Dear Datalounge, what was it like experiencing 9/11?

The sky was so blue that day.....

The sky was so blue that day.....

I no longer believed in insatiable bottoms.

Dear Datalounge, what was it like experiencing the 2016 election? I was born two years after Trump got elected so I have a slight grasp on what the aftermath was like, but I know nothing about what it was like while it was happening in real time. How bad was the hysteria and panic? Did people really think we were being invaded a la Red Don?

I'm a mayfly, and have no memory of the Trump trying to buy Greenland. What was it like?

Please hurry with your answer, I have hours to live.

Let’s roll you bitches!!!

Unless you were in NYC or DC no one cared. I was in Chicago and everyone just bitched about how they couldn't get anywhere or how businesses closed, (which was correct, no one outside the USA cares about Chicago).

At least we had some different TV.

Now the anthrax that followed was scary, but 9-11, was not, for most.

R7 I’m also curious about the anthrax attacks. Nobody ever really talks about them anymore, despite what a panic they seemingly created. Can you tell me more?

For me, it was this very weird, unsettling feeling that the world as we knew it would never be the same. Also, the images of the victims jumping to their deaths from 100 stories up--inescapable at the time--will haunt me forever.

R7 what in the fuck are you talking about? There was indeed panic everywhere — we had no one what they might hit next because many cities have/had Taliban/Al Quaeda targets. Every single airplane in the sky was grounded in a matter of a handful of hours. So.....NO, you’re wrong. The entire fucking *world* was watching and cared, much less Americans.

Also OP, you need to read more. See link as a detailed primer, before Time truly sucked.

r10

There was NO PANIC at all in Chicago. I worked for Starwood and I called over to all the NYC hotels and not one was even the least bit concerned, except how they would not make their bonuses for the quarter.

The anthrax attacks drew panic. That was because anyone could get anthraxed at any time, any place in Chicago, but no one cared about 9-11, especially after the news was predicting like 50,000 dead and it was what? Not even 3,000 dead.

Since they solved the anthrax attacks no one cares, it was much more scary. Unless you flew frequently (and most don't fly much in their lifetimes) 9-11 was not much to you. But anyone could get an anthrax letter.

Was living in ground zero, had a perfect view of plane two hitting tower two, the explosion and blast hitting my building and the rumbling cloud of death and debris engulfing the neighborhood. Can still remember the expressions of complete terror on the two people running towards my building not quite in front of the Federal Reserve.

Started having seizures, anxiety attacks and migraines within a year.

When the gas lines got shut down our building was evacuated and we were instructed to soak the heaviest towels we had to wrap around our faces as we paired off to walk up to Canal. Downtown looked like a warzone, no one on the streets.

I got lucky as my roommate took me to her friends place in Chinatown and I went home with her because the city didnt shut down the Path train.

I still get physically ill when the pictures of the two after the first/second hits. I do wish people would be more careful with those images, but that's just the PTSD.

Having to walk https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x549ftg IT to get to Battery Park, seeing vendors selling memorabilia of the attack was pretty disgusting. Tourists would pose for pics in front of the wreckage for atleast a year later which was also equally disgusting.

^not sure how that dailymotion bit got into my post

The vast majority of Americans "experienced" 9/11 by watching replays of the twin towers collapsing over and over again on TV for a year, then ramping up into a jingoistic frenzy that lasted until about 2008.

OP, you're going to be late for school, get off DL.

There was a lot of crying in my office as we huddled around a transistor radio. The internet and phone systems were overwhelmed and worthless. WCBS was reporting that bombs were going off downtown. There were several planes unaccounted for for a while. Clinicians were on standby for patients who never arrived. (Or rather started arriving a year later) At the beginning while there was still some phone service I was yelling at my wife, who was driving to Brooklyn, to turn around and go home. She was all “it’s nothing.” By the time she went over a rise and saw, there was no longer phone service so I was worried for hours about her.

When the Triborough was re-opened an elder gay friend with a car picked me up on the corner and drove to Forest Hills. I waited at the train station for about an hour in the mild sunlight. I vomited when I finally made it home to Long Island.

No one in my office went to work the next day.

It was like this

[quote]Unless you were in NYC or DC no one cared.

This is laughably untrue. The entire country shut down for nearly a week.

Ignore R7 since they’re clearly a troll.

R12, you’re out of your mind. My brother was a stockbroker trading on the floor in Chicago, so I know exactly how it affected the markets, which was a huge fucking deal. I also think you’re mistaking lack of pure hysteria from people giving a shit. It affected every single industry in the US because it also roiled imports/exports and travel. From a purely greed-oriented standpoint, everyone cared and watched, AND obviously people had to carry on their day and work, take care of families, grocery shop, etc. Your comments show lack of context. The footage played over and over and over and over and over on every single station. TV shows didn’t air for fear of being offensive and/or various other reasons, people could travel initially blahblahblah.

Let’s agree to disagree.

I was in Boston where 2 of the planes took off from and we knew that fairly quickly. I was working at a small college for a dean and she couldn't give a shit. The college president came to see her annoyed at all the requests to cancel classes. Neither one of them had seen the images on tv. La dee da. When I saw the alert about the Pentagon I told them, thinking that would affect their decision. Instead I was scolded fer announcing it., "Someone who has a loved one working there might hear you and get upset."

A well respected tenured professor heard this and jumped out of her office and started yelling at them, "Right, by all means lets just keep it all a secret!!! No one ever has to know!!! Close Down the school!" Others started saying the same and they still resisted. Within 25 minutes we heard that Harvard had closed and they relented.

The next few days they stumbled over themselves trying to be politically correct. Fucking tone deaf assholes.

Everyone else was freaked out.

That thread is hilarious, r18. It seems incredibly phony, like one person was trying to recreate what was going on

"Oh, it's probably someone like Osama Bin-Ladin!"

9/11 was the day I discovered the DL.

So, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It was obviously a big, newsworthy moment and people were pretty shocked by it and checking updates often. Otherwise, we went pretty much on with our day. Obviously the towers fell pretty early in the morning (EST) so the conversation hung around. It's not like people packed up and left or dropped what they were doing; at least not where I was.

By late afternoon, though, there was a huge run on gas which is what I remember. Prices spiked suuuuper high and there were cars lined up around the block.

I remember it was far more unnerving when the power went out in 2003 throughout the northeast and eastern great lakes (we were the westernmost area affected). We thought that was a far more serious issue/harbinger of something major to come. I still don't really buy the explanation of what happened.

....

I think Sarah Silverman speaks for all of us...

Nobody was afraid of “invasion.” Al Qaeda didn’t have a navy. We feared other, similar terror attacks.

Sarah is a cunt royale, no surprise she predictably goes for “shock and awe.”

It changed US travel, and the sense of security the US had. Before you could meet people at the gate - security was easy.

My first week at university, I barely knew anyone there yet but the morning it happened I could feel a buzz in the air and people were talking so I asked and someone told me a plane had hit the WTC and I didn't believe them. After that class I saw footage of the second strike and also of people jumping out to escape the flames. I was transfixed and horrified.

My plane to Denver was grounded in Birmingham, Alabama. We were shuttled to a hotel, with none of our luggage. Two or three ladies took orders for underwear, etc, and drove complete strangers to a nearby Target and Walgreen for necessities. Everyone was so kind and generous. We ate silently in the hotel restaurant; there was a lot of tears and silence. A man, that I am certain had never held another man's hand, took my hand in his and asked if I knew how to pray because he didn't. I did my best. I cannot imagine what it was like in NYC. But I know I felt like I had been stranded on the moon. Thank God everyone seemed to pull together and be at their best.

Because I was stuck at my desk and had only seen a glimpse of the burning buildings on the student lounge tv I tried to get my news from the computer. That was all fucked up so I went to the Salon Table Talk message boards. What a great decision. One poster took CNN, another took ABC, another CBS, and so on. They gave us all the updates as they were reported and that kept me sane that day.

Because I had to stay all day to man the phones I left at about 5:30. That day I opted to take the buses home because the idea of being underground on the T was too creepy. Boy we made record time that day.

It wasn't until I got home and turned on the TV that I fully understood the post, "The south tower just collapsed."

I was there. It was very scary. I know people joke around about the over dramatic response of some people (the sky was so blue, etc), but it really changed everything and I see my life as distinct periods before and after.

OP is 16/17?

R8, I agree, very odd that an act of bioterrorism likely perpetrated by an american national isn't spoke of ever

[quote] Unless you were in NYC or DC no one cared. I was in Chicago and everyone just bitched about how they couldn't get anywhere or how businesses closed, (which was correct, no one outside the USA cares about Chicago). At least we had some different TV. Now the anthrax that followed was scary, but 9-11, was not, for most.

This is completely inaccurate. People were terrified all around the world for months.

I was at work, where I did data entry while listening to NPR. NPR was on regular programming, and at 9 it went to BBC and that's how I heard. I immediately got on NBC.com, but quickly all the news websites were flooded and no one else in my office could get on anything, so everyone crowded around my monitor. After about an hour people started wandering back to their own desks. For whatever reason, I decided that if today was the day I was to die I was going to do it at home. So I got up and left.

I had a scheduled day off the next day and spent most of the day watching the news, but at night I went to a road show version of Best Little Whorehouse starring Ann-Margaret and Gary Sandy. They literally could not give tickets away and the few people who were there were not a very responsive audience. Poor Ann-Margaret was a trouper though.

It was horrifying. You couldn't catch your breath watching the news footage. It was surreal.

The people jumping off the buildings was the absolute most awful part of it. Hands down. It was sickening to see. People jumping holding hands. There is footage that someone took from in the lobby complex between the towers and you can hear the bodies slamming into the roof of the lobby complex. It's horrible. I wish I never saw that footage, but it was happening live in real time.

I lived in L.A. and it was ghost town. I got tired of watching the horror and decided to go to my sisters to paint her house. On the freeway, there was no one. It was bizzarre. It was post apocalyptic. I'd never seen Los Angeles like that.

Post 9/11 society changed for a bit. The world became more "neighborly". Strangers were nicer to each other. People smiled at one another. It was now "us against them". There was a "we're americans and we got each other's back" mentality. I liked it. Strangers were bonded through this epic epic epic tragedy.

me too r34. I'm at the point now, 18 years later, that I am wondering how my life might have taken a different turn if it never happened.

It was awful, OP. I’m in Boston where two planes departed from, so I worried that they might have spread anthrax before they left. I thought there were 50,000 dead as that is the number that apparently worked there. I left work. Everybody did. Since the stock market didn’t open, it wasn’t a problem.

The phones were not functioning and even the internet was unreliable. Everybody was trying to contact everybody. My nephew at Rockefeller Center, NYC also went home.

Everything seemed to stop. Every plane was grounded and the ones in the air were questionable. Were they terrorist-controlled? Would we shoot them down? Subways stopped, too.

Sickening,

R7/R12 is an idiot. If he’s not just completely fabricating those answers then he sounds like an extremely vapid, clueless queen. 17 years on and yet he learned nothing.

People were terrified for days; no one knew what would happen next. A “Red Dawn” style invasion was not the fear; we were not targeted by a foreign government or state (at least not overtly); these were lawless terrorists and they’d clearly stop at nothing. The idea of flying planes loaded with passengers into high-density sky scrapers was just shocking in it’s complete disregard for human life.

One positive, if a positive could be claimed in all of it, was that we really came together as a country. That only lasted until we invaded Iraq, which we all know now was a foolish mistake sold to us on lies.

9/11 dominated the news for months. The internet was still under a decade old and everyone relied on traditional media for information, so there was no escape from it unless you were a very shallow person who didn’t follow news, like R7/R12.

I arrived early to work (6:00 a.m.) which was located in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. My office faced to the parking lot and happened to look up to see one of my co-workers running into the building. When he got into the office he said a plane ran into the World Trade Center. He heard it on the radio as he was driving in. At first I thought it was a small plane but the next few people who arrived said they heard it was a full sized jet. I noticed that my internet connection was very slow and I couldn't call up any of the news sites. People who had radios gave the rest of us updates. I called my partner at home and he turned on our TV just as the second plane hit the other WTC building.

