What were you doing on Sept 11 2001?

from Sins Forums
Let us stop and share for a moment what we were doing 6 years ago on Sept 11. Please do not post about the war or your opinion or about bush or anything else on here, just pause and share what you were doing on the day our world was changed.

On That morning I was sitting on my computer finishing up some notes for my programmers in England on some code changes for a project we were working on, the phone rang and it was my girlfriend’s friend Sue. She asked me it I was watching CNN and I said no.

She said "ha, I finally got to hear about a big news story before you, a plane has crashed into the world trade center in New York"

I turned the TV on and put on CNN. I said to her "wow that must have been one big plane to put that big a hole in that building!"

We were chatting for a min or two and she was bragging how she had finally got news of something before me. (This was a game we played with each other about the news). At that moment the 2nd plane crashed into the building and I said to Sue "oh my God Sue, we are at war, did you see that. she responded with, "I better go to work, this is not good" (she was an EMT).

We hung up and I called my mother in Kansas, she was already at work so she missed my call. I then woke up my girlfriend and told her to scrub out the tub and fill it full of water. I filled every container in the apartment with water and set them aside.

I then sat down and watched in disbelief what was going on on TV. When the first tower fell, I remember thinking "God, there must be 10,000 people still in that building".

The rest of the week is kind of jumbled, but on Sept 16, i was in New York with Sue delivering a truck full of supplies from the Philadelphia regions fire departments to the Ft lee NJ office of emergency management at the base of the George Washington Bridge.

I was back again on Sept 23rd with another truckload but this time they had us drive it to a staging area just outside of ground zero. I met several of the firemen who were working at ground zero and had an opportunity to go in. As I was getting ready to walk over with the group that was getting prepped to go in one of the firemen grabbed me and said "you don't want to go in there, we have already been in there and this is our job, you do not have to go in there. Do yourself a favor and don't go. You will gain nothing by what you see but it will change you forever and not for the better if you do" I looked into the eyes of the other firemen who were there and their eyes said it all, they all said "don't do it". I decided to listen to them and said ok. They all sighed with relief, I spent the next 2 hours talking with them as they shared with me what they were seeing down there. Many of them cried as they were telling me what they were seeing.

It took months for the taste and smell to get out of my nostrils from that day.
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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
I was going to english class at college, we all were in the common area watching on TV. I wondered where my brother was, who worked next door to tower 2. He left as soon as the first plane hit and took a ferry to NJ.

Scary times... Hard to believe its so long already...
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I was in school. All the lessons were just talking about what happen. Teachers just brought TVs into the classroom so we could watch the unfolding news. I remember almost every classroom had the teacher and pupils just watching the TV and disbelief. This was in England.
Multiplicity - Control multiple PCs using one keyboard and mouse
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
My girlfriend and i got home from work, and as always i turned on the TV and i saw our own news channel showing CNN i think it was.

As i was watching i thought to myself this isent over, something else is gonna happen. On CNN they said something about other planes were captured but they were not sure, as the information wasnt confirmed.

Abit later a another plane hit the other tower, and i was like whats going on? the chinese is on the war pact?

I was like glued to the TV when my girlfriend said: we have to go shopping, you wanna help? (or something like that). I said: no no, god no, dont you wanna see this?
Well i dont remember if she watched it or not, but she did go shopping by herself.

I also remember i was abit scared if nukes were about to be used, if it was the chinese.

A confusing and scary day indeed. Rest in peace
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
I was sitting in my 5th grade class room wondering why they werent allowing us to go outside.

Didnt know much about politics or anything back then, but it was still sort of frieghtning and at the same time exciting. Oh, you guys should of heard some of the rumors that were going arround the school. Some even said the US was nuked, the teachers finally stepped in though when the second plane crashed and then for the rest of the day we just watched TV.

A few months later I remember seeing how many videos were taped of people just jumping off the Towers. And I kept thinking what a negative immage it was for the country back then, and for the media to keep replaying it was quite discustiong.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
7th grade, Ms. Query's english class (and my homeroom) they turned on the TV and we saw the two towers on fire and smoking. I remember when the bell rang to get us out of class, a bunch of my classmates were running up and down the hall screaming "We're going to WAR!" They were young and didn't really know what that meant (hell, I hardly knew what it meant, just that my parents had gotten it in my head that war was bad). As a matter of fact, I actually got into an argument with a few classmates. My position was that this was a terrorist attack (my watching of the history channel had taught me what terrorists were, I know I was and am a nerd) and a nation can't go to war with a band of terrorists, nations only go to war against other nations. Well needless to say, a few days later I was eating those words. Anyways, back to the events of that day. There were lots of rumors about more terrorist attacks. Some true, like the Pentagon; others false, I went home thinking the Sears Tower in Chicago was down as well. The school turned off the TVs fairly quickly and we tried to get on with our lessons. I missed the actual towers falling (in fact I didn't see that footage for almost two years), but the next day everyone got out of class to watch President Bush's first address to the nation after the attacks. A bit selfishly, a lot of the students, myself included actually, wished that we could have gotten out of class by seeing his other speeches, but no such luck. The administration was adament that the school get back to normal as quickly as possible. Within three days the old routine was back. We didn't forget, we just kept on with our lives as students.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
I was on my way to the bus stop when school when one of my friends started babbling about fires in the pentagon and the world trade center (no real details). When I got to the school I went to the library and I started to realize things were pretty serious. We got the TV out and watched the news, and that pretty much set the course for much of the day (my math teacher made me actually work on math, I don't think anyone else really did). I honestly don't remember where I was when the towers fell (I think they'd already fallen before I got to school, actually), or much of the rest of that day.

