Dear readers: Where were you on September 11, 2001? This is my story:
I’d just returned from visiting family in South Carolina. It was the last day of a two-week vacation, and I was getting ready to leave my apartment to go to a 9:00 a.m. hair appointment, several blocks away.
I live in the city with restricted parking, so I had to move my car from the “Tuesday” side of the street to the “Monday” side. Around a quarter of nine, I had the remote in my hand to turn off the television. I’d been watching Matt Lauer. (Yes, I once watched the Today Show.) interviewing someone when I saw him pause mid-sentence and look off-camera.
Then he said he’d just been told that smoke was coming from one of the World Trade Center buildings. Somebody left the microwave on too long. I turned off the T.V. and left.
While circling the block to find a parking space, I listened as a broadcaster on the radio yelled over and over about a fire in the building and something about a plane. What is his problem? I still didn’t get it.
I finally found a space. I’m late. Man! I hustled down the block to the hair salon and wondered if anyone else had heard about a fire at the World Trade Center. Everyone looked oblivious. Several minutes later, I was standing in the salon. The radio was blaring, but it wasn’t Anita Baker’s sweet voice I heard. Two planes had crashed into the towers and the buildings were burning. We realized we were under attack. Then the Pentagon was hit. One of the sylists said her husband worked there.
I don’t remember asking any questions. I numbly walked to my stylist’s chair and sat down while she went to work. I was trying to recall a name. What’s the guy’s name, the one on the FBI’s Most Wanted list? Bin-something? He was behind it. I knew it.
Before I went under the dryer, one of the women suggested we all pray. We walked to the lobby of the salon, stood in a circle and held hands as someone prayed aloud. We prayed for the families whose loved ones had been killed. We prayed there’d be no more attacks. We asked God for mercy.
I can’t recall what I was thinking or feeling after that. My stylist canceled the rest of her appointments. Most of the women had children they wanted to get to, so they decided to close up shop early and hustle us clients out of there. At 11:00 a.m., my stylist was done. Record time. As some of you ladies know, a mere two-hour hair salon visit is rare.
I spent the rest of the day flipping between FOX, CNN, MSNBC — whatever news station I could find. I couldn’t get through to family on the phone because the lines were jammed, and my cell phone was useless. Whenever something happens in D.C., even across town, miles from where I live, my mother wonders if I’m OK (my father, less so). On September 11, 2001, she had to wait for what must have seemed like ages.
The most vivid memory I had on that day wasn’t the towers going down or the national mourning. It was hearing the lock turning behind me as I left that salon at 11 o’clock in the morning.
America is burning.
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I had been called on September 7 by my boss to quickly go to a new assignment, a bid for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to upgrade a system called SAVE, that tracked aliens requesting government services. I arrived at Reagan Airport in Washington on the 10th of September and went to the Hilton Gardens Hotel about 3 blocks from the White House. In the evening, after my workday was done, I wandered around and ended up at the White House. It was deserted except for a few guards. My thoughts were occupied in grief because this was the day a year earlier that my wife had died and I was trying to calm my spirit down.
In the morning, I walked to the Building connected to the Hyatt Hotel accross from the Washington Convention Center where my office was. As I got my breakfast, I saw a number of people staring at the TV. The first tower had been hit. Going upstairs, I told the rest of the staff their about what was going on. As we went down to watch further, the second tower was hit. Then, before the TV announced it, someone said that there was an explosion at the Pentagon.
I called a colleague who had worked at the Pentagon previously, He was anxiously waiting for a communication from one of his military commrades who occupied an office on that side of the building. In our conversation, I asked his opinion on what happened.He said that he was not suprised, for he had done a study on airport security for the Joint Chiefs that pointed out significant security flaws at American airports.
I was to stay in Washington all week as planned but it became a surreal place with Humvees on every corner and helicopters and planes overhead at night. The only ones not disturbed by all this were the homeless who continued to sleep in building alcoves on gratings just blocks from the White House.
Most everything had shut down so I scrambled for a place to eat. I found the Post Pub, a small hole in the wall bar/restaurant at which I ate the rest of the week. On the first day, someone from the post walked in and handed out copies of the late edition of WAPO. I still have it. On the second or third day I was sitting there and talking to a young woman who was very distraught. Her friend had jumpe out of one of the towers from above the 100th floor and she was leaving the next day to take care of her friends children. Near tears, the bartender, came over. A woman in her 50’s who was also a German tranlator for the the IMF conference told her to get it together. She then explained that her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s son were both Ney York cops and that both of them were missing in the rubble.