We were eventually told to go home and be with our families. I don't remember much of the rest of the day. I watched TV throughout the rest of the day and into the evening. Most shows were cancelled. I recall many shows were cancelled for the next few days. I think the Emmy Awards was moved to a different day.

What still remains to this day is a hatred of people from the Middle East or Muslims. I guess this is what it was like during WW2 with Japanese and Germans.

R34

Me too. I wasn't there in NYC, But it so profoundly impacted me and everyone, that I've never gotten over it. I'm still terrified to fly. I didn't step foot on a plane until 2010, and I didn't know how to go through security when I got to the airport.

I knew three people who lost someone in 9/11. I always think about these three men. I was only acquainted with them, but hearing the shear terror that they and their families went through not knowing if their loved ones survived.... words cannot express what it was like watching those buildings fall, knowing their loved ones (father, brothers) were inside.

I worked at Applebee's in Times Square, but lived across the river in Queens. The bridges and subways into Manhattan were closed for days, so I couldn't get to work. When things normalized and I did get to work days later, my manager chewed out everyone who "stayed home" like we just decided not to show up or something.

I watched the event live from the safety of my home and was just stunned. There was nothing

For a long time afterwards there was a haunted quality to Manhattan in part because of all the 'Lost' posters on lampposts with photos and descriptions of people's fathers, mothers, sons and daughters who had worked in or near the WTC and had disappeared that day. It took years to ID victims using tiny bits of human flesh mixed into the rubble. I don't know how long it took those families to get closure.

Giuliani, an arrogant moron with fascist leanings suddenly got nationally known just by not peeing himself on the day. He's also the fool who had decided to build the city's emergency command center in one of the WTC buildings against the advice of experts.

r46, I loathed Giuliani before 9/11 and loathe him now, but that day, and the days immediately afterwards, he was the only person who was able to step up and show some leadership, so I give him a pass for those few days.

I saw a very moving series of pictures on the internet of world leaders in series, and all of their expressions were extremely pained. Even Putin’s. Besides the barbarity, it meant that the world had changed. (If anyone has this clip, please post it. I can’t find a t now. Thanks.)

[quote] Unless you were in NYC or DC no one cared.

[quote] This is completely inaccurate. People were terrified all around the world for months.

I am German and still remember to this day the moment I first heard about the attacks. Came home from school, wanted to watch my favourite show on TV and was pissed at first that they were talking about some 'boring political stuff' instead (I was 14...). It took me a while to understand - and process - what had happened. I think the news about the second plane had just come in, so it had become clear it wasn't just a tragic accident.

In the next few days, the terror attacks were all anyone talked about. IIRC, there was even a minute's silence in school. So yeah, people not just outside NYC/DC but outside America very much cared.

Dear Datalounge, what was it like experiencing Weimar Berlin?

I was born two days after Kristallnacht, so I have a slight grasp on what the War was like, but I know nothing about what it was like when Berlin was the swinging HEP town. How bad was the VD and Königsberger Klopse? Did people really think they were living in the new modern Utopia?

R47, I share you disgust for Giuliani. But no one will ever be as pointless a human as our Attorney General John "DuctTape" Ashcroft.

R43. You make a good point about the racism that emerged against middle easterners. It was shocking. Innocent americans were murdered in cold blood just for looking Middle Eastern.

At one point they had a hotline that you could call if you suspected your neighbor was a terrorist. My friend called and reported his neighbors. They were five Arab men, living in a two bedroom apartment, who were in L.A. attending some pilot training flight school(!) A little weird. After 911, they mysteriously moved.

Let's just say we've been living in that world ever since, and in your case it's all you've ever known. To talk about before, it was sunnier, you worried less about things that didn't concern you and your little world directly.

9/11 was the start of the authoritarian downfall of the US.

OP, if you truly do want to know, there's a new book scheduled for release on Tuesday that details the experience of 9/11 by looking at it from everyday perspectives of people experiencing it in the moment. It's called 'The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 and, skimming through it this week, it looked pretty interesting. It's not a dense re-telling. It's reporting in people's own words of their personal experiences and thoughts.

The experience was the realization that the world is small and getting smaller and probably also that 9/11 was the first of what will be a long series of increasingly nasty incidents as population grows and common sense and morality fail.

You could blame the Great Recession on the terrorists. The low interest rates were a a result of the dot-com bubble bursting, plus 9-11.

I can’t find a good example of the family members who were wandering aimlessly near ground zero holding photos of missing loved ones for weeks afterward, and then as the dust settled, the flyer photo walls began. It was gut wrenching.

Many were lucky if a single bone fragment was found. Many victims simply.....turned to dust. Disappeared into the air. I don’t know how those families live with it, even now.

To this day, I can't watch any movie about 911. I can't watch any documentaries. I can't watch any news footage about it. I don't want to see any photos. I guess it's the PTSD of it all, but it's too overwhelming.

" I agree, very odd that an act of bioterrorism likely perpetrated by an american national isn't spoke of ever."

The anthrax scare was concocted by Cheney and Rove as a way to keep Americans scared and submissive. Can't have any pesky progressives/liberal ideas when you're trying to take over the government.

I saw the towers burn from the corner of my street in the Bronx. We spent the day waiting at my friend’s house with his family, waiting for him to call or come home. He never did. FDNY fatality. At least they found him later that March. I learned that day that widespread terror has a taste and a smell. It comes off of people and gets into the air. The only other time I experienced it was the day R25 is talking about- when we lost all power on the east coast.

[quote]You could blame the Great Recession on the terrorists.

Sure, Jan. I’ll contnue to blame the banks, Wall St., predatory lenders, corporate CEOs and the 1%.

Nice try, bootlicker.

It was dandy, OP.

[quote] I learned that day that widespread terror has a taste and a smell. It comes off of people and gets into the air.

No it doesn’t. It was the smell of jet fuel, burning plastic & electrical equipment and cement dust.

I was across the west side highway, in a spot on the river side. Those of us on the floor in the interior didn’t feel/hear it directly, but people in the perimeter offices did. I can’t remember which happened first - people coming out of the perimeter offices saying, “what was that?” Or the WTC showing up on CNBC, it might have been simultaneous.

Then we went to the other side of the building so we could see what was happening. I was on a fairly low floor and I remember seeing a woman lying completely still on the west side highway meridian (is there a meridian?). She was young, black, and professionally dressed. Her skirt was pleated. It’s an oddly vivid memory and I don’t trust it. She was too intact.

I do remember one of the admins saying, “I hope nobody was hurt” and looking over her and meeting the eyes of another colleague. Neither of us said anything. At that point it wasn’t that scary (for us), but I remember thinking that it was the biggest, most historic thing I was every going to see in my life, and then immediately thinking, “Shoot, I HOPE this is the biggest thing I ever see.”

At some point I made my way back to my desk on the other side of the floor and exchanged a few emails with a friend in midtown, while watching the CNBC coverage. I still remember Mark Haines. He did an amazing job. People at work were hypothesizing about why the pilots would have done it and I remember saying that the pilots wouldn’t have, especially as so many are ex-military.

Then the second plane hit and it was, “Holy shit we’re under attack!” Some people took the elevator, I didn’t want to, took the stairs. Two women from the mailroom were at the head of the pack going down the stairwell. We got to the first floor and the door was locked. The women from the mailroom had imperfect English but a guy who used to go for runs at lunch and used the stairwell kept his head and conveyed to them that we needed to go one more floor down. By this point one person was trying to climb over the handrail to get down, but they weren’t pushing. We went down one more flight and got out to the winter garden area. I didn’t want to walk through there because of the glass, so the people I was with went out an exit further south.

R7 is a moron.

.

Then we walked up the west side highway. Several women were in heels. I stopped a tourist wit a suitcase and asked her if she had socks. My colleagues were embarrassed, but I already realized how bad it was and that people would want to help. I was also concerned that more would happen and we would have to walk a lot farther that people were anticipating. So some women walked in socks instead of their heels.

One woman’s fiancé was in a building closer to the towers, but not one of them, and she couldn’t reach him. This was before everyone had a smart phone. Cell phones were working erratically, but people with blackberrys were able to send and receive emails. We were facing north, and at one point people’s faces dropped and the atmosphere changes all at once. We turned and saw the first tower fall. It was completely unexpected. I was scared for the woman who couldn’t reach her fiancé.

Once we got above 60th street, it seemed as though some joggers and roller blades still didn’t know what was going on.

We crossed the park to the east side and stopped at someone’s apartment and eventually the engaged woman reached her fiancé. He was Ok, but dust covered. I asked her at that point how she stayed so calm and she referenced faith. I am not religious, but was impressed. People talked about going to give blood and I though they were nuts - 99% of those affected were going to be OK or dead, why go to a hospital where you might get exposed to a biological agent? I remember discouraging them, but didn’t say what I really thought.

I continued north on second avenue. There were a lot of people and not too much conversation, but there was definitely a sense of being in it together. Middle aged men were sitting outside at a table in front of their church giving out bottles of water. That really impressed me. Those guys from Harlem handing out water rot a bunch of Wall Streeters. I crossed the bridge and waited for my ride at that McDonalds that’s just outside of Manhattan.

People were basically zombies for days after. Markets didn’t reopen until the following Monday.

R7 is a moron.

I also remember the memorials. Some were pretty delayed because, as mentioned, people went around with those photos of their loved ones for a long time. I thought the press really dropped the ball, it seemed like it should have been communicated that there were not hundreds of patients in hospitals who were unconscious or suffering from amnesia. There weren’t that many injured.

You couldn’t pay the national anthem as part of a Catholic service, so they would play it at the end, as everybody left. There were no bodies, but they had photos. One of the services I went to had a sonogram along with the photo of the mother. It was awful.

R66, I posted about the wandering family with photos.

I was 5 1/2 months pregnant. I was a teacher, and sitting alone in the teachers lounge and then with another teacher. Watching in silence. We were both pregnant the same amount of time. We dared not say it aloud, but I couldn’t help but wonder, “what kind of world am I bringing this kid into?” “What kind of future will this kid have? Nothing, nothing, nothing will ever be the same.”

We both cried a bit, I knew she was having similar thoughts, but we didn’t speak. Then I had to go back to my classroom in a middle school. As the kids walked the halls, it was eerie, spooky, slower, with hushed concerned talking, no smiles, no laughter. This was at about 12pm CST. The principal emailed all of us to stop with the TV’s because that’s what was on in every single room. He then made the rounds to make sure every turned off the television as it was terrorizing the kids. Many parents started showing up to take their kids home, like several hundred. The orchestra teacher was hysterical all day in the office and couldn’t teach as her husband was a pilot and she didn’t reach him til 9 hours later.

I’m so sorry to all of you who were actually there or even in the vicinity. I’ll never know what you went through. Just as OP will never understand, truly, what it felt like across the world.

I live in Cleveland and was working in downtown Pittsburgh that day. The Fidelity office across the hall had their tvs on and we were watching the first tower burn - then the 2nd plane hit - and the mood went from " what a tragic accident" to OMG WTF..... so we are watching this in horror, and the Pentagon happens... Then the plane crashes in Sharpsburg, and panic starts to set in - all the businesses downtown close - there was a mass exodus -- the parking garage I was in flagged everyone out - no time wasted on paying..... So, Im sitting in my car on the freeway, which was more or less a parking lot - crying angry tears, thinking this is how it ends? I had a dinner party the Sunday before ( fabulous, thank you) and recall the innocence of that day compared to our life now - and we were truly one nation with the sympathy of the world for a few months after that ...

Read a book or watch a movie you fucking twat.

People forget it was primary day in NYC. I didn't have to be at work until around noon, so I ignored all the messages coming in on my answering machine thinking they were recorded political messages and recorded GOTV. Then I heard my brother who never calls anyone and called him right back. He's in DC. He told me to turn on the television. I pictured a small plane hit. I remember watching the and seeing a sort of molten core still burning inside the impact site and thinking that was not a good sign. I had no concept then of the number of people who might be stuck. I think I pictured most of the people in the north tower getting out below the impact point and all of the people in the south tower evacuating as soon as the north tower was hit, so wasn't expecting high casualties in the population of either building. Of course I didn't go to work and all day I could smell burning which I finally realized was smoke from the towers blowing across Prospect Park (that's how the wind blew it). People also forget the scare stories. One was that the mall in DC was on fire. Another was there were eight planes ready to do more damage. I remember thinking well, they can't possibly have every plane in the world up there ready to attack this way. And people might forget how damn long it was before ANYONE in government authority addressed what was happening, and that was almost more frightening. There was just a remark that some thought it was Al Queda. This was why Guilianni, who was already hated, suddenly became heroic for awhile - because nobody supposedly "in charge" was taking charge. It was just talking heads on TV and that's it. I didn't feel any personal panic. I knew no plane was aiming for the building I lived in, and we're not adjacent to any symbolic or famous target.

