History 9/11

I was getting ready to head into work when the local news channel cut over to the live feed. I sat and watched in horror as the second plane hit. I was glued to the tv for a couple more hours before I finally went into work. Our shop was just outside the city under one of the main flight paths and it was really weird not hearing or seeing planes flying overhead for a few days. I'm still numb over the whole thing 11 years later...it seems like yesterday.

 

I was having coffee with a friend at Mac's restaurant,..... I can still remember every detail....... And I will NEVER forget.

 

I had to turn it off.......like it was yesterday.

 

Getting ready for work, turned on the TV ... putting my shoes on.... watched the second jet hit and sat there just numb to what I had seen... The worst day ever, fellow employees were just dazed the whole day ... Got home and just cried.. Then heard my sister was flying back from the east, she then got stuck on the ground in Colorado.... and was lucky enought to get a rental car and drive home to Washington... Never forget 9/11... Got bless to all the victims and their families...

 

I had just gotten out of the shower, walked by the TV and saw the tower smoking, sat down in only a towel and saw the second plane hit. Sat on the couch in my towel for two hours glued to the TV in horror.

I can never forget but don't want to re-live it either. Too painfull. I almost didn't open this thread.

I also remember our church service being packed out the following Sunday. But that wained after a few weeks.

 

I was at work, heard it on the radio, then watched it on tv.
stunned me, be hard to ever forget that day, much less ever forgive..

 

I was at work (mail processing equipment maintenance at the Denver Bulk Mail Center) busy doing something when a call came across the 2-way radio that a plane had crashed into the WTC. I thought WTF, the pilot couldn't see the towers. I wandered down to the break room just in time to see the second one hit. My thoughts changed to "I guess this the start of a new war and it has come us". Not much mail got processed that day.

 

I was getting my son ready for school because his mother was flying back from India where she had been on a medical mission trip. She was scheduled to land in NY about 9AM that morning to catch a connecting flight home to Memphis. It was a long morning until they confirmed those flight numbers on the news and I knew she was safe. Still didn't hear from her for almost twenty hours, she was one of the many diverted to Canada and it was days before she made it home in a rental car.

 

The bastards can't take us down. The American Spirit is amazing.

As for that day, my alarm was set on the usual local news station. As it went off I heard a plane had hit the WTC..................no Cessna bullshit in my mind, I turned it up and rolled over to Carla and said "we are in War"

 

I'm in NYC this week on business. I thought the twin beams of light into the sky were an awesome tribute and honor to those who were most closely affected by this tragedy.

 

At The time I was a GM Perfprmance Parts specialist and had recently moved to a different dealership. I had taken a couple of comp days off because of the time I'd spent selling our wares at the NSRA Nationals in Louisville and I was lounging in bed watching my wife run around naked trying to get ready for work. My son called and asked if I was watching the news, that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. He works for American Airlines and said they thought it was one of theirs. I flipped on the TV to CNN and was watching the coverage when I saw the second plane come into sight and slam into the other tower. This confirmed what I had already suspected that the first was no accident. My daughter called the next day from Mexico where she and her girlfriends had gone for a few days and were stranded with no way to fly home and their hotel reservations were up. The hotels had doubled their room rates because they knew tourists would be stranded there. I had to wire some funds to cover their extended stay. The girls were all afraid to fly when they got the okay. As a side note, I lost my job a few weeks later as no one was buying performance parts and as no one was hiring, I was out of work for about 7 months until things somewhat came back to normal.

 

I live in a town in NJ on the main commuter RR line into lower Manhattan...every town along it has a multitude of people working in amd around the towers. I could before 9-11 clearly see the towers while driving route 124 a couple miles from home...
That morning I was teaching research methods to a bunch of freshmen in the library... every time I looked up I saw a cluster of people at the refernce area talking excitedly and acting...weird.
I dismissed the kiddies when class was over, and first version I heard was that a light plane had hit the WTC and there was a fire...
I keep a little radio handy and tried to get news...nada. Later I found out all the antennae were atop the WTC. Phone began to ring with people I know fishing for information and describing failed attempts tp call friends working there.
Cell phone connection to anything failed VERY early in the mess, particularly terrifying here because everyone knew people who worked there.
Finally fired up CNN on the computer, and I had to click overandoverandover for 15 minutes before I got in. Everyone in the country was logging in at once, and watching the news slowly change from excited gibberish to some relationship to reality, and then watching it all get worse and worse.
The atmosphere around here as the dust settled was awful as there were no communications to find out anything, and the thoroughness of the destruction was not clear...everyone assumed for a long time that there surely must be hundreds of people trapped under rubble and in the sub-basements, and it took days to fully realize that the collpse and fire had been absolute...anyone who had not walked out of there was gone.
Local NJ Police began the accounting on the first night...they simply ran the license numbers of cars left parked at all the local RR stations. No one was coming back for most of those cars.
Closest dead guy to me lived about 3 houses away, and left three very young kids. Each railroad town lost a number of people and had no certainty for quite a while.
On my way home I could see a huge blanket of smoke covering the whole area where the towers had been.

 

Sequel...a few weeks later we were at Englishtown swapmeet. My Alice got lost, a continual problem because she was nearly blind, and was rescued by a guy who turned out to be a Port Authority cop.
He told us that he knew 43 people who died that day.
His whole being seemed gray and shaky...he was still in shock, I'm sure PTSD.
Think about that guy's life.

 

The plane that hit the Pentagon flew right over my head. Low flying war planes are no big deal...I'm right near Andrews AFB. I looked up and there was the low flying commercial jet way too low for my area. You never see the bottom of a jet liner so close. Weird at first but we suspected nothing at that moment. A few minutes later there was what seemed like a mild earth quake. It went across the Potomac into no. Va. and back around north into the Pentagon. We still had no clue until it hit the news. It took a few minutes to put it all together.

 

i was having the first and only horrendous almost shouting match with a co-worker----over dumb shit. The thing that put an end to it was another mild mannered co-worker with a panic/urgency in his voice that i have never heard in him before and since saying, "GET TO THE BACK ROOM NOW!" This is where the t.v. was. And that's how we found out.

But more importantly, i want to say something about that day: If you were in the DC and i'm sure NYC/NJ area, something amazing also happened that day: Everyone started working together, everyone was friendly and so helpful towards each other. You would turn on your signal and you'd be let in the lane, no problems no questions. We were one. In complete harmony.

Why can't we be like that all the time?

 

I was at work that day.

The plant accountant called me and said go check out msn.com or yahoo.com or whatever.

I work in the food industry, and we are still in "ready-mode" because of this fabulous stunt. "Food Defense Plans" are required at every food manufacturing site in the U.S. Fences, security guards, hidden cameras....

What a sick world we live in now.

Defending against terrorism is like trying to defend yourself against well-trained snipers. They're going to get you if they really want to.