On Friday, I had lunch with an ex-FBI agent who was the first one to tell me that the coordinated attacks were consistent with the Islamic terrorists methods. He said that the targets were military (Pentagon), economic(WTC) and the last plane was intended for a Political target, most likely the White House or Capitol. He told me other things that convinced me that this attack was part of a war that had already been decalred and was being intensely fought by one side but not the other.
Friday, I was scheduled to leave Washington, but out of Dulles, not Reagan as originally planned. The normal bustle of the airport was eerily quiet, with everyone just waiting in line to get one the plane, not saying much of anything. The takeoff was very steep, I thought to myself, maybe they were trying to confuse a potential attacker. Everyone was extremely polite to each other as if chastised to behave better by a parent.
While I still believe that we are in a war, and that the experience of September 11 was something I won’t forget, September 10 is still more important to me.
My own rememberance is posted at http://unclesamscabin.blogspot.com/2004/09/september-11th-2001-i-remember.html.
I live on the west coast, so I was pretty far removed from the whole affair physically. I’d woken up that morning and stumbled over to the living room sofa, still half-asleep. My mom was on her Powerbook checking her E-mail, and she got a message from two friends who said their trip to Scotland had been canceled “because of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.” Huh? Bin-Laden who? I was only sixteen then, and I’d never read the news much or read up on terrorist attacks on foreign bases. OK, I’ll admit it — I didn’t even know what the Pentagon was. I guess i was living in a vacuum. So we checked on news sites and saw that the WTC had COLLAPSED. We were all horrified and spent the rest of the day in a daze. We managed to take a trip to Whole Foods Market, and even all the liberals there were in a state of shock and limbo. All the American flags were raised around the neighborhood in an effort of patriotism. I wish they still were.
I was within half a mile or so from the Pentagon…
I wrote at length about this and set up a memorial blog for this week at http://www.mywideblueseasluxaeterna.blogspot.com, or you can use the link on my site. It really took me a year to take it in for a number of reasons and I have had a lot of thoughts most of which are not politically correct regarding this event. Thanks for keeping this front and center Its so important!
I work for Boeing. I build the very 767’s used in the attack. My leadman came around about nine in the morning and said that someone had flown a small airplane into one of the towers at the WTC, but didn’t know more. As we all began to crowd around the computers at work, the internet slowed to a crawl, as the entire company, and likely the world for that matter, all logged onto the news sites for something useful and informative. At first we all thought it was a 737, as we had a hard time figuring out the scale of the building and the airplane, then we started getting reports that another plane had hit the Pentagon and that one had been shot down in Pennsylvania. I called home to have my kids turn on the TV and wake up my wife to have her tune in as well. My son said he was watching TV and couldn’t understand why I was talking the way I was. As facts flowed in, we all felt more and more useless, confused, and frustrated. It was hard to know for sure how we felt and before too long no one could get any useful work done so many of us went home. It was odd walking out to my car with many others, hurrying to turn on the car radio so we could hear more about what was going on.
I was still in the military at the time, at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. It was afternoon there. We were almost ready to go home, and those who had finished up were watching the news for a bit before they left. Soon, we were all glued to the TV. We stayed for hours.
As we saw the video of the first plane, we thought it was a terrible mishap. We jokingly made fun of the “experts” they had on who thought is was a small plane. We say planes flying in and out of the base every day, and we knew a big plane when we saw one.
Then, the second plane crashed and there was no more joking and little talking.
My unit was a TALCE, a mobile airlift command and control unit that is one of the first called in for wars, emergencies, and humanitarian assistance. We all knew we were going somewhere to do something soon.
We also had a lot of Anti-Terrorism Force Protection briefings and classes because of the nature of our mission. Most of us were pretty sure it was Osoma Bin Laden. (Also, a few months earlier, one of our members who spoke fluent German had told us he read an article in a German newspaper where Osoma Bin Laden was offering anyone a $10,000 reward for every American killed.)
We were horrified, but not afraid, even though we knew we would be going somewhere soon to do something about it.
Most of my friends in the military still feel the same way. (I’ve been promoted to mom, but my husband is still in the military.)
At the time, I was living with my in-laws while my husband was tracking down a job in another state. I took the bus to work, usually with a magazine or two, and since my in-laws live in a small town, the bus ride was the better part of an hour. As we just got in to the city proper (BTW, small city), we picked up someone who had gotten perhaps two minutes of news and told us, “Hey, there’s a fire at the Pentagon.” So the discussion turned to the danger of chemical weaponry under the Pentagon – I corrected that idea right quickly – and various and sundry implications of what, at the time, seemed a comparatively minor event.