Places in the city like Union Square were covered in laminated photographs of the people in the tower, i.d.ing them as missing. Candlelit vigils and so forth. I remember the city was extemely quiet for about a week or so, no horns honking, just quiet voices, no rudeness.

Lots of magazine reports immediately afterwards were full of erroneous information. I remember one described people huddled in Trinity church emerging to stand in the cemetary to watch the towers fall and being crushed / killed by the towers falling. That didn't happen - the cemetary was and is fine, though it did get that cloudy stuff over it. New York magazine showed a picture of a tree covered in work boots that were hanging by their shoelaces with the caption "Shoes left by office workers fleeing the tower." Idiotic caption. They were clearly where responders had parked their "regular" shoes before changing into the heavy duty stuff, and no "office workers" are going to untie their sturdy shoes - all the same style - make neat bows with their shoelaces on some branch and then continue running uptown. And it was published that some guy "surfed the rubble" all the way to the bottom. Stuff like that.

Casualty count so much higher than I had surmised. The number of firefighters was particularly daunting because a few had died in famous fires over the past few years and the turnout for those few funerals were MASSIVE. I couldn't imagine how the profession would deal with upwards of 300 gone in one go.

Didn't give a fuck about anthrax and nobody I knew cared either, even though i work in the dead center of midtown near Rock Center. Nobody cared. Everybody knew it was some copycat idiot trying to drum up hysteria.

P.S. I finally went to work on September 13. The F train from Brooklyn is elevated when it crosses over the Gowanus. It was after morning rush hour so the car I was in wasn't packed, but it was absolutely quiet. As soon as we got up on the elevated track every single person in the left of my car got up to the right side windows to peer out at the smoking hole. Still not saying anything.

It was a blur since I was in second grade, All I remember was being in class and the intercom telling teachers to not turn on the tv's.

OP, R67, there is a TV series about an Middle eastern American comedian in Queens (?) and some episodes show scenes from his childhood and the after effects of 9/11. One of his classmates lost her mother and one scene shows a classroom where the girl is watching the coverage and says, “My mother works there.” It a fictionalized show, but IMHO it really captures the atmosphere and also give a little of the perspective of a Muslim family without over dramatizing it’s I think it’s exceptionally well done.

-R66

R69 I know, I just prefer real people’s accounts to stuff like that. Sorry if I sound uninformed or stupid.

I had hooked up the night before with a male model quality architect in Boston.

Also, remembering that there was even a contingency to shot down a commercial US plane by our Navy. A snippet from these interviews:

Col. Matthew Klimow: “It was a very painful discussion for all of us. We didn’t want the burden of shooting down the airliner to be on the shoulders of a single fighter pilot, but we also didn’t want to have that pilot go all the way up the chain of command to get permission to shoot. It was decided the pilots should do their best to try to wave the airplane off, and if it’s clear the airplane is headed into a heavily populated area, the authority to shoot can be given to a regional commander.”

OP, you should listen to the Howard Stern show recordings from that day. His show was live on the air from New York while the attacks happened and for hours afterward. It really captures the confusion, fear, anger, and chaos of the day. They can be found on YouTube.

Mark Allen's photos, pts. 1 and 2 (that night), were uploaded that afternoon and night as it happened. Gives a good feel for the day. Old-time website, keep scrolling.

I came up with 911 ways to squeeze fame out of 9-11.

For at least one year afterwards they re-played Howard’s 9/11 show on the anniversary. I also highly recommend it.

In the aftermath I commuted by car to an alternate location, so I listened to a lot of Howard Stern. He was very good. I remember it coming up that people had donated so much that the FDNY and NYPD widows were getting crazy amounts. Howard was all, “As they should! I want each one of them to have a yacht!”

I remember reading a comment by a psychologist that the actions of the people on the flight that went down in the field were so remarkable because there were many highjackings in the 70’s and it was accepted procedure to do what they said. So those people were exceptional. There was a song about Tod Beamer by an amateur called something like “She kissed a Hero.” It was probably awful, but every time it came on during my temporary commute I ended up crying hysterically.

A minor scandal was that the first responder widows got assigned reps to help them navigate through everything. This resulted in more than one affair where the rep left his wife to be with the newly rich widow. People are human.

R80 Do you remember there was a heroic guy who tried to thwart the hijacking on one of the planes, and he was gay. I think they did movie about the doomed flight, but the filmmakers didn't want it known he was gay. They were afraid he wouldn't look heroic or something.

If anyone knows this story can you elaborate?

[quote]For at least[bold] one year [/bold]afterwards they re-played Howard’s 9/11 show on the [bold]anniversary.[/bold]

So... once.

R81, His name was Mark Bingham and a documentary was made about his life.

Dear OP,

As a twink your job is to make your hole available to tops. Stop posting other threads immediately.

R84 Very helpful, thank you.

I lived in the West Village, two miles north of World Trade. The smell was in the air for weeks. Police wouldn't allow anyone below 14th Street without photo ID to prove you lived in the neighborhood. Gradually, the northern boundary was moved down to Houston Street, later Canal Street.

I was in first grade and remember my mom pulling me out of school. We lived in New Jersey so being relatively close it was pretty scary. My dad worked in ny at the time but he never ended making it into the city that day.

I also have a clear memory of a few days after having to bring in an emergency pack - blanket, sleeping bag, etc. to school in the event there was some massive attack and we would have to stay at the school

[quote] OP, you're going to be late for school, get off DL.

Maybe OP is accessing DL at school. Wouldn't that be something for a teacher to find him scrolling through Men Presenting and Big Cocks threads.

The first plane flew behind me and hit the tower I was standing under it. Little bits of glass landed on my head a few seconds after the giant boom. They were the size of grains of sand.

After the second plane hit, my office was evacuated and I walked all the way to 73rd street in a calm daze. It was impossible to make a phone call, either cell or land line. My boyfriend was frantic because he knew I’d just be getting to work at the time the first plane hit.

We spent the rest of the night with our neighbor. A friend who lived in Queens came over because he was stranded. I made panini and we just tried to process what had happened.

The next day we just hunkered down at home because we didn’t know of anything else would happen. We did make sure to see my boyfriend’s family because his mother was worried that something worse might happen and we might not see each other. We made a plan to meet at their place and drive out of the city if anything else happened. Lots of uncertainty. It was a few days before my company got us back to work. Interestingly, there had been a trial run at our disaster recovery location a month or so before the attacks... almost as if a global bank had received a warning to get ready.

I was 7 months in the womb, so I can’t even imagine what it must have felt like! Growing up in a post 9/11 world is very different from going through that cultural shift as adults. It must have felt so huge. I think the most heartbreaking thing I’ve heard about it are the voicemails people left to their loved ones. They all pretty much knew they were gonna die; some were calm and others were hysterical and helpless. And the poor people who came home to those messages, ugh.

I ran down to the Site and immedately started cleaning away Wreckage & rescuing people. FDNY marvelled at my strength and ajiliddy!!

Many, many people told me to give up. I finelly listened to them after I pulled many Survivors from the runes. Then I realised I had the tallest building in downtown Manhattin. I was very proud of myself!!!

I went inside my 68th story condo and watched Thousands of arabs celebrating in Jersey City.

SAD!!!

R91 You wouldn't have known where the fuck to run because it was an opaque white/gray out, you couldn't see 5' ahead of yourself. How tactless can you be?

R92 They’re clearly making a stale Trump joke.

The guy I knew who lost his father... I think the story goes, he called his wife and she didn't pick up the phone, was on her way out and was totally unaware of what was going on in NYC.

Once the realization dawned on her, she got back home to try and reach her husband. She couldn't get through. She called the children. The guy I knew was in L.A., so he was just waking up.

It was only later, that she discovered his goodbye message to her and the kids, on the answering machine. Heart breaking!!

R82, I think it was several years, but I’m only 100% certain it was done the first anniversary.

Another thing I remember was that it seemed like every single person in the greater NY area was just trying to do the right thing and was willing to help anyone else in any way they could. Everyone probably went back to being a dick right after, but not that day. People were holed up for a while. I went shopping that week and stores in the suburbs were not busy. It almost felt like I was doing something wrong by doing “normal” stuff. People who were traveling for work weren’t able to get home for a pretty long time - I think a week or so.

People had very hostile attitudes towards anyone vaguely middle eastern afterward. So not a fine moment in that respect. But it really did feel almost warlike. My father was a WWII vet and was on the ground in an infantry unit. He was ANGRY after 9/11. I was sad and scared, but he was mad. It affected him.

And in what was probably the first incident of media going viral, there were people from all over the country being filmed saying, “I’m so and so, and I’m a New Yorker.” It sounds stupid now. But it was nice.

R7 is a moron.

Not true, R7. I was in Ohio, and everyone I knew was horrified and grief-stricken. Were we in a panic something would happen in our state? No. But watching 3,000 people mass murdered on live television was a traumatic experience. I remember watching the first tower coming down and saying to the person I was with, "They all made it out - right? Right?" I was in utter denial. These were people who just showed up to work on a letter-perfect September day. I still think about them sometimes as I ride the elevator up to my office.

I have a daughter in VA and one in Brooklyn. I live in Western PA. My daughter in VA called me to tell me about he plane so we watched together and saw the 2nd plane hit. We hung up and 10 min. later the plane hit t the Pentagon. I called my daughter back immediately but the answering machines were on. She worked within a mile of the Pentagon.

Then I couldn't get a hold of my daughter in Brooklyn and it is the only time in my life that I felt my entire body just shut down. I couldn't reach either daughter. I just sat and waited. I didn't even think because I knew if I did I wouldn't be able to handle it. After 30 minutes I heard from my daughter in VA. They had immediately shut down the business and told them to leave and just drive west. She did but then wondered where the heck she was going to go so she turned around and went home.

My daughter's godfather worked in the Towers. He was late for work that day but had been in the towers in the 1st bombing in the 90's. My sister's best friend decided to get off the elevator to get coffee to take up to her office. As soon as the elevator door closed the plane hit and all the people in the elevator were incinerated.

I heard from my daughter in Brooklyn 3 hours after it happened. She had dropped her kids off at different day care centers and was in the subway when it happened. They stopped underground for 30 minutes which she thought was odd. When she got to her stop and went up the stairs she said there was not a single car moving. Everyone had stopped and gotten out of their cars and were looking up. She ran to the office to open up and turned the tv on to see what had happened. She turned it off and locked the office up and went to get her kids. She said there was so much smoke and she could hear planes overhead but didn't know if the next step she took would be her last because she couldn't see if the planes were ours or the enemies.

A man offered to take her to to pick up her first child but halfway there he said he had to let her out because his wife was scared and he had to turn around to go home. A woman asked her if she needed a ride and she was able to get her 1st child. Can't remember how she got the second one. Her husband was stuck in Manhattan and had to walk home. He made it home 8 hours later.

I worry about all of their health because Brooklyn was covered in soot for weeks from the destruction. My BIL was a NY detective and he went to ground zero. He now has Parkinson's disease.

My neighbor whose son lived in OH was in NY for a meeting and was on the floor that the 1st plane hit. I'm sure he died instantly. (we hope)

I had just finished a transaction a few days earlier on ebay with a man from Australia. He wrote and sent me the kindest poem. My son-in-law worked at a place that made huge photos for Dept. stores for advertising so he made huge photos and sent them to me of the firefighters raising the flag. I had just finished another transaction with a Fire Chief in TX and sent him one. He was going to frame it to hang in his firehouse.

9/11 affected EVERYONE no matter what anyone says. It may have affected them differently depending on whether they knew people involved, lived there, or were just horrified but it affected everyone. It changed everyone's life. I heard someone in another country say, If it can happen in America then it can happen anywhere.

