NY on September 9th. I was supposed to fly back on September 20th. At the time I was dating a man from NY and we commuted back and forth.

I was at work at home when if all happened. We were all glued to a television at work. Phone service to NY was non existent . I didn’t hear from him until late on the 11th.