Of course, it was still interesting enough that the driver missed his turn and ended up doing a three-point turn across four lanes of traffic.
It wasn’t until after I’d changed busses that I heard about the WTC. I don’t remember exactly what the woman said but I was highly offended by her manner – it seemed awfully cavalier to me, with more than a little bit of “they deserved it” attitude. (Oh, yeah, this was a small hippie city. “Berkeley North”.) Of course, when I got to work (retail), everyone was deeply shocked.
We stayed open that day, though the mall across the street closed. Many people drive for a couple of hours to shop in the city – there’s a lot of rural area there – and so we did a lot of business with people who heard about the WTC on the radio. We only got dribs and drabs of information during the day, and I was particularly frustrated since my previous job had been at a news radio station and I was a serious information junkie.
Something that struck me at the time was how my co-workers – many of them young and not disillusioned – didn’t see the implications. One young manager (21) couldn’t get past the fact that there were women and children on the planes; it didn’t make sense to her that anyone could deliberately kill kids. Me, I was angry and traumatized for maybe 45 minutes, and then I was thinking. I told another co-worker about my conclusions, including the knowledge that there was war in America’s future, but she was still confused about the event itself and didn’t understand how I could get there.
When I left, the mall was disconcertingly quiet, though the busses were still running.
I didn’t get home until the evening, by which point the worst of the images were no longer being shown on the TV. I kicked my mother-in-law out of the living room – she was thoroughly traumatized – and then realized that as long as she could still hear the news, it wasn’t helping. So I flipped around until I found a Spanish station (my Spanish is minimal, but newscasters speak clearly) and learned some cultural differences about reporting. (They had one graph where they showed how many tons of steel were in the WTC, and how many windows it had.)
As a side note, I once did a self-portrait in pencil that I scanned into the computer and reversed – and then realized that I’d made some errors. I never went back to fix those errors, and I wondered why… until I found that sketch. It’s dated September 10th of 2001.
I was at College back at England….the local time was about 2pm i think. My lecture was interrupted and we put the TV on. We watched the BBC dumbfounded, and then another plane hit the second tower. It was surreal. In my architectural ignorance, i had no idea of the structural damage the planes would of caused, or how many people were dying. I think i was a little naive. At the time, i was totally unaware of the effect this would have on the entire world. College technically carried on, but lessons really ended. We just kept watching the coverage, spinning off ideas on how the hell this happened, and who was responsible.
La Shawn, thank you for sharing that…it makes me grateful for being able to be with my husband when the world was changing before our very eyes. I cannot imagine that day separated from him.
I posted about my experience of that day here (warning: harsh and un-PC language), but there was one incident that infuriated me so much that I had put it out of my mind until now.
After sitting for hours in front of the TV, I went to the cleaners to pick up a military uniform (I had surmised that I?d be needing it soon.) The proprietor of the cleaners?black–has a TV mounted on the wall. Obviously a fellow news-junkie, he keeps it tuned to either FoxNews or CNN and, of course, all the events of that day were still being broadcast. As the owner and I were doing our business and making ?can you believe this? talk, another man walked in, older, black. As we continued talking about what happened, this ignoramus put in these two cents: ?That?s what them white folks get!?
Appalled, I whirled on him furiously:
?What? You think only white people worked in the World Trade Center? Only White people worked in the Pentagon? Only white people fly on planes?? He was stunned into silence, as, apparently, this hadn?t even occurred him.
I didn?t even bother to address the extreme callousness or the disgusting racism of his statements. Feeling temper begin to come off its leash, I paid the owner and got the heck out of there.
As someone who has struggled long with some racist feeling toward Arabs (seeded well before 9/11), I do understand from where this man?s feelings may come, but I certainly do not wish them all horrible deaths. Not even now.
I was at home that morning talking on the phone to a friend. I just hung up and another friend called and asked did I have the TV on? I said no and she said, You’d better turn in on. We are being attacked. I turned it on and sure enough, rerun of the 1st plane and then the 2nd plane hitting the towers. Unbelievable!
As I was watching and crying I got a phone call. At the time I was editor of a small village/suburb monthly magazine. Some guy, who refused to identify himself, called to complain about the photo of the boy scouts in the July 4th parade. I was trying to figure out what the problem might be…were the kids misidentified in the caption, or what? No, he said, didn’t I know that the Boy Scouts discriminated against gays? How could I contribute to that bigotry by running that photo? What? I was just super confused. Could this really be happening?