It was terrifying, OP. I was at college in the Midwest, a lot us were from the NYC metro area. I was in a coffee shop and heard the first plane hit. We thought it was a crazy accident. By the time I got to campus, the second plane hit, and then we heard about the Pentagon and the one in Pennsylvania. I thought we were at war. We thought they're might be more, just crashing planes across the country. All flights were grounded right away.

The state of technology is crucial, the Internet was largely still shitty and slow, no video, just text/images. It wasn't the main way to get information just yet. I didn't have a cell phone, I didn't know anyone who did. Everyone tried to call their parents from their dorms. Absolutely no one could get through, all day. That was scary and felt hopeless. I remember emailing my mom, although even the school LAN network was slow and overloaded. They rolled out TVs everywhere, you couldn't escape it on campus. Classes were eventually cancelled but that first day I didn't know what to do and a bunch of us showed up to our history class anyway and watched the news with our professor, who talked about war and Vietnam, and how there hadn't been a war in the US for a long time and maybe this was it. Dark.

Kids with cars just started loading them full with people and driving back to NYC to see their families. I remember being at the student union, and car after car heading back, crammed with people. It felt like half the campus left in the first 24 hours.

The aftermath sucked, everyone had some kind of PTSD, I all of sudden didn't want to fly. My mom actually said a few months later when I was getting on a plane again, This is actually the safest time to fly, there are new safety measures and everyone is pissed, No one will let that happen again. And she was right. And that worked. But something was forever lost. I saw the flight attendant on that flight do the thing they always do now where they put up that barrier when the pilot goes to the bathroom and I remember thinking that was forever changed. In high school, I'd hang out with my friends on layovers in the airport and walk them to their gate and hug them goodbye. Flying feels like a military operation now.

A lot of people willing signed up our military afterwards. Also, in NYC and NJ, tons of areas were shut down or patrolled for a long time afterwards. I remember this nature preserve I liked to walk around in was by the water so they shut it down for a long time. It was the first time I saw military with guns in places like Penn Station too. Now you see it all the time. There was definitely a world before and a world after and it's kind of crazy to me that you've only known the world after.

R98 Wow. I knew about what Pre-TSA was like, but I didn’t know that they basically turned all of NY and NJ into a police state afterwards. That sounds terrifying. And I guess things that are crazy never really seem crazy if they’re all you’ve ever known. A person born into a world on fire would think that the world being on fire is normal.

I was 20 and I was completely naive and nonchalant when it happened. A coworker who was 50 was screaming “it’s terrorism!!! Terrorists!!” when the first plane hit. I thought, “Jesus, what a fucking drama queen,” and I assumed it was a radar malfunction or something like that. Then the second plane hit and in my head, that substantiated my theory.

And then the Pentagon happened and I lost my shit. I lived in northern Virginia outside of DC, and my dad worked for DoD. He went to the Pentagon a lot and he had mentioned recently that he was going to have a meeting there soon. I called my mom at home, except I didn’t because the phones were all dead. Absolute surreal panic ensued. He didn’t get home until late into the evening because traffic locked up and there was no way out.

And what followed was even more life changing to me: literally overnight, everyone in the area put U.S. flags on EVERYTHING. Like, everything. Within days, an Afghani kebab place my coworkers and I ate at had replaced their to-go containers with ones that had a U.S. flag on them with “I heart America.” I was unnerved and that made me realize how threatened anyone who isn’t white must feel. Within 2-3 weeks, an Afghani family rented the house across the street from my parents; they had lived in Jersey City and fled to Virginia because of death threats.

9/11 made me aware of terrorism, made me feel unsafe, and made me most terrified of reactionary patriotism.

I worked in a building that had an Anthrax scare shortly after 9/11, too. The world just turned upside down overnight.

R22 was it Emerson?

I once heard the great radio talk show host Lynn Samuels say "this country began to go downhill when JFK was shot."

I could never quite grasp it, because I wasn't alive then. I was 30 on 9/11. And I feel that day is a demarcation. Things went downhill fast. Something in the time/space continuum ripped that day. Once one unspeakably awful thing happened, it was only a matter of time. That people were so willing to bend over and take the Patriot Act was a harbinger of terrible things to come.

Fuck Osama bin Laden.

R101 But nice guess.

No it was Wheelock over on The Riverway. Now it's part of BU.

Funny thing is that by Wednesday morning we received a memo instructing us to not talk to the press because one of Bin Laden's nieces had graduated from us the previous May. That drove the "Doesn't concern us," attitude they had right up their pompous asses.

We were very close to the Isabella Gardener Museum and for the rest of the month they had free admission. Spent every lunch hour in the court yard that September .

[R100] . Yes I remember that, there were US flags EVERYWHERE. People you'd never think of being patriotic, just hanging one outside of their house or business. I feel like that lasted for years afterwards.

(Originally sent in an email to friends and family, 9/11/02)

Friends,

I think it would be nice to memorialize the events of September 11, by sharing our personal experiences. Here’s mine.

I was on the subway going to work. I live at 112th Street, and my office is on 22nd Street, so I only use one subway, the #1, going from the 110th Street Station to the 23rd Street Station.

On this particular day, the subway stopped at Times Square (42nd Street) and an announcement was made, no downtown service. As we left the car, I overheard someone say that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center, and it was an attack on our country. Some people laughed, and I laughed, because it was absurd.

I walked out of the station and started down Seventh Avenue. I had forgotten all about the World Trade Center. I was focussed on getting to work, which was a mile away at this point, and I knew I’d be pretty late. As I walked down the avenue, I noticed groups of people congregating around stores with televisions in the windows. But I was still oblivious to “news” or anything untoward happening in the city.

When I reached 22nd Street, I turned east (my building is between Sixth Avenue and Fifth Avenue). When I got to Sixth Avenue, I could see people looking south. So when I reached the corner, I looked south.

The World Trade Center appeared at the end of the avenue. Because it was so tall, you could almost see the entire expanse of the building, from the ground to the roof. And both buildings were on fire. It was an amazing sight, like nothing I’d ever known before. Immense, billowing smoke was pouring out in a southern stream.

Although I was mesmerized by the sight of the fire, I rushed to my office. When I got there, the president of my company was coming out the door, saying, “I’ve got to go home. It isn’t safe. The country is under attack. The WTC and the Pentagon have been hit.” I asked him if everyone had gone home, and he said they were all on the roof of the building. So I went to the roof.

Here was an even better view of the buildings, nearly unobstructed. About 2 minutes after I got up there, the first building (2 WTC) collapsed, pancaking down, creating havoc, debris, and untold dead. Everyone on the roof was speechless, though there was some sobbing, I don’t know from whom. I myself was stock still, shocked but fascinated, still finding it absurd and yet pregnant with ramifications for the future.

I stayed on the roof for another 45 minutes, watching the second tower fall. Then, with the others, I slowly walked down the stairs of the building to the street, and I walked home (about 6 miles away). There was no panic in the streets that I saw. Everyone was walking slowly home. Cell phones didn’t work, so people lined up outside payphones. I knew my chances for calling anyone were slim, so I waited until I got home to call my parents in Salt Lake. They had watched the entire event on the television, and my mother’s first words to me were, “now you know what Pearl Harbor was like.”

At the time, my niece’s husband, Chris Williams, was staying with me. He arrived home some hours later, and we were grateful to see each other. I spent the rest of the day, and the rest of the week, watching the news coverage like everyone else. We didn’t return to work until Friday.

Although I was a witness to these events, I wasn’t personally affected in any way (although my hometown, Summit, NJ, was hard-hit — it was featured on 60 Minutes, and one well-known casualty, Todd Rancke, was someone who had dated my little sister). There is probably some stress-related trauma which I’ve experienced as difficulty concentrating and other physiological symptoms, but for the most part, I am unharmed and unaltered by the experience. But it certainly was vivid, perhaps my most vivid memory of all.

It happened around 11 pm Sydney time, and we got the live feed from the States for about 12 hours. People here were phoning each other at midnight to turn on the TV. Many people watched in horror all night, and we're like a billion miles away. (Ahem, R7.) I'll never forget the panic of the period between when they realised planes were being hijacked to use as missiles, and when the authorities had got in contact with all the airborne flights and accounted for their safety. During that period, of course, the Pentagon was hit and Flight 93 crashed.

One memory that I don't think has been mentioned yet was all the falling paper. A4 sheets falling like snow from the blue sky, pretty much the whole time the towers stood.

Everyone made it about themselves, the American flags came out, and we then went full fascist. The end. 🇺🇸💩

Does anyone recall the Republican debate, when Jeb Bush was expected to be the easy winner and Trump was an entertaining and insane buffoon to everyone in the country, and at one point Jeb said something about Dubya’s leadership during 9/11, and Trump said something like, “You don’t want me to tell everyone what I know about what your family did in 9/11, Jeb! Don’t push me! I know what your family did! I was in New York! I know everybody!”—something like that, and Jeb totally withered? It was a really shocking moment to me but people seemed not to even register it.

It was like a racking up of tension from confusion, to bad, to worse, to OMG.

But then it was over. Except it was all we heard and thought about for about three years.

At home, in Brooklyn, sleeping on the couch when I heard the first plane hit. But I thought it was thunder, so paid it no mind. When the second plane hit, that one was much louder and woke me up. I was supposed to go to Queens that day and thinking that it was thunder was kind of upsetting because that means it was going to rain. Well low and behold, I finally take a peak out of the window and I see the two buildings with smoke coming out of both. I couldn't make out what I was seeing, even thinking for a moment if they were filming a movie. But then I realized what I was seeing and immediately thought it was a bombing. Turned on the television and I couldn't get any local stations (the city's strongest transmitter was at the top of WTC 1 and that got knocked out in the blast). I was able to get CNN and some radio (the ones that were still transmitting from the Empire State Building). That's when I found out it was two planes.

Very little concern in LA. After a day or two, it was back to getting discovered for most people.

Anyone else reading this thread and crying ? I know,MARY! but it still tears my heart out all these years later.

No, R111, it all makes me angry. Life was better before this day, and I don’t blame it all on foreign terrorists. How we dealt with the aftermath, the national militarized, fearmongering, rights-restricting, xenophobic and racist response from everyone was soul shattering to me. It really was. Do you remember how long they kept up the daily “terrorism threat” color coding thing to keep people in a reactive, paralyzed state of being? And does anyone even recall that the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to have been temporary and it became a federal overlord in no time flat?

I am, R111. I posted on the thread linked at R18- my first day on DL.

[quote]Well low and behold

No. "Lo and behold," r109. Lo.

I'm terrified of Drones and Arena events, now. It's just a matter of time. I've hated drones since day one. They are going to be used real soon, somewhere in this world.

I was a sophomore in high school in New England at the time. Not directly affected at all, other than the general trauma that the ensuing weeks and months caused me and a lot of young people. The thing I remember the most about the day and the next few was the round-the-clock coverage on literally every TV channel. Every station, from ABC to CBS to Nickelodeon to QVC had been preempted by whichever network was their parent company. Every channel. All they showed 24/7 was plane hitting building/building collapsing/office worker jumping from 97th floor window. That lasted for several weeks before this sense emerged that maybe it’s not in great taste to keep airing footage of all those Americans being murdered. For weeks after the attacks, every comedy and sitcom was forced into hiatus. Like even Friends was off the air for weeks at the peak of its popularity, and it wasn’t ever even funny to begin with. I think the news media and bleeding-heart celebrity telethon nonsense made the situation a lot worse, and it definitely whipped up the climate of animosity and xenophobia that enabled the neocons in DC to take our country to its darkest depths of warmongering and torture. That climate also gave the neocons a mandate to push through the PATRIOT Act less than a month after the attack, greatly curtailing freedom and civil rights for all Americans.

My newly retired father had worked there and I was so thankful that he was home with me and not still working. I still have nightmares that he's there when it happens and I'm running around looking for him.

I lived in a building in Brooklyn and it was easy to see that part of Manhattan from the roof. The thick cloud of black smoke made that impossible and hard to breathe so my neighbors and I left the roof and went back to turn on our TV. At that time we had both cable and the building's master antenna. I didn't realize that when the towers went down it took the TV signal to the master with it. It was only when I went to one of the bedroom TVs that I realized. Such and unimportant tiny thing but for some reason I freaked out over that.

