Where were you on 9/11?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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My mom called early in the morning, but it was my housemate who answered the phone. When I got up he said there was something about an attack or terrorism or something. I turned on the TV and everything was upside down.
Then I walked down the street to the little coffee place. they didn’t have a tv or radio, so i went back home, grabbed a little B&W set that we don’t use and loaned it out.
An hour or so later I went to work, where my boss (who was mentally ill) said 9/11 was horrible, because all the trains to NY were cancelled and she wouldn’t make her meeting. All of us in the office were aghast by how callous and self-centered she was. Two days later, she flipped out on my officemate and me (I still have the emails). My office mate walked out on September 13. I was fired for insubordination on September 14.
A week or two later I was in NYC rehearsing for a tour with the Essex Green. Their drummer and I went down to the docks in Williamsburg, and could smell the burning.
Wow. I’ll bet your ex-boss is voting for McCain, too. What a nutcase.
I was at work. I remember a few of us started to find out via email and the news spread quickly. The entire internet was slowed to a crawl because everyone was trying to get information. We’d get a picture here or there but we didn’t know much. I remember hearing that 50,000 may have died. Finally I think it was around 11:30 or noon they sent everybody home.
I had just gotten everyone on the school bus and called one of my colleagues to let him know I’d be sending him a completed project later that morning; I was just checking to see when he was leaving to catch his flight to Europe that afternoon (I wanted him to be able to review it on the plane).
When he responded that he wasn’t sure if he or anyone else was going anywhere, I was dumbfounded. I turned on the teevee at his suggestion, in time to see the second plane hit while I was still on the phone with him.
The thing that always sticks out in my memory of that day is how beautiful the weather was, and how eerily quiet everything got with no planes in the air.
I was at the dentist first thing in the morning. They had a story on the radio as I was on the way to the office about the plane hitting – at first everyone assumed it to be a Cesna or some such. When the 2nd one hit, it was obvious we were dealing with terrorism.
When I got to the office, we didn’t have a TV, so we had to use the Internet – very slow that day and hard to get any information at all. I was going to sites such as the BBC or the LA Times where the servers weren’t quite as busy.
I read the story on the Internet about the 1st tower that came down, but I didn’t have any pictures, so it was hard to say exactly what it meant.
Traffic was nuts because of the attack on the Pentagon. I stayed at the office until mid-afternoon, and it wasn’t until I got home that I saw all of the pictures on CNN.
I didn’t ac
I was at home – 1.5 mile down the road from Emma Booker elementary school, wondering when the hell george would get out of town.
Around 1pm, network coverage of events in NYC & DC was abandoned by our local ABC station so we could all watch the president’s motorcade travel from the Colony Beach Resort on Longboat Key to the Sarasota airport.
We were reassured that the urgency of national security would keep the drawbridges over the Intercoastal Waterway closed to boat traffic so the president could move quickly.
I was more disgusted than terrified on that day.
I was in my car on the way from Pasadena to El Segundo, just passing through downtown LA on the 110. I was hearing it first on NPR and was having trouble believing it. I didn’t know whether to cry or scream in anger. I maybe did a little of both. I wondered if others on the freeway knew what had just happened.
When I got to work, I couldn’t get anything done. I also, being close to LAX was spooked by the thought of any plane being in the air (there were none of course). I was also somewhat afraid that more planes would hit tall buildings (at International Rectifier, we were in one of the taller ones).
What I ended up being most struck by, before we all left early that day, was the way so many of my coworkers just went on with their work. One in particular, was this happy-go-lucky little graphic artists and she just laughed at the same little things she always would laugh at. I resented her and I resented others who could so quickly move on from the tragedy of 9/11 having only taken place mere hours before!
That evening, my faith in human beings and my fellow Americans was greatly restored by the media coverage and the clear sign of renewal and love amidst the wreckage…..only later to be destroyed by this administration’s response and the American people’s enabling of it.
I had just come back to Ohio from New York. I had lived there for 25 years. My brother called me early that morning and said, “The tower collapsed! Turn on the TV!”
I couldn’t grasp what he was saying but I turned on the TV. And I sat there watching for 24 hours straight. It was just too huge and monstrous to wrap my mind around all at once.