I said,look if you want to send me a signed letter to the editor, I’ll run it. Otherwise I’ll not be intimidated. And by the way, we’ve just been attacked. We are witnessing World War III, so I need to hang up now…
I was in bed. My wife came and woke me that morning to watch the news of what was going on. It was a little bit after the first plane hit. No one knew what was going on. Most people thought it was some kind of tragic accident. I went back to bed. Shortly thereafter she came a got me just after the second plane hit. This was no accident afterall. I didn’t go back to bed and I was glued to the news for weeks after.
I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at work when we heard the news and most everyone (who wasn’t afraid of the boss) went next door to a hotel to watch it on a big-screen TV.
Never Forget
Never Forgive
Never Again
I was on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, headed for the 3 train, late for an appointment at Union headquarters in Manhattan. My destination was Chambers Street, a few blocks north of the World Trade. It may have been the same building where Mayor Giuliani was later trapped.
I passed people in cars listening to their radios, and switched my Walkman to WABC. It was only a few moments after the second plane hit. I wandered idly into the local supermarket, where nobody had heard about the second plane.
Everyone understood: one is an accident, two is war.
When I returned home, my TV showed only static because the broadcast antennas were on the WTC. I climbed the fire escape to the roof of my building where I could see the towers burning.
Smoke extended southward, past the Statue of Liberty. The smell was mostly chemical but not entirely. I looked down at my shoes and saw metallic particles melting on them. I thought, it can’t be good to be breathing this, so I climbed back down.
My upstairs neighbor had cable TV. We watched the towers collapse. She said, ‘The worst part is, we’ve got that f**king moron as president.’ I went back downstairs, thinking, ‘Thank God for George Bush.’
Joel’s 9-11 story
One last thing.
My local firehouse responded, Squad 1 from Union Street in Brooklyn. Twelve firefighters crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and disappeared forever: James Amato, Brian Bilcher, Gary Box, Thomas Butler, Pete Carroll, Robert Cordice, Eddie D’Atri, Michael Esposito, Dave Fontana, Matthew Garvey, Michael Russo and Steve Siller.
May God keep their souls, and watch over the wives, children, and loved ones they left behind.
AT the time I was living in Portland, Oregon, but still very much on East Coast time. I sleep with the TV on news, always. I woke up shortly before six a.m. to hear about a “propeller plane” hitting the World Trade Center. I ran to my computer and emailed all my friends in D.C., “Turn on the television, NOW!” Back in my living room, I watched the second plane strike, live. I remember hearing the anchors sayingm, this can’t be real, there is a second plane, it’s hitting the second tower. It was mind-numbing. It IS mind-numbing. I think of those people on the plane … what on earth did they know of their destiny? We owe to all the victims to never, ever: forget; forgive; excuse. And yes, I do fear every day the repeat that is sure to come. But …. I’ll fight back however necessary to vindicate the lives of those who had no idea what was going on that morning. Anything less is a smear upon their memory.
I appreciate reading all the stories here. It’s good to remember.
I teach individual music lessons, and when I went in the room at the school to teach, my co-workers told me there was an explosion at the WTC. I made a statement that I’ll never forget.
“It’s been attacked again? They should just knock those things down they are such a target.” Little did I know…
Two hours later, I emerged from the lessons and left for home to have lunch. On the way, I got the gist of what was going on from the radio. WTC AND Pentagon attacked? What was is this?
I got home, saw the images on tv of the strikes and the towers falling, and was distraught and very very angry. I tried calling my friend who lives in DC and whose husband worked in the Pentagon from time to time. He was in Russia at the time, but I could not get through to her for a day or so. My mother called me crying. My husband was trying to keep kids at his school calm all day long
My friend in DC said she did not have the tv on all morning that day, but when she got into her car to go to work, she saw the smoke coming from the Pentagon. Then, she promptly turned her car around, went home and hide inside. During the anthrax scares, her mail was microwaved. She lives on base in DC.
Wow, you have all brought back memories.