I had the day off and had been watching NY1 when the first plane hit. Of course I thought it was just a plane accident. My dad said in the 1930s or so a plane had hit the Empire State Building. I remember thinking, "Shit, they'll be covering this all day on every channel. I had planned on catching up on a soap I watched. Then what, about a minute or two later, when the second plane hit I immediately knew it was deliberate. I was frozen in front of the TV.

It was a few minutes after when I went up to the roof.

When I was able to get online again an online friend from Boston contacted me to tell me her sister had been on a job interview at one of the towers. She didn't know which one. She asked if there was anyway I could get there. I told her no way. I felt horrible for her and her sister. Her sister was missing for a good couple of weeks and she and her family thought she had died but it turned out she had been badly injured and was unconscious. She had been separated from her belongings and the hospital had no idea who she was until she woke up.

I know one other person who's brother was one of the cops who was killed down there. We were not close. She was someone I knew very casually.

For me too the worst thing was the people who jumped. I can't begin to imagine what that last second of their lives was like to know either way they were going to face a horrible death. I hope they passed out on the way down, but I doubt it.

The ones I felt the most sorry for were the poor people killed/hurt at Ground Zero, like the bus boys and waiters and other minimum wage earners. No one was really lined up to help them or those they left behind like the companies were willing to help those left behind by the high earners, not to mention the millions most of those windows got. Many of them, especially wives of the police officers and firemen, live in Staten Island and I hear they are quite hated by the way they acted after they got the money, like going after other women's husbands and in general acting like they are royalty. Of course the husbands that took up with them are equally to blame for dumping their wives.

All of this said I really hate that they're still reading the names all these years later. They need to let it go. We don't keep reading the names of those who died at Pearl Harbor or of Northerners who died in the Civil War. I think 500,000 died in the Civil War. I mean come on.

In the few minutes after it, I recall thinking clearly that I should get myself to the recruiters office. After about 24 hours it became apparent that the story being told was a narrative and that nothing we learned about 9/11 was likely rooted in reality and I promptly got over that thought.

The small town of Gander, Newfoundland in Canada doubled its population that day when 38 jumbo jets enroute from Europe had to land there when US airspace was closed.

I remember thinking that they are definitely going to fly a jet into the white house. The White House was next.

In primary school, we had crates/barrels for each student packed with survival gear/food, and would have periodic “duck & cover” drills—the south wall of the classroom was glass, and we were in close proximity to an important USAF base . . . I still remember quite vividly, at age 10, that very, very dark Friday night of 22 November—only the flickering images from the TV and hushed conversation of my parents were indicators that something horrible, life-changing had happened . . . those photos of John-John saluting his father’s casket are forever etched into my consciousness.

On 11 September, I was on the 5/405 S/B transition to the 118 W/B, and turned on the radio—usually I had it on, but not that day. Again, I remember as if it were yesterday—the news bulletin on KNX, the hot, bright day even at 09:00, then arriving at work with a TV set up in the lobby, all transfixed by the events in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington. I was the newest member in the office, doing upscale cruises & tours; with the ground stop our entire business was chaos; we assisted the air people making changes, and did our best to get our people home from all over the globe. Nothing was the same after that—a lot of us lost huge chunks of business—it took years to recover. The overwhelming feeling of anger, helplessness, and finally resignation is difficult to describe to one who wasn’t affected, especially those closest to the actual scenes. Because I had family/friends, and had gone to school in Washington, I was devastated emotionally—I still remember the taste of the lamb with mint sauce we enjoyed at Windows on the World . . .

For those of us who grew up at a certain time, 11 September is another of those watershed moments in history that mark another “before and after” period—I still pray for all the souls lost that day . . .

I'd really rather not, but OK. I was living there at the time, and felt dissociated from reality. A friend's mum saw the second plane hit from the promenade in Brooklyn Hts. I moved away shortly thereafter, and am still disturbed by it. Not only the panic, but the shock, the smell, and the paranoia that set in afterward. I don't think it's possible for me to ever feel the same about living in the US. Fleeing the city, I was in a car with friends, and we were one of the last groups allowed to leave through Holland Tunnel on our way to NJ. My business was closed over a week, and I grew increasingly more paranoid when news reports spoke of terrorist cells in NJ. No one could get a plane, or find a rental car. It seemed like an apocalypse film really.

It was the beginning of our turn to Fascism. The Patriot Act, Islamophobia, Guantanamo, the Iraq War and the lies they sold it on, Abu Ghraib... all just a prelude to Trump and what we have now.

It was a day of mass torture.

R70 I also remember that it seemed to take an unconscionable amount of time for anyone from the federal government to respond that day. And as much as I loathed GW Bush, I hoped he would say something reassuring, but instead he looked scared when he first spoke after the attack and called the terrorists “these folks.” Then he flew around the country for hours.

[quote]The thing I remember the most about the day and the next few was the round-the-clock coverage on literally every TV channel. Every station, from ABC to CBS to Nickelodeon to QVC had been preempted by whichever network was their parent company. Every channel. All they showed 24/7 was plane hitting building/building collapsing/office worker jumping from 97th floor window.

I was in junior high and that is what I remember most about 9/11 as well. Never since has something like this happened; there was no escaping the images. The months after were very nervous, with anthrax terrorism, that terrible plane crash in Queens in November 2001, and the war on terror. I will always remember Oprah Winfrey doing a show about activities families could do over the holidays if they cancelled their air travel plans. It was such a weird and dark period.

My parents were finally able to move us out of a bad neighborhood the following year, home interest rates were at historic lows post 9/11. Most people don't realize what a huge ripple effect 9/11 had.

The next day was even worse. People everywhere were just in a daze. Nobody knew what to say or do.

My brother got married 3 days before on September 8th. It was a wonderful day that I remember clearly and having a great time. That’s my last memory before 9/11. The world went to shit after that. We’ll never go back to how things used to be.

Surreal. I was 18 when it happened so my entire adult life has been post 9/11. It made travelling so much more strict. I remember a time when you could drive over the border without a passport.

The entire aviation industry had to be restructured. Multiple airlines went bankrupt.

OP,

I’m sorry for those who don’t remember a pre-9/11 world. Not in a condescending way, but I agree with other posters who have stated that America, and indeed the world, was very different after that and will never be the same again.

I also wasn’t personally impacted (in that I knew no one who was), but I disagree with anyone who has stated that the rest of the country was essentially ambivalent. I won’t belabor that as other posters have already addressed it. Suffice it to say that I saw (much) of the live coverage from the 2nd plane on, remember the sight of the jumpers - and the sounds, the 24/7 news coverage on every channel for days.... I remember “freedom fries”, and that we were all encouraged to buy houses and new cars (and how that panned out 7 years later). Later, I became neighbors with someone who lost their significant other that day....they moved here a few years later because they just couldn’t stay in NYC anymore.

For me, I worked in a hospital in a “flyover state” that had received many injured/casualties in a domestic terrorism act less than a decade before (Oklahoma City). I was in my mid-twenties and listening to the radio while I got ready for work and that’s how I heard of the first plane. I remember thinking, in a typically cynical GenX way: somebody is getting sued. Of course I didn’t realize the scale of this plane hit....was thinking more along the lines of the Empire State Building incident also previously referenced here.

As I drove to work I continued listening and clearly as the coverage expanded picked up that this was more. I parked, clocked in, and just as I was crossing a lobby stopped to watch the TV there.....within moments I saw the devastation.....and then watched live when the 2nd plane hit. Right then I knew this was no accident.

And my pre-9/11 innocence was lost.

I'm Canadian and even we were never the same.

I'm crying (and fapping) as I type. Hot!

I live in Texas. The only thing that sort of upset me about 9/11 was losing some hot firemen.

I was in Western Pennsylvania, and as it was happening...we were hearing reports about another hijacked plane that was headed our way. It was really terrifying. Nobody knew what was happening, and who was next.

Weird shit like this happened and people thought it was okay.

[quote]Unless you were in NYC or DC no one cared.

Bullshit.

I was in college, the middle of nowhere, and the entire damn campus lost its damn mind. Not in a screaming, hooting and hollering kind of way but a quiet silence. I will never forget it.

I just remember seeing students paused all over campus as I walked from class, talking on their cell phones or dialing numbers. No laughter. People weren't moving, except for me cause they knew and it happened while I was in class. So my oblivious ass just kept walking.

I walked back to my townhouse, saw my roommates and asked them what happened and they told me. I immediately went to try and call my family. I called my mom and couldn't get through. I called a different close fam member and got through. She was running from the Pentagon where she worked to grab her kids who were in school before they closed it up and told me she loved me.

I turned on the news and loaded up Datalounge where one of my posts still sits in the original 9/11 thread from 2001.

I live in Charleston SC. Two co workers ran into the office breathless,informing the rest of us that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. I replied with the inquiry, "Terrorists?" Someone brought into our lobby a tiny tv to watch the news. The Internet was down, overwhelmed, so we crowded around the screen. We watched the second plane. No one got any work done. I was already scheduled to leave the office at noon to pick up my daughter, for her school was to dismiss early that day. As we drove home, she - a ten year old - told me that her teacher's cell phone rang just as class was starting. After the teacher ended the call, she ran to turn on the classroom's tv. My daughter also saw the 2nd plane. Later that day, I took my daughter to her eye appointment. We were met by torrential rain. The street was flooding, it was ankle deep. We greeted the receptionist to sign in, who commented on the downpour. " God is crying," she said.

R12, you either have zero friends, or you’re full of shit.

As soon as the first plane hit, my phone rang. My boss was calling me from Paris, and asked me to turn on the TV. By the time the second plane hit, the world gasped collectively, in real time, and that was a wrap. Within minutes, the world and America, as we knew it, changed forever.

It was the most significant event that had ever happened on American soil, other than perhaps the filmed and live assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the alleged rocket launch headed towards the moon in the 1960s, before the full and stable deployment of internet and satellite.

Only a dead man, or an uncaring and self absorbed idiot living in the United States on 9/11 thinks that over 3,000 people being murdered on national TV in Manhattan, NY, wasn’t a big deal.

It was a HUGE deal, and there hasn’t been a bigger deal since - thankfully.

R54, I posted about the book on another recent 9/11 related thread. I’ve already read the book and the author who was 19 or 20 himself when it happened, addresses those people who were young when 9/11 happened and how they are now trying to understand the world as it is today. It an excellent, powerful read.

R12 is a fucking moron. He’s either dense or in a self-centered cocoon.

The sky was indeed so blue that day. It was crystal clear in New York. Everyone I know says the same thing.

It really was a beautiful blue cloudless sky that day. I am oblivious to many things to a fault, and even I noticed the sky as I left for work in NYC that morning.

Want to see how blue it was that day?

https://youtu.be/ieIFtjnBfJU

Ignore the rest/politics/etc.....but it was a beautiful day across the country.

Meanwhile, in the rural Midwest: Once a month I used to edit a right-wing newsletter this nutball published from the back room of his farmhouse. (He paid OK, so why not? The downside: trying to read to the dulcet tones of Rush Limbaugh.) He'd phoned to let me know he'd finished his latest opus, so the next morning after my parents left for the airport -- they were headed off to be touristy in Florida -- I drove out to his place.

I flipped on the radio. A man and a woman on the country station in the next county were going on about airplanes and buildings and explosions and Jesus and whatnot -- but in this excited, chipper way. I honestly assumed it must be some sort of early Halloween, "War of the Worlds" prank. Or maybe more Rapture Ready garbage. Whatever. None of it made any sense to me, so I turned it off.

When I got to the dude's place and let myself in, he was sitting there staring like a zombie at this TV he had bolted up on a high shelf, which as usual was playing that all-day cable NBC channel. I didn't think anything of it and started booting up the second desktop, when he said, "It hit one of the towers. A plane." I had to sort out what the hell he was talking about.

The car radio hadn't been a joke.

We both just stared at the TV for a bit. It was playing endless footage of babbling and wild speculation and burning building. Then he said, "I've got to make a call," was reaching for the phone, when boom. We both yelled at the same time. "Shit! That was a plane! Was that a plane? Was it? What the fuck!" And clearly that hadn't been an accident -- that was intentional.