The next day I called friends and relatives who still live on Long Island. And they told me about their offices ringing with the sounds of the agonized screams of those who had friends or adult children working in the WTC. Many of my friends lost loved ones.
It was a waking nightmare.
Was sitting in meeting room waiting for a “job networking” meeting to start. Had just been part of a huge layoff by my former employer of 15 years, and was attending the meeting as part of severance package services.
In the break room, a TV was on so we watched the events there. After the second tower fell, everyone left for home to be with their families. When I got home, my family did not know about the event yet. Whereas just a week prior I came home early with the bad news I had been laid off after 15 years, this morning my surprise news was worse.
It was more than a week before the meeting was reconvened. No matter though…the tragedy of that day also had a dire effect on FL economy (tourism dollars vanished), and long-lasting negative effects in the employment market. After a long stint of nothingness, the next tangible job lead I heard of was for trainers for all the new TSA airport staff. Very ironic.
My family and I were in a hotel room in Flagstaff, Az on vacation. We had gotten up to start our day and turned on the TV. We saw the news. I cried.
Due to our inability to get a flight back to NY, our vacation was extended by 2 days. I was actually afraid to give up our small rental car as I figured that we would be driving it home. When we did return it there was a sea of cars, literally overflowing the return lot.
I mailed a small item home to avoid carrying it on the plane. It was an extended period before it finally showed up.
The theme for tomorrow’s Friday Foto Flogging is Critters.
I was working at home and got a call from a co-worker at the office. She said, “Turn on your tv.” That’s all she said but the tone of her voice made me run. When I turned it on, people were jumping and the cameras follwed them down almost to the ground. I howled “NO! repeatedly because I couldn’t absorb what I was seeing. When I did, I started screaming.
I called my husband; he was working a contract in BellSouth’s main office. “Come home,” I cried, “Please, come home.” He said he couldn’t because the building was on lock-down just in case there was a follow-up attack on communications.
Asleep on the sofa. I had no idea about what had happened until later that night. I’d been in the South Tower the week before, which added a bit of extra surrealism.
I was in the Marriott Hotel there in August, visiting my then father-in-law. But mainly, growing up where I did, the towers were just part of the backdrop of life. Even today I can’t look at the skyline without getting furious.
Getting ready for work when I lived in Minneapolis at the time.
I remember the newsies talking about this terrible accident in Manhattan only to watch the second plane hit live.
I was at work for an engineering firm in Oak Ridge, TN that had several environmental cleanup contracts with DOE and DOD. Outside my office there were two women working in cubicles, and one of them was always going to the CNN website and giving her cube-mate the latest news. The very earliest reports after the first plane hit made it sound like a small plane, and people blew it off for a few minutes. Folks started checking news websites, and found them running very slow – and Oak Ridge has very good internet access because of the presence of ORNL. The only site I could get access to was the WaPo. After the second plane hit folks were thunderstruck. Someone put on a TV in a conference room, which everyone watched silently, in shock, wandering in and out at times depending on their ability to handle what they were seeing.
Rumors started spreading by telephone that the DOE weapons facilities were on the highest state of alert, and that Marines had certain roads blocked. I left for home just before lunch time, taking a roundabout route to avoid the DOE facilities, which are located just off the main road back to Knoxville.
Mrs. K.P. had just started veterinary school and was not available by phone.
My younger son was in middle school, and he arrived home at lunch time; we sat on the sofa and watched CNN for a few hours until my older son, who was in high school and going through a rebellious “punk” phase got home. He didn’t want to watch TV and went off somewhere by himself – probably talked to his friends.
As CabinGirl noted, the weather was absolutely beautiful, and in fact stayed that way for the next several days. Mrs. K.P. and I took the dog each evening for long walks in the park, to de-stress (she was also having to deal with the stress of going back to school after 20 years, and veterinary school was hard. Plus her father had died not long before.)
It was very odd at first with the planes grounded, but you got used to it, and in fact it was disconcerting to hear one go over for weeks afterward after flights were resumed.
