What were you doing on 9-11-01

I was at home just getting ready to walk out the door when the first one hi****ched till the second one hit and had to get to work. Heard about the one at the Pentgon and the one in Penn. over the internet. My daughter was going to school in Pittsburgh and called and said she wanted to come home. She just wanted to be with my wife and myself. To tell the truth I was glad she came home, I wasn't that worried for her safety as much as I just wanted her close. My son was in the army at the time and ened up going into Iraq with the 3rd ID.  It did change my life. It made me think about my responsibility to be prepared to protect my family. I  try to be much more aware of what is going on around me, not paranoid, just prepared. I know there was nothing that the people that died in the Towers or the Pentagon could have done, but there are bad guys around us every day. We are where home security starts. pan head

I was at work, in Atlanta. I always had AOL Instant Messenger running so that I could keep in touch with friends, employees and co-workers scattered around the country. I have a good friend named Alex that lives in NYC and works for Sony Entertainment - about two blocks from the World Trade Center. He sent me an IM and said that a plane had crashed into the WTC. He's a bit of a joker and you have to take some of what he says with a grain of salt, so I blew it off with a "Yeah, right Alex". Then, someone in my office said that they'd heard the same thing a few minutes earlier. I went to CNN.com, but the site was swamped and I couldn't get any news. One of the guys in the office ran around the corner to Wal-Mart and bought a TV and brought it back to the office and we all sat around the rest of the day, in utter horror, and watched the coverage. We saw both towers crumble on live TV. It was surreal. I'll never forget the anger, the despair and the helpless feeling of that day - but what really made an impact on me was the next morning. I am a bit of a morning person, an early riser. I tended to leave my house for work at about 6am (to beat the Atlanta traffic). That morning, GA 400 was completely empty and the traffic announcement signs all read "Atlanta Hartsfield Int'l Airport Closed Due To National Security Emergency". When I got closer in to town, all the flags, everywhere, were at half staff. From schools, to car dealerships to McDonald's. Seeing this bustling metropolis so still and quiet and mournful and seeing the flags at half mast in the early morning light really brought it home to me. I'm not afraid to admit that I had to fight back tears. Everyone was in a zombie like state for what seemed like weeks. I watched CNN and Fox News for hours every night. It's all anyone talked about. The images are forever burned into my memory.

I was at work and my boss came in somewhat in a panic.  Her brother was in one of the towers when it hit. So the rest of the morning was searching for more information. Via impromtou groups on livejournal. Via me going to the best buy and buying an antennae so we could get a station on the tv. To me listening to the NYPD police band which was being broadcast on the net. Eventually the boss shut the office down and I went home to watch the news. Her brother was thankfully ok.

It was 11:00 p.m. here. I had just gotten home from practicing music with some friends. Could barely sleep that night. Just unimaginable seeing one...then two skyscrapers pancake.

(If anyone's interested in the myths about the collapses being a "demo" job or any of the other myths. This debunking site is really interesting:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227 842.html )

Dave

I was a Union official at the time and was engaged in contract meetings with management. Another manager walked in and said that a plane hit the WTC. In my mind I thought of maybe a small commuter plane from nearby Teterboro or even Newark might have struck the tower. We finished up our business a few minutes later and I went back to my office. Other members were standing around the TV, looking shocked. Just then we saw the second plane strike the tower and the enormity of what had just happened hit us all like a ton of bricks. The Pentagon and Pennsylvania also shook us up.  It was a sad week for us all at work.  I was born and raised in NYC and back in the 70's I used to deliver freight and construction materials to the WTC. I lost count how many times I was in that basement at WTC.

I had started a new job and was in CPR training class.  Everything stopped.  Everyone was glued to the television screens.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I grew up in Queens, about 15 miles from lower Manhattan. I could always remember seeing the towers in the distance at night when if I was at the top of the hill on my street. On Sunday the 9th, my grandmother passed away. On Monday night, the 10th I flew in and I remember being dissapointed that I couldn't see the skyline because of very heavy rain that was falling. The next morning I woke up at my Uncle's House in Rockland County just north of the city. It remember mentioning to everybody how beutiful a morning it was. I had just come from Phoenix where it was over 100 degrees everyday for the prior three months. It was crystal clear and in the 70's a real chamber of commerce day. At 8:00 AM or so the funeral service began. I had written a great eulogy about my only grandmother and I fell apart while delivering it. About that time, the first plane hit. By the time the service at the funeral parlor was over, word had broken on the radio. The first indication that something was wrong was when the funeral director asked the immediate family to come and talk to them outside. We thought it was to receive directions on how the procession would start. Instead we were told there would be no procession. We were told that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers and that the city was on lockdown, whi*****luded all of the bridges. We needed to cross the Tappanzee and Throg's Neck to get to the cemetery, so burying her was out of the question. We were devestated to think that her body would have to wait there in limbo. Oh yeah, and my grandmother was Jewish, and it is Jewish law that a body be buried within a certain number of hours of their death, so that was troubling too. Soon though, those troubles seemed trivial compared to what we were hearing on the radio. My mother lost it. I remember her screaming "I can't lose another one of my baby's" because she was certain this was going to lead to a war and the eventual draft of me or my brother after she had already lost our sister to cancer in 1989. We soon went back to my uncle's house where everybody regrouped and stared in awe as we watched the coverage for endless hours on CNN. I think I finally went to bed around 7:00 AM the next morning. That day, Wednesday, I was on the phone with American Airlines trying to find out how they could get me back to Phoenix. They didn't know how long the planes would stay grounded so they didn't really have any answers other then to tell me that I had to leave from JFK, which I wasn't comfortable with. I wanted to drive down to Raleigh with my cousin and wait there where at least the terrorists wouldn't blend in on a departing flight. I finally convinced them to accomodate me and the next morning I was off to Raleigh - before my grandmother could finally be laid to rest the next day. Raleigh was beutiful, that trip was what led me to move there. So in a roundabout kind of way if 9/11 never happened, I never would have moved to Raleigh, I never would have went to Duke for WLS, and perhaps would not have lived as long! How's that for trying to turn lemons into lemonade! On Friday, they opened the skies again and I  finally got on a near empty plane in Raleigh, It was me and a preist in full garb in the fron row, I sat on the aisle with my leg out - nobody was getting to the ****pit without getting through me first! I arrived home safe and the rest is history. God bless the memory of those that were lost but never forgotten.

I agree with others when they say that they pictured a small plane.  My first image was like a prop plane. It is amazing to me that the same exact thing happened and we all had a different experience with it.  Thanks everyone.