Eventually, among the endless TV loops, I remembered that I still needed to finish what I'd driven out there for; I took my printouts to the back porch to get away from the TV. Oddly, there was no traffic at all down on the road. So it was just sun and puffy clouds and cornfields and birds. It was a lovely day. A dragonfly landed on my shoe. Maybe a half-hour later a couple of military jets went rumbling over. And I remember watching them and thinking, "I wonder if this is how the world ends."

I knew there was no way my parents were on a plane -- it took a couple of hours to even get to the airport. But I had no way to find out for sure; nobody had cell phones at the time. As it turned out, they did drive all the way to the airport before being turned back.

My TV antenna never picked up much, and my dial-up was too slow and expensive to waste on anything but work, so I missed out on most of the news after that. (So when someone made a duct tape and plastic joke on a listserv later, I had no clue what it meant until I mentioned it to my mom.) As for newsletter guy, he viewed 9/11 as confirmation of all his craziest conspiracy dreams; and when my "token liberal" ass had had enough of his and Rush's anti-Islam rants, we parted ways.

At the time, I had just sent two large invoices to an NYC publisher, who as it turned out was located near the towers. I waited for months -- to the point where I was broke and desperate -- before I tried an email about their no-show checks. I'm positive they thought I was being an insensitive asshole; they never hired me again.

I was working at a gay dual diagnosis treatment center in LA and the clients thought LA was next. So much drama!

I was off work that day, about to head out to the primaries to vote for Green. I was watching the Today show eating waffles when breaking news showe the first building smoldering after the first plane hit. Then just moments later, LIVE ON TV, another plane was flying curiously close to the second tower and dammit, it hit it with deliberate perfect aim! I screamed, 'They did it on purpose, we're at war'.

I was utterly confused and scared.My roommate woke up because I was screaming. I tried to call family in Michigan, but all circuits was busy. I never heard that kind of message before so I knew things were completely fucked. I watched the news all day, and when both buildings collapsed, the smoke slowly came up to my section of Washington Heights.

Finally spoke to family a few hours later, they were relieved to hear from me. I was told that brother and sister's jobs let them out early because they had me, family in NYC. Schools in Detroit were let out.

I had a panic attack in the middle of the night that first evening because there was a strike of thunder that seemed to invade my room. just a historcially dreadful day.

https://youtu.be/D60QnpI_xH4

I have an odd memory of the members of Congress gathering on the Capitol steps to sing "God Bless America" later in the day on 9/11, but I know I didn't see it live on TV. Did it actually happen, and does anyone have a link to it?

While this has been incredibly informative, I partly regret starting this thread. God, this is depressing. My heart hurts.

For R149

I need something upbeat after reading through this. Holy fuck. I’m so sorry to everyone here that lost somebody. Wow. I can’t even to begin to imagine the horror it must have been to watch it all go down in real time. Fuck.

I really need a hug after reading this. Fuck.

I was in Australia. For a couple of days afterwards, people were nicer and were more softly spoken.

There was a lot of optimism leading up to that time (check out Y2K Aesthetics, it theories that it was a hopeful time, with a keenness to embrace the future, more 'playful') - and then things seemed to get really serious really fast, but then there was a reaction to that seriousness as well, and people get a bit more 'silly'.

R12 Is as cold as Susan Dey.

4 days until the NYC " Maryfest."

There is a theory, that the focus of the world's attention on 9/11, and the sheer shock / global trauma, did something 'metaphysical' to reality, that it threw reality of its balance, perhaps creating a new reality or timeline (some stayed on the old timeline, some moved to the new timeline).

TV eventually stopped showing the buildings coming down, because young children thought the attacks were ongoing. Plus ratings, probably.

It was shocking and terrible for everyone.

This man from my home town had a wife and child on one of the Boston planes that hit the World Trade Center. His nanny and another child couldn’t get on that flight, so they found another - it was the other plane that hit tower 2. How awful is that?

He eventually remarried, and has since died.

Thank you, R151.

We had such goodwill after 9-11, and Bush squandered it all.

What I was amazed with was how the Midwest, Chicago in particular, seemed to think “they were next”. No terrorist is going to do anything in the Midwest.

Unless you were in New York at the time, it really didn’t matter anywhere else. Other than DC of course.

I went to Prague the next June. They were convinced they were next, since Radio Free Afghanistan broadcast from there, is what I heard.

[R153] Big hugs, OP. As I'm sure you know, some things are always better and some worse, as time goes on. When people say the world was different afterwards, it's true. But I can't imagine being 20 now in a good way, gay marriage is legal, you've seen gay people on TV your whole life, there's PREP + the AIDS cocktail has been around your whole life -- I mean there are so many things I could have never imagined just 20 years ago. Also, just medical breakthroughs all over, things you used to die of that are 100% curable now. It's not all gloom and doom at all.

R162 You’re an ignorant turd. Did too many people block you? Is that why you’re back as someone else? Go wipe the jizz off the picture of your Mother.

Well hon you just sound really angry.

R162 is insufferable

OP, Osama bin Laden’ relatives flew out of Cambridge/Boston in the days after 9-11 on one of the few flights allowed. I don’t blame the White House for allowing this. The relatives were probably not aware of the attack and were innocent of any involvement, but their lives were at risk while they stayed here.

But it was a bit of a scandal.

R146 - I wish LA had been “next.”

It's so strange, though. I distinctly remember watching the TV coverage and wondering how they were going to be getting the people out -- I never doubted that they'd manage it somehow. Then the second plane hit, that arc and sudden motion is a vivid memory. After that, I draw a complete blank on the TV coverage that day. I know I was still watching when the buildings came down, but there's absolutely no memory of it. Just other ordinary stuff I did later that day.

I remember watching Dan Rather (a hardcore old-school newscaster) on Letterman sometime after 9/11. He lost his shit and started weeping. There are just so many odd things we witnessed. Things you never could have even imagined happening actually happened. It broke us, it made us stronger. I think 9/11 left a scar on our country’s psyche, but what we thought was just a scar was actually a wound that was festering and infected. It created Trump. And you’ll only “get it” if you lived in the before/after.

OP, don’t be depressed, though I can only imagine what it feels like for you. I am an optimistic pragmatist. I have to believe we will destroy Trump and fascism. And while America isn’t the same, we have a chance to rebuild into something even better. I couldn’t go on living if every molecule in my body believed that we are fucked. I bet America felt like this after the Civil War, WW2, JFK too. Life has a way of moving forward, always.

R13 and others who were near the Towers when it happened, thanks for sharing your stories. I was at work in the Chrysler Building, which was evacuated around 9:45 (right after the Empire State, which they thought might be next). I headed to an ATM and took a large amount of cash, afraid everything would be shut down for days. I was heading for the river to catch a ferry to get out of Manhattan in case it all shut down, but I first stopped at an elderly friend's to make sure they would be okay for several days, if necessary. I stayed there long enough to hear there were around 12 planes unaccounted for, then the count kept decreasing, and finally went to 0, so I knew the plane attacks were over.

I soon realized I'd rather be at home in case there was looting, so I had to walk home, south of Houston (but just north enough that I was never evacuated). I passed St. Vincent's, where there were lots of doctors and nurses standing by outside with gurneys, looking down 7th Ave., waiting for injured people to be brought there, but unfortunately by that time (in the afternoon) there wouldn't be any or at least not many. Luckily a Korean grocery store was open and I bought lots of water, in case it was shut off or contaminated (which never happened, thank goodness).

I had tiny burn marks all over my bare skin and shirt plus my nose was bleeding from inhaling all of the horrible air that was carrying burning bits in it. I had to wear a mask outside the next few days because the air down there was so bad and I couldn't turn my A/C on because the smell would get inside my apartment. And yes, I do have some respiratory issues now, but nothing too serious yet.

There were sirens non-stop up until about 10:30 or 11 p.m. on 9/11, then all went deadly silent. Nothing will rid my brain of the memory of walking out the next morning to 6th Ave and seeing no traffic and no people around. It was so quiet. I could see the families and friends of the firefighters standing outside the local firehouse, looking south at the smoke while they waited to see if their loved ones returned. It was freaky to see the barricades and for several days I had to show ID to get in and out of the area. An asshole friend of mine was dying to come downtown and look around and asked if I would give him an extra ID of mine..... I told him where to stick it.

R115, every time I think I'm over all of it and put it in my past, then I find myself sitting at one of the men's quarterfinals last Wednesday thinking about how easy it would be to send a drone into Ashe Stadium. I freaked out then tried to shut down the thought. So I'm not over it obviously.

[quote]It's so strange, though. I distinctly remember watching the TV coverage and wondering how they were going to be getting the people out -- I never doubted that they'd manage it somehow.

My friend's sister was going to lunch around that time. (I only knew her as kids do their friend's older siblings.) I remember my friend's email updates every few hours for days because she couldn't find her sister. She knew she worked nearby. She knew she would normally have been going to lunch at that time. They never found her.

I also had a really grim but very unique experience some time after 9/11 when I had graduated from college and moved to NYC. I have only spoken about it twice over the past few years. It's something I usually keep to myself because it was dark.

I landed a job where part of what I was supposed to do was go through emails from the servers of a company that had an office in one of the buildings. (Yes, I know that's vague but I signed documents to NOT talk about it although the purpose of what we were doing had nothing to do with it.) It really broke my heart. I hope all of those people who were emailing back and forth, wondering what the hell was going on, thinking they should stay where they were, made it out. I know that's probably not likely.

I always wonder why they gave those to me to look at but I guess it was because I always came off as a frosty bitch back then. Oh, no. Reading them upset me deeply.

https://youtu.be/F8V9DEEx_cA

New Yorkers say they are tired of talking about it. You can tell from the DL posts.

It's all been downhill since then.

It's been garbage. America before 9/11 was a thing of promise and hope. Since then, well, never let a good crisis go to waste, right? Now we're in a dystopian nightmare of authoritarian surveillance.

It’s been downhill for the USA since the 2000 “election.” 9-11 was the nail in the coffin.

Watching the CNNfootage @ R148 really brought it all back succinctly.

I eventually ended up going into work that day, because sitting in front of the TV was consuming me with an anxiety that I had never felt before. Of course, once there, all my coworkers who were also there, did nothing but sit in their offices, various conference rooms, & cafeterias, glued to the news.

There were hundreds of New Yorkers who only survived 9/11 due to small, seemingly insignificant changes to their usual & customary morning routines. My brother was one of them. He & his GF at the time, had recently broken up. Unbeknownst to my family & I, they had been seeing each other again, & he had spent the night prior to that Tuesday morning at her apt. They were both spared because they were running late. Their coworkers who had been there on time did not make it. They, along with a handful of others whom they worked with only survived because they had that day off, were scheduled for meetings off site, had called in sick, or were running late. Fortunately, we finally communicated, but for a little less than a day and a half, our family had no idea as to his fate. That was brutal.

During the immediate aftermath of the following weeks, I had unknowingly developed stomach ulcers, & for the next 2 years, I woke up every day, with heavy nausea, sometimes vomiting, unable to digest food properly. My day to day became a living hell, trapped in a body that would not let me eat. I looked like I had anorexia. Thankfully, I eventually healed, but my digestive system has never been the same since.

I only share that story, to point out that the events of that day changed the lives of millions of people in ways that were not perceptible to us.

Many here remember Peter Jennings, OP. He was a journalist & a highly respected news anchor at ABC, and he worked as the top anchor for the network, as the unbelievable events unfolded. What millions of Americans did not know, is that Peter had an adult child who he couldn’t reach that morning, & he had reason to be justifiably concerned. For hours, he sat at his anchor desk, doing his job, with no idea if his kid was OK.

Peter had been a smoker. He had not smoked for many years. He was so consumed with panic & complete powerlessness, that he had a cigarette. That cigarette turned into 2,3, etc., & within days, he was once again, a heavy smoker. Several years later, Peter died of lung cancer while at home, surrounded by his family, including the daughter that he couldn’t reach for hours on end on 9/11.

Peter his humanity, duty, professional integrity & work ethic that he displayed that day were something that we rarely see today. He was one of the good guys, one of the ones who understood the importance & gravitas of true journalism, and not the dreck & schlock we are exposed to currently, or the highly edited, curated bullshit millions of Americans who ALSO sincerely & genuinely love their country, are unwittingly exposed to via FOX News on a daily basis. It is an aberration and anathema to what real journalism is. Peter was the reason that I quit smoking, btw.