It was interesting to learn afterward that the grounding of the flights led to a delay in the start of the flu season, and allowed scientists a chance to study the effects of jet contrails effect on the weather.
While I didn’t know anyone killed in the towers, I believe both of my brothers (one in Philly, one in DC) did. The brother in DC lived just north of the Pentagon, but was at work at the time. He had a number of stories of the effects of 9-11 on life in DC.
We were supposed to go to his place for Thanksgiving dinner that year, but it was canceled as folks weren’t comfortable going to DC that soon after the attacks. But of course, no one would come out and say that; we all came up with various face-saving excuses.
I was in Brooklyn, sleeping. My housemate woke me, said the teevee and radio wasn’t working, but appeared that the WTC was on fire. We were able to get one teevee station, and saw the 2nd plane hit the South Tower. We screamed in bewilderment, two 41-yr old men screaming and hugging like teens, knowing that this was the unleashing of the fascist wave we both knew that CheneyCo. represents.
We spent the rest of the day shopping for food, taking walks in Park Slope, and later that evening, getting drunk in a local gay bar. I was furious, furious, knowing that this is exactly the excuse these fuckers needed to close down on the US and turn it far right, right into totalitarianism. I sat at a table with plenty of strangers, and I’d yell out “FUCKERS” every time the teevee reran the plane smashing into the South tower (it was repeated often). I’m sure in my anonymity that no one knew I was using profanity towards the force of CheneyCo., probably thinking my anger was unleashed at the terrorists.
I was in Manhattan, at the Lenox Hill Hospital. Had minor surgery scheduled for the following week and was in for some tests.
Had gone in early to pass by office first and got on the PATH in Hoboken around 7.30; I still have the image of the towers there that bright, cool morning at a mile’s distance. Magnificent they were.
Was sitting in a chair getting a blood test when someone came running into the room and said to turn on the radio – a plane had crashed into a builing. It was not clear where/how, so I imagined a small plane hitting a high rise. But the radio was turned on and shortly thereafter, the second plane hit. More confusion, but now it was obvious that it was no accident. A few minutes later, and the alarm is sounded in the hospital corridors: “Code Omega, Code Omega.” I guess that is the highest it goes. But no one came…
By the time I leave, both towers have fallen. I get out on 77th St, and soon get to the Lexington Ave corner to look south. The now familiar smoke plume towers over southern Manhattan. No phone, no cell. I walk down to 42nd St, where my office is. What a strange place the city had turned into, everyone suddenly seemed attentive to others’ needs.
At the office, all have been evacuated from the building (Chrysler Building) – but I find some colleagues in the crowd – we have been told to go home.
I can’t get through to the ex, but assume the kids are OK in their school. Their godfather had an office at the 85th floor of the north tower, and I am sure he is gone – but later in the day find out he is among the last to make it out.
I walk back to curly’s at the upper east side (can’t get through to her either), no subway service and all buses ridiculously full. Wait and watch TV. Manage to get through to family in Europe. Eventually, curly shows up, finally I also get the ex and hear that kids are OK and she has also seen the godfather – all covered in blue/green smoke and building residue. He had been looking out the window and seen the plane coming – hitting just 5 floors above. He and his 5 employees all made it out just in time.
Make it to the ex/kids in the evening and then back to curly. A lot of walking that day/evening. A surreal feeling, a strange quiet, but the disaster all to evident with the never-ending smoke plume and the horrible stench of burned building that quickly spread over miles (and would remain for months).
I was at home and watched the goings-on on TV. When it came time to drive to work, I took the long way around downtown Los Angeles just in case another attack was in the offing.
When I got to work, we all talked about it for hours on end. Not a lot of work got done that day.
I was teaching. Between 1st and 2nd hour, my Student Council president came up to me and said that the towers had been hit by a plane. I thought that it was some freak accident. Part way into 2nd hour, she came to my class and told me that the Pentagon was on fire.
For some reason, I took my classes to the library where my students (many Arabic and Bengali) didn’t exactly do the assignment as we just watched things unfold on the Internet.
My dad was visiting from Florida and was at my house. We called my mom (who works at Disney) and found out that the park closed immediately. We watch GW on television that night and we both wondered aloud if that “idiot was up to this.” Then, he, my brother, and I were stunned that he told people to go shopping.