On September 10th, my middle child (4yo) fell on a makeup brush and stabbed her thigh requiring stitches, and was home from preschool the next day. My husband called me to tell me a plane had hit the WTC, to turn on the tv. I said no, we were playing, and I’d see it on the news later. I thought it was some small private plane. My dad called soon after to tell me I really needed to turn on the tv. I turned it on in time to see the second plane hit, then the tv stayed on for a long time thereafter. My oldest child, then 8, was in a small private school that they both attend now. I called the school and they recommended leaving the children in school to finish out the day, to keep their lives as normal as possible. She came home on the bus later and sat with a girl whose mother was out of town, and the girl’s birthday was that day, Sept. 11th. The poor girl cried the whole way home on the bus. If I had known then what I know now, my car would have had rockets coming out of the back as I raced to the school to pick up my daughter. We were all in such a state of shock.
I remember thinking, Bush is here in Florida, and our local news cut to him in the Sarasota school and I watched his initial statement live. My daughters both had dance class that night, and their teacher, a New Yorker, called to tell me class was cancelled. I stayed on the phone with her for almost two hours; she was trying to reach her brother who was an EMT for NYC on her cell phone. He worked about a 36 hour shift that day, and is okay.
My husband was teaching high school at the time, and he had them turn on coverage in the school library tv. One of his students cried because he had just returned from NY, and had eaten at the Top of World two days prior, on Sept. 9th. Late that night, as we fell asleep, my husband (from New Jersey) murmured about all of the different kiosks and shops that were under the WTC, and how one of them had the greatest coffee.
What a day.
Oh, one more thing. My husband’s uncle is a retired physician living in Manhattan. We were able to get him on the phone, and he had phoned the hospital to check in, so he could be called to help with injuries. He never was called.
La Shawn I am doing a series on my reflections of 9-11 titled From the Pentagon to Babylon. You can read the first part over at The Herald.
I am and was at that time an army nurse. I’m based now at Killeen/Ft Hood but on 9/11 I was at the Brooke Army Med Center at Ft Sam Houston, Tx (San Antonio). I had got home from work that morning and first heard the news over the AM talk radio station KTSA. My wife and I ordinarily would load our daughter in a stroller and go for a morning walk thru the neighborhood prior to my going to bed to “recover” from the nightshift.
On that morning we tied a small radio onto the handle of the stroller and set out on our merry little stroll.
When I heard the news about the first tower crash, I immediately thought: pilot error/negligence, colossal lawsuit award etc etc. When the 2d jet hit, my visions of liability arguments vanished and gave way to the grim realization that it had all been planned and purposeful.
The magnitude of the evil, the hate and rage that could prompt suicide highjackings and cause the deaths of all those people was mind-numbing then and even now I have a hard time understanding the depth of radical muslim hatred against the West.
The next day when I went back to BAMC nearly every civilian patient/retiree or charity emergency indigent patient had been transferred to civilian hospitals there in San Antonio in anticipation of victims from other attacks which praise God never materialized. I remember that we had a few head trauma civilian patients who had been there for several weeks with no likely discharge date in sight.
They were all gone on 9/12/01.
Well, I am a little late to weigh in on this one, but….
My church at the time had a Mothers-Day-Out ministry. I took the money, greeted the moms, put the lunches away, etc. We begin the day at 9 a.m. CST. I had just finished taking the lunches down the hall and settling a new mom into the schedule, when one of my friends said she heard something about the World Trade Centers being bombed, on fire or something. I wasn’t sure what to think about it, so went on about my errands. When I got into the car, I turned the dial to my local NPR station. As I recall, they were trying to get the details straight. I began to pray with desperation for the people in the WWTT. I turned my van around and went back to the church and pulled the each teacher out to tell them news. Several mothers were coming in to retrieve their children. Not wanting for the children (under 5) to be frightened, we posted a sign asking moms and dads to please not discuss or mention the happenings and thus allow the children who were remaining to do so in peace.
I decided to let my children finish the day so as not to alarm them. But as I was driving home, a journalist announced that one of the towers had just collapsed. I pulled into my driveway and wept. After a minute, I went inside and turned on the television and watched the second one come down. Then I called my husband at work (a corporate hog farm company) and told him what happened. He hadn’t heard anything yet, so it was quite disturbing and upsetting. He gently passed the news along to his employees.
I picked up my girls and my husband came home and we watched the news together and then we prayed as a family. I wept as I watched the news, but I remember be greatly comforted by the obvious resolve and strength that President Bush exhibited. We prayed together with our girls that night, as we do everynight, but this one seemed more sober and humble than any we had spoken to the Lord before.
Thanks for sharing, LaShawn, and thanks for asking your readers to share, too.
La Shawn,
I posted on what I did on September 11, 2004 and how 2001 didn’t really impact me until just a few days ago. Amazing experiences, very spiritual as well.
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