9/11 changed all of our lives in intricate, personal, meaningful ways that may not be obvious to the naked eye, including your life as well, OP.

I don't remember it, since I was golfing. What happened? I don't have time to read your response, because I'm preparing for a meeting with the Taliban on 9/11 ( just a few days from now). I'm sure they'll join me in a public memorial service and reception at one of my hotels.

My husband of 13 years had died a few weeks before and, as a 39 year old widow, I was taking a few months off from work. I was staying in Seattle at my brother's house, sleeping in when my sister-in-law yelled up the stairs that I had to get up and see the news. I got to the TV a few minutes before the South Tower collapsed. To this day, my feelings about 9-11 are mixed in with my grieving for my husband. I eventually found another man and we were together for fifteen years until he died last year so all of the grief stuff is back again.

I was in NYC about two weeks later. What I remember: The smell. New Yorkers actually being thoughtful and kind to other people for the first time. The missing posters in the subway. No one I knew was killed, but a number of friends and relatives of friends were.

LOL, R180.

It’s obvious he wants out, & is begging to be voted out of office. Not that he’s not nutty enough or perhaps in the advancing stages of the dementia he possibly inherited from his father, in order to say crazy shit like that, so who knows!?!?

Jesus, do most of us here realize that it would have been highly unlikely to have Donald Trump as our POTUS, if not for 9/11?

As soon as those towers crumbled, we were thrown to the wolves, the wolves who had bigger plans, and weren’t settling for two decimated skyscrapers , 3K plus dead Americans, an illegitimate war and the eventual economic crisis that brought the world to the brink of collapse.

Who cares about Chicago, [italic] The Murder Capital Of The World

R157, I believe this country never fully recovered from JFK's assassination in 1963.

R159, There was a young man from my hometown near Boston who was flying to CA on Flight 11 to help his recently divorced mother move to her new home.

The town erected a stone memorial for him on the downtown common and I think of him each time I drive by it.

Most everyone was amazing and incredibly supportive of each other on that day. But that's not the entire story.

I was on lower Broadway next to the plaza when the second plane came in and everyone began to run down Wall Street. Charred pieces of smoking metal everywhere.

Apparently I wasn't running fast enough and a guy pushed me into a building, told me "get out of my way, asshole."

Interesting, I knew Peter Jennings started smoking again on 9/11 but I didn't know his daughter was missing . That explains his terrible anchoring that day He was the worst of all of them. He simply refused to believe that the south tower was gone and attempted to correct the witness he was talking to.

I admire his work and career but he was terrible that day.

Another West Coastie here. I had to get up around 6, heard the first sketchy reports on the radio, part of news at the top of the hour. Apparently like a lot of people, I thought some bonehead tried to do something like fly a little Cessna between the two towers. It was crazy enough, though, that I immediately turned on the TV, watched it for at least the next 12 hours. It didn't seem real, imaginable.

By the way, Hunter Thompson was well past his prime by that point, but a few days later he wrote a tremendous, scary, ultimately accurate column about all the ugliness to come, in the USA and by the government. It was like he had come back from 9/11/2002 to let us know what was going to happen.

I woke up earlier than usual that day. I had some time, so I read some of the book I was reading. I kid you not, Denial of Death.

It was Los Angeles, and a little after 7 I got a call from my friend Kristi- she explained everything she knew. The enormity of what was happening and historical weight was crushing. I turned on the TV to see the WTC on fire. I shut it off immediately. "I don't need to see that."

I went to my roommate's restaurant. Being from CA his while life (I grew up in NJ, basically in the shadow of the Towers) I don't think he'd really understood what was happening, until he looked at me. "Oh my God, what's wrong?" And I just started sobbing.

I got in the car and decided to go to work. I'll never forget- I'm sure I was looking distraught, listening to Howard Stern live following events unfold. I remember an older African-American gentleman catching my eye in another car. He could instantly tell he too was from the tri-state area. He looked me in the eye and with sympathy, and incredulity shook his head as if to say "can you fucking BELIEVE this?" With tears on my eyes I slightly shook my head "no, I can't"

I went to work that day and had to deal with making sure all invited guests knew that the Everybody Loves Raymond syndication launch party was cancelled for that evening.

I was sent home at 1pm. I was living in Miracle Mile at the time, and my roommate suggested we go to LACMA. Which we did. It helped.

There was a hit song at the time. "Stuck in a Moment" and really, that's what things felt like until Christmas. A terrible, sad time in America.

r186 Gimme a break. Get over it. The guy was terrified, rightfully so. Forgive him.

As soon as those buildings came down, all New Yorkers were changed. A number of people commented on how different the people of NYC were in the weeks and months after 9/11. People were kind and courteous. Crime ceased for a time. Everyone felt safe around each other, instead of on guard.

R190, fuck you, you filthy little cunt

R189, interestingly enough, AND coincidentally, I used to date ELR’s Exec. Producer, Stu. We stopped seeing each other a few months before 9/11.

We eventually reconnected, but it just wasn’t a love connection for us. Otherwise, he’s a fantastic guy, & we had lots of fun.

And, no. I’m not a man, lol.

Maybe Jennings didn't want to believe it because of his daughter.

I was just reading about this woman from Spain who pretended she was rescued from one of the towers and became the president of one of the help the family's of the victims groups or something like that and took Rudy and Bloomberg on tours of the site and all. Turns out she was still in Spain on 9/11/01 and had never been in NYC until 2003. The NYT ended up exposing her fraud in 2007. This was the first I'd heard about her. Anyone else who never heard of this woman?

r186. You're pathetic.

Thousands of people died that day and you can't get over someone pushing you out of the way and calling you an asshole? Nice attempt at trying to make 9/11 all about YOU, you fucking narcissist!

You're disgusting.

Why not link the story, R193?

A brief excerpt from CNN's report on Palestinians celebrating in the Middle East.

Said one Palestinian child who received a treat in celebration of the attack: "This is a sweet from Osama bin Laden"

[quote] What I was amazed with was how the Midwest, Chicago in particular, seemed to think “they were next”. No terrorist is going to do anything in the Midwest.

Everyone assumed they were targeting skyscrapers and Chicago has many. Here in LA residents were warned not to go downtown on that day.

I love in L.A. but have family and friends in NYC. I was frantic trying to account for everyone and it took a few d As to confirm that everyone I knew was safe. Thereafter I tried to block out the horror of what happened -- all of the death and the manner of it was just too horrifying. I am sensitive and cannot cope with something of that magnitude. I avoided all images of people jumping from the towers.

The one image that stuck with me was the photo of Marcy Borders escaping the site covered in ash. It was so visceral and wrong that she should be shrouded in all of that horror. Then years later in 2015 she died of cancer and her post-9/11 years were turbulent and she was very obviously, cruelly traumatized by the event. Reading her obituary in 2015 I started to cry as all of the emotion I had locked away about 9/11 just burst forth.

R194, this thread shouldn’t be angry.

I took that poster's story as just describing what happened to him. He didn’t express anger at the person shoving him, he just described what happened to him/her. Isn’t that what this thread is for?

R198, I had no idea she died. That is heartbreaking. I would love to know if all the victims who “survived” are still alive. What percentage had/have cancer? I know that Detective who John Stewart defended a few months ago testifying to Congress to renew the funds to help victims died two weeks later (no idea how he managed to travel in his condition).

Thank you to all who shared. OP are you still with us? Tell us what prompted you to start this thread.

I lived in Chicago on 9/11 and the posters up thread who said Chicago shrugged it off are out of their minds. Beyond the absolute horror and grief we felt for the cities impacted, we were warned the Chicago was next on the list. Most of downtown was evacuated that day and more Chicagoans gave blood that week than any other city, other than NYC. As awful as it was, I remember feeling such an enormous feeling of kinship and community.

It was truly a terrifying time. Watching the news around the clock. Everyone waiting for the next attack.

It’s true about Chicago, we were terrorized too BUT, none of us understood terrorism at the time. Obviously, I would no longer fear a major attack here. Having said that, look at what happened in the Boston Marathon — they can theoretically pop up anywhere, and obviously, their goal is to cause this type of fear. Our country has done an amazing job of preventing attacks.

The most likely targets will always be DC, NYC, LA, then maybe Chicago though I don’t think it is even on a list. But those three cities have done an outstanding job of protecting their citizens.

R199 I’ve grown up in a post 9/11 world. A significant chunk of my childhood was the war(s) in the Middle East. I never experienced 9/11, but my entire life and my world as I know it has been lived in the shadow of 9/11. I was just curious to hear some stories of what experiencing it was like, to understand what it was like. I’ve never known anything before the towers falling, so I wanted to understand exactly what the world was like before and how 9/11 changed my country.

And how does it leave you feeling hearing all these stories? I’ve read several books on it. You should read this OP, though they’re making it into a movie which could never match the book, it’s an incredible read. It used to be called Horse Soldiers. Many people died trying to get to Bin Laden in the immediate aftermath too.

Thank you all for sharing, I’m grateful we have a place for your stories here.

R202, here’s some perspective: our country and our world change constantly, and now, VERY quickly. So first, understand that things and people will constantly change, which is normal. Secondly, in order to understand how something has changed before you were born, or even now, ideally and optimally, you should be well and accurately informed as to what “it” was, and how it evolved, and most importantly why it changed. Getting on YouTube and even DataLounge, may, or very likely may not give you a complete picture.

So how do we understand who we are as a nation, how we have changed, and why? By studying history. Real, factual, objectively presented history, not alternative history, or revisionist history. If you’re still in school, take classes, and if you’re not, take classes at home. Apps like Coursera, offer you that, as well as resources that are relatively cheap, and/or free. Go to your local library and crack open some good old fashioned books, or read them on your device. Just learn.

9/11, and the events which followed after, are best understood when one has accurate knowledge and context of the past. Without that context, you will not understand how your country changed, because first you must understand what it was previously to a significant event that changed it.

"Nobody really cared about 9/11 outside of NY and DC" is one hell of a brain-damaged take.

I mean, how on earth are you allowed on the internet without protective headgear??

The analogy that makes sense to me is to think of 9/11 as a kind of national mugging. Terrorists got really lucky and used the tools of our open society to seriously hurt us. We're living with the reactions to that trauma to this day.

In simple practical terms, lower Manhattan stank like burning plastic for four months.

R205, I love you as a DLer, which is why I’m going to tell you that you do not need to write “I mean”, before a sentence, in which you express exactly what it is that you mean.

It’s OK and preferable to write, “How on earth are you allowed on the internet without protective headgear?” No need to be redundant, since it is already understood that what you wrote, is what you mean.

The reality was that everyone felt targeted, regardless of where they lived. It was clear that Americans had been attacked for being Americans.

Middle America still latches onto 9/11 with far more dramatics than the actual cities that were attacked. They hate New York and DC, except when there is something else to hate more.

I was sitting in my office at a Big Pharma company, having started the job three months prior, and thinking, "Wow. I guess we're at war with someone."

The reality is that the families of the victims made MILLIONS!!! Not such a bad deal if you think about it. Sure the initial grief would hurt, but the cash would ease my pain fairly quickly!

That’s so gross r210. It’s easy to say now that we are almost two decades out. It was unprecedented.

R208, as a Chicagoan, you are slightly off. I think lesser cities just feel left out. Kind of like a kid sister tugging at your sleeve, “Joey, can I play? Can I play too?” It annoys me too, they need to have some fucking dignity. If you feel left out, go live there. Otherwise, be proud of wherever you reside, and be grateful your city isn’t a target.

That’s so gross r210. It’s easy to say now that we are almost two decades out. It was unprecedented.

R208, as a Chicagoan, you are slightly off. I think lesser cities just feel left out. Kind of like a kid sister tugging at your sleeve, “Joey, can I play? Can I play too?” It annoys me too, they need to have some fucking dignity. If you feel left out, go live there. Otherwise, be proud of wherever you reside, and be grateful your city isn’t a target.

Actually, I think it’s a fairly human way to react to the incomprehensible. I grew up in the Midwest, and people came up with all sorts of reasons their tiny city was a target for the Russians’ nuclear weapons.