My husband-to-be was teaching in Windsor and he e-mailed me immediately. We were both shaken and partly worried about our wedding that was a month away. The service was to be in Canada and the reception in Detroit. The border was closed for the rest of the day. Friends who lived in Windsor but worked in Detroit started crashing at my house because it was taking four hours to get to downtown Detroit.
I’d had surgery the day before and was lying half-out of it on Vicodin. As soon as I saw what was happening, I knew a lot of my brother firefighters were gone. One of my co-workers wore an FDNY shirt to work today. It makes me sad all over again.
I was in Costa Mesa, CA, visiting my daughter’s family. I’d gotten up early to tend to my 9 month old grand-daughter so her mother could sleep in. I was sitting on the couch giving her a bottle so I turned on the TV and there was the first tower on fire. Daughter woke up and came out then went to wake up my son-in-law. We knew that when my grandson woke up, he’d want to watch cartoons, so SIL brought in another set from his office and set it up with the VCR. That let us keep watching the news. By that time, the second tower had been hit and then the Pentagon. I’m not sure when we heard about the flight that went down in Pennsylvania. I called my husband and then my parents. Flights were being shut down and I had a ticket to fly back to Michigan in a few days. Daughter & I tried to find a Red Cross office where we could donate blood but they were all closed – as it turned out, blood wasn’t needed. Flights were allowed to start taking off the morning of my ticket home so I made it, but I think everyone on the plane was extremely nervous.
…since i haven’t seen any obama campaign ads attacking on the healthcare front, i’ve come up with one anyone’s welcome to adapt and use:
60 sec radio spot: HOW LOW CAN WE GO? (with FEC disclaimer):
[SFX/ Olympics music fade to siren]
ANNCR: “Would you believe we are number 37 in the world? The World Health Organization ranks healthcare in the US as 37th in the world. Most of us know we’re ranked below Northern Europe and Japan but did
you know we’re ranked below Greece? And below Chile? And below Colombia? Were even ranked below Morocco? It’s a deadly shame.
Without universal health insurance many families in the US hit with sudden medical emergencies are forced to go into debt. A medical catastrophe can financially wipe us out. Many just never receive any medical care at all. But John McCain thinks there’s nothing to worry
about. He’s got more important things to do. Like figure out just how many homes he owns. Lets see… one… two… three…. four…five…
[SFX fade out]
Are you ready for change? Like from number 37 to number 1? Vote Obama-Biden this November.Your family’s health depends on it.
Paid for by Bitchers and Moaners of America. http://www.b&m.net“
As with the morning JFK Jr.’s plane went down, I awoke early, for no particular reason. When I wake and can’t sleep, I turn on the news.
When I turned on the news, only the first tower had been hit. So I saw the second one hit in real time. It was so bizarre. And I thought, honestly, this couldn’t be our government’s doing, because that building is the symbol of the financial center of the world. It’s owned by the Rockefellers. This must be retribution for the ill we’ve done in the world.
My sister called and said flat out, “Bush did it.” I’ve seen no evidence of that, I said. To me, that seemed counterintuitive, at the time. It wasn’t until much later that I learned the insurance policy on the building had expired, the Rockefellers didn’t own it anymore, A Bush relative ran security there, and all the rest.
Anyway. I watched as one event progressed to the next. I watched as a caller said a bomb had just gone off at the Pentagon – a comment that was not followed up. I remember flipping through what seemed like 50 channels looking for someone talking about the Pentagon. Found nothing. Returned to CNN, and about 20 minutes after the initial report, they started talking about the Pentagon saying a plane had hit it.
I felt like I was in shock all day. All that death. All that destruction. And that was before I knew about all those toxins released into the air from the building’s destruction.
Then all the planes grounded, everywhere. All those people without their vacations, without their business meetings. Sleeping on floors at the airport. The whole country was so vulnerable. We just ground to a halt.
I went to work, mostly to be around other people. It was too much horror to bear alone. It was like walking among ghosts. People barely talked to each other. Everyone was wandering around in their own private bubble of worry. Very odd. Never seen anything like that.
