9/11, eight years later

That picture is (and, well, all of them are) still god-damned horrifying.

I was a sophomore in college; my mom called me and woke me up. They canceled classes for the rest of the day, but everyone still sort of met around the commons area and milled, talking about who might have done it and why.

A week later I got in a screaming fight with a guy in a class over the role of the media in the event. He contended that (somehow) the media made it worse, and that we all would have been better off learning about it via word of mouth. Oddly, it was an African American religion course. Still my best way of describing what the fallout was like -- it was everywhere, invading every conversation and thought, for weeks, months, years, leaving every nerve raw.

 

My memories of that day extend past a week. When something like that happens, you want to hug the ones you're close to, brothers, sisters, parents, significant others, kids. I didn't have an SO at the time and don't have kids.

When 9/11 happened, my parents were out of town on Day 6 of a seven-day Alaskan cruise out of Seattle. When their ship came in on Wednesday, all air travel had been halted. They had no chance of getting a train back to the midwest. And with everyone else stranded, no hotel rooms, either. My dad loves to drive, so they could have rented a car ... except, of course, there were no cars available either.

Because all of the folks scheduled to fly in for the next Alaskan cruise also couldn't get to Seattle, the cruise line ended up leaving the ship in port and allowing the passengers from the previous cruise back on as a floating hotel. Two days later, they offered everyone the chance to go back to Alaska on the ship for an abbreviated cruise for just $100/person. My folks chose that option. They didn't get home until the following Wednesday, and it was still very emotional picking them up at the airport eight nights after 9/11.

I remember how eery it felt driving to work and looking up in the sky and knowing that there were absolutely no planes up there. And from that week on, the bosses took an anti-terrorism stand and made everyone wear their work ID instead of just using it to get into the building.

 

I was a junior in high school. Went to NYC two years before the attacks. Hard to believe it's been 8 years.

 

I was a manager at Borders Books. We had an area-wide management meeting with our regional manager at one of the stores at 8am [Central]. I rolled in around 7:58 to find several people with stunned looks on their faces huddled around a small 13" television in the break room where the meeting was being held. I asked somebody what was up and they told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. There's a big, black box of a building just north of Downtown Dallas called World Trade Center. I thought it had been hit by a small prop plane. A couple of hours later the meeting ended and the television was truned back on. The second tower had been hit during the meeting and the first tower had just fallen. The magnitude of what was happening slapped me in the face. Reports about the Pentagon were rolling in. My mother was in DC and she was supposed to be taking a VIP tour of the Pentagon that day. It took four hours of "All circuits are busy" recordings before I was able to reach her on her cell phone. She was unhurt but mentally shaken by what was happening.

My other memories from that day:
- Returning to a store full of employees that were truly scared and realizing that they were looking to me to offer some guidance on how to deal with the day's events. All I could do was remain calm, keep them updated on the latest developments, let those with friends/family that were in the affected areas try to get ahold of said persons, and listened to employee after employee express concern about "is Dallas next?" and wanting to get home before dark.

- The Dallas Morning News published a special afternoon edition covering the attacks. A handful of customers were super-pissed that we ran out of copies.

- Slayer's God Hates Us All album was released that day. When I got home I listened to it while watching those two planes hit their targets over and over and watching the towers fall repeatedly. It was an eerily appropriate soundtrack.

One of the other things I remember was a few days later when the flight restrictions were being lifted. I was walking down the street when I heard that familiar sound of a jet plane overhead. Pedestrian traffic stopped and we all stood there collectively watching that plane fly by until it untik it was beyond our field of vision. The proximity of Love Field to downtown means that Southwest Airlines planes often look like [depending on your angle of view] they're going to collide with a skyscraper. Even now I'm still in the habit of watching planes flying near downtown.

CART held - as far as I can recall - the only major sporting event of the following weekend. They were in Germany and it was logistically impossible to postpone the race. I had planned to wake up super early to watch ESPN's live coverage but overslept. When I tuned in a scrolling message informed viewers that coverage had been stopped temporarily due to a possibly fatal on-track accident. Alex Zanardi didn't die. But he did lose both his legs.

 

Man - I can't believe I liked this ad when it aired. It seems so wrong now.

 

He never went off the air. He was on the next day too. Absolutely amazing.

 

Waking up after a frantic message was left on my answering machine from my mom, since she knew I was going to NYC and Times Square that day and had tickets to the Yankees-White Sox game. Called her back, turned on the TV in time to see the second plane going into the tower.

Walked outside and was able to see smoke from over 60 miles away down the shoreline. Went to give blood, got a fucking haircut and went into work on my day off (I wasn't called in, just showed up because I thought they would need any help and I needed to stay busy or I would've lost it).

I will never forget the images of seeing the emergency vehicles zoom down I-95 and the "All bridges closed to New York City" signs on the highway like we were in a war zone.

A week later, I went to Times Square and Manhattan just to walk around. Fitting that it was raining that day ... the rain making the ink on the thousands of "missing" signs run.

Words still fail me in describing what that scene was like.

 

I remember sleeping late, waking up to hear on the clock radio that the first tower had been hit. Oddly, at that point, they were thinking that it was a small plane. Turned on the TV, watching NBC coverage, and saw the second plane hit. The NBC talking heads - I think it was Katie Couric and Matt from the Today Show - wonder what the explosion was about, when everyone else on the planet saw the plane fly behind the building then never come out. Hurried up and got to work, where we all sort of watched in stunned silence in the newsroom. Started getting back to work, then one tower came down. Back to stunned silence around the TV, and then the second tower came down. Took us forever to get back to work and start working on the next day's paper.

 

I slept through most of it. Woke up around 11, showered and went into the office, where people were gathered around the TVs.

The Newseum here in DC has an incredible exhibit and documentary about the coverage of the event in the moments immediately afterwards. That alone is worth the price of admission.

 

I was in college and getting ready to head to my 9 am class when I turned on the Today Show and saw them talking about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. Just as I was about to leave, the second plane hit.

The class went on, albeit with all of us wondering just what was going on. When I returned to my building just before 11, probably 100 people were crowded around the TV in the lobby watching the news that the WTC towers had just collapsed. That's when it sunk in.

I obviously wasn't alive when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor or when JFK was assassinated, so I have no idea if 9/11 was more or less surreal than those dark days. But 9/11 was certainly the most surreal day of my lifetime.

 

I was sitting at my desk in mid-town, firing up the computer and drinking coffee when the first plane hit. Those of us who were in early moved to windows on the south-facing side of the building where we could see the smoke billowing. Then we turned on TV in the conference room and watched in stunned silence punctuated every few minutes with angry speculation about who might be responsible -- all focused on Bin Laden. I hadn't seen them in years but two guys I played baseball with as a kid on Staten Island died -- the catcher on my high school team, who had become a bond broker and partner at Cantor - Fitgerald, and the son of the local sporting goods shop owner who had become a fire department captain. RIP guys.

Edit: Just found out in a friend's Facebook post that a guy from my HS class died in 9-11. He was a lieutenant with Ladder No. 11 in lower Manhattan.