I do, however, remember a detail from my second period class. Naval Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, AKA Naval Science 3. We we're watching the news, and the first news came in about Flight 93. Don't ask me how, but he knew -- Captain Zinser knew! -- that it wasn't an accident. That when the pieces were put together, we'd know that heroes on that plane had brought it down before it could reach its target.

Another thing that stuck in my mind was the trip home that day, after school. We filed on the bus pretty much as normal as far as I recall, then proceeded with the normal bus route out towards the local Navy Base (where I happened to live). We hadn't even reached the base (the edge of it followed the highway for a few miles before you reached the gate) when we hit the line. We spent a long time, maybe 2 and a half hours, going through the line until we reached the gate. There a couple of sentries climbed up onto the bus and searched us for bombs, checking IDs on the way (half the bus got kicked off and had to wait for their parents before they could get in).

The line, btw, was because every service member who lived off base had been called in at the same time they cracked down to a maximum level alert, requiring full vehicle checks at the same time as they placed barricades up to limit it to one vehicle entering at a time. (I say that they had to be called in as the events unfolded because I don't remember the barricade being up or any signs of an alert when we left through the gate for school, sometime around 7:15).
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
And I kept thinking what a negative immage it was for the country back then, and for the media to keep replaying it was quite discustiong.


Why was that disgusting?
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
I was going to a college class that morning. It was a US political class and I was kind of annoyed the professor didn't want to talk about the event and simply keep to the lesson plan. In retrospect I don't really care but it annoyed me at the time.


Anyway, I remember being angry and wanting to drop a pill on whoever did it. Now I'm not so much as angry at them as "determined" to see their vision of the world die. I want them to be outcasts in their own home... for their children and grandchildren to spit upon their names. I want to destroy them in a way more complete then death... to break their very memory from the world.


That is what 9/11 changed in me. Prior to that, I didn't care about their stupid ass little wars.
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
on 9/10 i actually watched a pbs show on an single engine plane that hit the empire state. not having watched the news or listened to the radio when my first passenger got in guess what i thought he was talking about.
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
Why was that disgusting?


Capatalization on peoples pain and agony. We all knew what happened yet the media continued to play footage just to raise raitings.

In my opinion 9/11 and all events following were Big Media's version of a holiday.
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
I had just woken up maybe fifteen minutes before, my Dad having gotten back from New York just the night before. He had gone through the twin towers just the day before. He happened to turn on the television that morning, and we sat in shocked silence over halfway across the country. The realization that not only had my Dad missed a possible death, but that our financial situation fell with the towers was a lingering, almost dooming, feeling. Almost for days I couldn't believe what had actually happened. It was a surreal nightmare, and my whole family wanted the terrorists crushed mercilessly.

Emperor; obviously it just couldn't be they were as shocked as we? I honestly thought that it wasn't played so much as other things were. The only time the clips of people jumping from buildings were played too much was right as it happened, the rest was quite sporadic.
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
Emperor; obviously it just couldn't be they were as shocked as we? I honestly thought that it wasn't played so much as other things were. The only time the clips of people jumping from buildings were played too much was right as it happened, the rest was quite sporadic.


Months later it was rare to go through one night of watching TV without seeing a recording, especially on the news.


Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
10th grade and I had early morning cross country workout. I live on the west coast (California) so the first plane hit just after (or maybe while) I was getting up for the day but I didn't know yet.

I went to the high school and was a little early so I stayed in the car for a few minutes. One of the girls on the team also got there early and was sitting in her car. I got out when she did and she told me that she heard on her car radio that a plane had just hit the world trade center. My first thought was that it was some small plane and that it had hit it on accident. So I just said "bummer" and we started the workout.

I don't recall if the entire workout was on the track or just the end portion of it but we ended up on the track and our coach turned on the radio in his car and we found out that a second plane had hit the other tower AND one had crashed into the Pentagon. This was when we realized that this was no accident. My coach seemed angry and most of the rest of us didn't really know what to think.

Then I went off to my zero-period Spanish class (that's a class that starts before school usually does, yes I'm a nerd) and we went through that class pretty much as normal but at the end we got some updates on what was going on from one of the librarians (our classroom was basically partitioned off from the back end of our library). She told us that one of the towers had collapsed.

I don't really remember much in the way of details from the rest of the day but I do remember that some of my classes tried to continue on normally and in some of them we sat and watched the news for most of the period. Another thing I remember is that at brunch some punk freshman walked up to one of our teammates and started cussing him out and telling him that we were going to bomb his country. Ahmed had moved here from Egypt that year and was on the cross country team with me. That stupid freshman is lucky that Ahmed stopped us otherwise half the team probably would have been suspended that day for beating him up.

Another thing that stands out in my mind about that day is at cross country workout after school we were commenting how strange it was to not see any planes in the sky.
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top

Why was that disgusting?


Capatalization on peoples pain and agony. We all knew what happened yet the media continued to play footage just to raise raitings.

In my opinion 9/11 and all events following were Big Media's version of a holiday.


No... showing that footage was a good thing. Would it better to see paris hiltion or something equally insipid? We are at war with these people. It is the drum beat of war. During WW2 we heard it in the form of constant reminders of what was happening to us and our allies. What they had done and will do if they are not fought.

A call to arms. The beat was heard during the Civil war. It was heard during the Revolutionary war... and back until the fog of history.


Currently the media is if anything trying to muffle the drum... but that's a mistake. It should sound loud until the job is done.
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
To continue our discussion (and any new side discusion) lets honor the OP's wishes and move them over here.
Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top
i was on my way to a homeschool civil war class (offered by the place that sold the supplies) we still went on with the lesson plan (we who went through homescholl can stay focused)
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top
i was on primary school have lessons.. and when i heard it, i thought : wtf .. is this such a big deal? there are happening worser things