It took a couple of years before the sound of a plane flying overhead didn’t give me a queasy feeling. Even this year, I saw a big plane shadow downtown and nearly jumped. I saw one fly close to a building and couldn’t look away until it had flown past.
And then all the weird videos and stories – that made me angry, because the best time to find the truth is immediately after an event, before the disinformation sinks in. And I felt the conspiracy theorists were muddying the waters more than even the official investigation would.
Three things I know now, that are enough to give me serious pause.
1. The FBI’s counterterrorism unit was on the opposite coast, at a joint event with their CIA counterparts in Monterey, CA. So the people best equipped for the initial investigation had been neutralized.
2. The guy who paid the hijackers was working for Pakistani intelligence, and likely British and/or American intelligence as well, from his history.
3. War Games kept the hijacked planes from drawing an immediate response. Blips on the radar were at first assumed to be part of the simulation.
Whoever was responsible had connections deep inside our country to time that with such precision. This wasn’t something that could have been run from caves.
Long Island, on my way to work when my wife called to say a plane hit one of the towers. I didn’t think much of it beyond the sensation the news channels would make of it. Minutes later she called again and let me know about the second plane. Fucking terrorists, I thought. I got to my shop and the race boat guys next door were watching it unfold on tv. I watched for a few minutes not knowing exactly what to feel except anger. Put on NPR and tried to pretend it was a normal morning but was really just going through the motions in a sort of daze until the Pentagon was hit. I went back next door to watch with the other guys and that’s when the first and then the second tower collapsed. Can’t really desribe the emotions at the time. I think we were in shock. It never occurred to me that they would fall.
One of the mechanics was an ex NY cop. When the towers went down with all those firemen and cops inside he began to cry. Tough guy, brought low with rage and disbelief. Seeiong him that way, well, it pissed me the fuck off.
It turned out that a couple that we were all close to hadn’t been heard from yet and we were worried because one of them worked in one of the towers. I saw them the next day and they were devastated, depressed and had that stare, like soldiers do. They had found out that some friends of theirs had not survived.
It was close to 11 or so when my wife called and wanted me home. She wanted the kids out of school too. Not very rational but completely understandable. Many others were feeling the same things. So I went home to be with our family. That night I stood outside looking west toward New York and feeling as if my own family had been murdered.
I saw the hole left behind about a year later. The black building next to the footprint still shrouded in a black safety net that looked like a funeral veil. You can’t speak or particulary articulate about your feelings at a place like that. You just look and listen, strain to grasp the enormity of what happened there. Failing really to get a hold on it.
My righteous, patriotic anger played itself out over the next couple of years as I began to understand what had happened and how it had been allowed to unfold as an excuse to create a foothold for a world wide dominance play by my government. 9/11 was the catalyst for my radicalization against that government. The beginning of really taking a hard and painful look at what we are and at who I was and had been. When they say that 9/11 changed everything, for me it did. It was an awakening to the truth about us.
I no longer direct my anger at those who attacked from without, but at those who have attacked from within and how they were and to this day were allowed to do it and allowed to carry on and how that reality has changed my whole view 180 degrees in the years since.
Driving to work, I turned on the radio to hear about one plane hitting WTC. I was still in the car and heard about the second one. By the time I got to the office (under a landing path to O’Hare), it seemed that no planes were flying and few cars were on the road.
When I got in, most people were trying to find out what was happening, and the only TV’s were in the deli on the first floor, which was too crowded, and another in our break room, which could only get the local Univision channel. I got to hear the commentary in Spanish as the towers collapsed, with a running translation by our head of IT.
We were told to go home about an hour later, and I met my wife there, who was sent home from her job at a doctor’s office. We went to the local blood bank to donate, and ended up being the last ones taken after many hours in line (but I couldn’t donate, as my bp was too elevated after watching hours of coverage and being fed free pizza, McDonald’s, and Diet Coke that was being donated to people waiting to give blood (hmm, love that sodium and caffeine).
Our conference rooms looked away from O’Hare, and for the next year I remember falling silent in the middle of meetings as I watched planes coming lower on their approach to land, seemingly coming straight in.