The most amusing memory I have of this phenomena was friends in Philadelphia. On 9/11, people there were sure that the Liberty Bell was Al Qaeda’s next target.

[quote]I grew up in the Midwest, and people came up with all sorts of reasons their tiny city was a target for the Russians’ nuclear weapons.

When they flew GW Bush to Offutt in Omaha (command center for any potential nuclear war) I knew shit was getting serious.

[quote]It’s true about Chicago, we were terrorized too BUT, none of us understood terrorism at the time.

Just this year, Chicago was terrorized by those two Nigerians who beat up Jussie Smollett and tied a noose around his neck!

As I recall, Chicago sent firefighters and EMS personnel to NY as soon as they were cleared to join the NYFD in the recovery of bodies, which was actually a recovery of perhaps, some DNA.

9/11 happened on three separate sites, however, many of America’s bravest and finest voluntarily left their comfortable homes, their wives, kids, pets, etc., to do a job that eventually made many of them gravely ill, and even killed them.

There was no Chicago, NY, LA, DC, black, Latino, Jewish or white supremacy. There was only America, and when it was clear that part of our citizenry need help, people from all over the country stepped up and helped in any possible way they could.

r179, Peter Jennings on 9/11 is the gold standard that journalists should aspire to. He was absolutely calm and thorough during all those long hours he remained at the desk delivering the most critical news of the century.

Whoever said he was off his game that day must be senile Barbara Walters posting away.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

I was on my way up to my desk in Midtown when I heard two people in the elevator saying a plane had hit the World Trade Center. It being a much more innocent time, my initial assumption was that it was a small plane, and an accident. Obviously plane number two changed that perception. Our company called us into the conference room and said we could shelter in place (it was a nondescript building on Madison at 40th) but everyone decided to go. The subways were closed so I ended up walking across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, where I am from. The next several weeks and months were unbearably sad and frightening, and even though things appear to be back to normal, nothing is really the same as before. I have lived here my entire life but everything is viewed through a lens of before/after that event.

I think it’s pathetic how Americans harp on and on and on about that very tragic day. Move on. That’s how you heal from tragedy.

"What I was amazed with was how the Midwest, Chicago in particular, seemed to think “they were next”. No terrorist is going to do anything in the Midwest."

Even in the midst of tragedy, a New Yorker has time to display his arrogance.

r220 America has moved on, but it is a permanent turning point in American history. The anniversary is not mentioned very much on television anymore, especially now in the Donald Trump era. After the 20th anniversary in a couple of years, it will rarely get a mention, and there is a whole new generation like OP who will have to learn about it in history class.

R222 no you have not.

[quote]Unless you were in NYC or DC no one cared.

Baloney. The whole country was in shock for a week or so. It pretty much shut down the country for a few days, and we're still feeling the aftereffects 18 years later.

I was in midtown Manhattan and 27 years old. My husband woke me up to say a plane had hit the WTC. I didn't freak out immediately because a small plane once hit the Empire State Building. But then another plane hit and they weren't little planes. So that was astonishing. I immediately thought "Wait, who's our President right now? Oh fuck." Then the Pentagon got hit and that put anything on the table. What would happen next? Rumors of bombs in Empire State Building and on George Washington Bridge. Will we be trapped in Manhattan? How will food get in? Then, rumors there was anthrax on the plane. What would happen next? Then one building falls. Unbelievable. I couldn't even conceive of the people that were in the building. I just saw our city fall apart. Then I thought, uh oh, the next building is going to fall too. How many people were just killed? 20 or 30 thousand? Then they couldn't find Giuliani and when they finally did, he said his advice to New Yorkers was "Go North." I thought oh, fuck, I need to go to upper West Side or better yet, New Jersey. What would happen next? My Dad called and I told him I wanted to leave. My husband said he was staying and my Dad said to stay with my husband which I did. Not knowing if we would live to see tomorrow, I called my best friend and asked him out to dinner. We went to Barrymore's, which is no longer. He wanted to go down to the rubble and see the site of what was one of the most incredible events in human history. I said hell no! It's not safe! We walked downtown a little by the Hudson River and saw all the smoke and dust. Wow. Then the news broke about who was responsible. Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, etc. And I cried as I read their handbook about how to kill infidels on the planes etc and cried. Then, for the next 3 weeks, I was terrified of dying like I never had been in my entire life. I was so scared. Did we need gas masks? At one point I woke up to a motorcycle starting up as light hit the side of our building and thought it was a nuclear bomb. Eventually, I calmed down, I went back into denial that we ever die and felt better.

There you go.

I also remember it feeling like a LOCAL story, not an international story and I was kind of offended that people in LA, Chicago, and even my hometown of Eugene, Oregon were evacuating buildings as if to make the story about them. I didn't comprehend what the world was thinking about this.

One other thing-- All planes were grounded for days and TV had no commercials for about a week. That was pretty amazing. Broadway only took two nights off and came back on September 13th. I went to see Urinetown and was so moved to see life go on. The song "Look to the Sky" was extra meaningful.

Oh and it was the most beautiful day ever. Blue sky. And it was an Election Day. I think the Governor primary??

I know someone who was on an expatriation flight the next day with a bunch of middle eastern grandees. Logan - Geneva. He reported that they were all questioned extensively, but yeah it was hush hush. Another funny thing was the spoken destination was Paris Le Bourget but they landed in Geneva.

R220 Why are you in such a cozy place you feel comfortable judging others here? Where were you? I don't think I'll ever quite be "over it". Many of my friends and their families chose to leave NYC afterward. My best friend was married the night before, and I was with a wedding party at Hilton Millennial. I have my friends' wedding anniversary to remind us of it all for as long as we shall live.

OP, one thing you really can’t understand if you weren’t there, is how all-pervasive it was. It was like the whole country was at a funeral.

The entire country suffered economically afterwards because for weeks, nobody went shopping or to restaurants. Nobody spent money. They just stayed home. Most were glued to the news, which carried wall to wall coverage for weeks. The whole country was at a standstill. It’s hard to explain it. I think we were all in shock, but it didn’t feel like it. It just felt like I didn’t want anything. Anything.

The idea of going out and having fun was repulsive. They even pulled shows like David Letterman for a few days. People thought it would be in bad taste to have people joking on television.

Imagine every single person in the whole country grieving the same thing. I think that must have been what Pearl Harbor was like. I used to ask my grandparents what it was like, and they said they couldn’t explain it, you had to be there. I understand what they meant now, but I don’t agree people shouldn’t try to tell you anyway.

A few days after 9/11, I was trying to distract myself and I went on the allrecipes.com website, looking for comfort food I guess. I came upon a recipe for meat loaf or something like that. There was a long preface to the recipe from the author, talking about how 9/11 had affected us all, and they were publishing their old time family recipes as a gift to the people looking for recipes on the site, saying they hoped it brought comfort to the readers. Afterwards, a long thread of people wrote in reply, saying they had all had the instinct to make comfort food for their families, and sharing eloquent, heartfelt goodwill towards their fellow men. I printed it out, and it’s still in a notebook of collected recipes I have. People were just thinking about it 24/7.

One thing you saw was American flags everywhere. They sold out, then more were brought in. They were on every house and business. When they opened Wall Street again, people were going to work in surgical masks, into a building with a giant American flag draped over the front. They thought it was their patriotic duty to carry on. Even if there was a risk. Same with mail carriers, carrying the mail knowing there could be anthrax in it. People felt they had to go to work. We thought of Londoners during the Blitz as our example. And it wasn’t crazy to think there could be other attacks.

I worked in SF. On 9/12, a bomb threat was called into my high rise building. A friend at another high rise down the street had a threat called in too. Anybody working in a high rise was afraid.

At night, I went to the BART train station. Police with bomb sniffing dogs went inside the train cars to search for bombs. After that stop, the train went into a tunnel under the SF Bay water for seven minutes. This went on for days. Every day you would see cops on the platform with bomb dogs. People on the train would get very quiet until the next stop.

If it hasn't been mentioned, this book is quite extraordinary in how it tells the story of what happened and the human toll of that day.

The WTC was an insatiable bottom.

This is the Star Spangled Banner, played at the order of the Queen, at the changing of the guard ceremony in front of Buckingham Palace. This was the first time a foreign national anthem had ever been played in front of Buckingham Palace.

I believe this was a day or two after 9/11. I read a comment that said this was for American citizens trapped in London because all the planes were grounded. There were people in the crowd weeping. I remember seeing this on the news when it happened.

This is what they mean by “the special relationship” between England and the U.S.

I was standing around Union Square and Broadway watching the debris of the second Tower falling down. It felt that part of me just died that moment. Then wandering through Manhattan for hours trying to make sense of what had just happened. It was something that I tried to express with a song lyrics, written years after that tragedy:

“Take It Away”

I don’t want to remember But it’s hard to forget Like the day in September When the heaven fell from grace

Prayers like dust densely scattered With the memories left behind Well, it shouldn’t really matter But still lingers on my mind

Take it away, take it away Take the quelling grasp of sorrow The benumbing realm of pain May the kin of tomorrow Never know of such a strain Take the dagger that may want to and may try To strike again

Through the rubble fed with fire Fostered by demented claims Forlorn hopes locked in a tower All at once engulfed in flames

I’ve heard voices softly crying For what eyes were forced to see There’s no need for denying It will always stay with me

Take it away ...

So I went to a chapel And was waiting there alone Lost in thoughts gravely battered I forgot what I came for

But the angels had not spoken Stroking tears like precious pearls For their wings now had been broken Tangled in egregious tales

Take it away ...

From the moment you’ve been missing It may never feel the same every picture tells a story Every story has a name

So I always will remember There’s no way out to forget Like the day in September .... Since I’ve lost you my old friend

Many of the posters here appear to have suspect memories of the event...

[Quote]I had a panic attack in the middle of the night that first evening because there was a strike of thunder that seemed to invade my room.

Thunder? From what storm? The weather in NYC was perfectly clear that evening and in the days following.

[Quote]My friend's sister was going to lunch around that time. ... She knew she worked nearby. She knew she would normally have been going to lunch at that time. They never found her.

Lunch. At 8:45 in the morning?

Sorry for the formatting, each line consist entire 4 lines verse

“Take It Away”

I don’t want to remember

But it’s hard to forget

Like the day in September

When the heaven fell from grace

Prayers like dust densely scattered

With the memories left behind

Well, it shouldn’t really matter

But still lingers on my mind

Take it away, take it away

Take the quelling grasp of sorrow

The benumbing realm of pain

May the kin of tomorrow

Never know of such a strain

Take the dagger that may want to and may try

To strike again

Through the rubble fed with fire

Fostered by demented claims

Forlorn hopes locked in a tower

All at once engulfed in flames

I’ve heard voices softly crying

For what eyes were forced to see

There’s no need for denying

It will always stay with me

Take it away ...

So I went to a chapel

And was waiting there alone

Lost in thoughts gravely battered

I forgot what I came for

But the angels had not spoken

Stroking tears like precious pearls

For their wings now had been broken

Tangled in egregious tales

Take it away ...

From the moment you’ve been missing

It may never feel the same

every picture tells a story

Every story has a name

So I always will remember

There’s no way out to forget

Like the day in September ....

Since I’ve lost you my old friend

“Take It Away”

I don’t want to remember

But it’s hard to forget

Like the day in September

When the heaven fell from grace

Prayers like dust densely scattered

With the memories left behind

Well, it shouldn’t really matter

But still lingers on my mind

Take it away, take it away

Take the quelling grasp of sorrow

The benumbing realm of pain

May the kin of tomorrow

Never know of such a strain

Take the dagger that may want to and may try

To strike again

Through the rubble fed with fire

Fostered by demented claims

Forlorn hopes locked in a tower

All at once engulfed in flames

I’ve heard voices softly crying

For what eyes were forced to see

There’s no need for denying

It will always stay with me

Take it away ...

So I went to a chapel

And was waiting there alone

Lost in thoughts gravely battered

I forgot what I came for

But the angels had not spoken

Stroking tears like precious pearls

For their wings now had been broken

Tangled in egregious tales

Take it away ...

From the moment you’ve been missing

It may never feel the same

every picture tells a story

Every story has a name

So I always will remember

There’s no way out to forget

Like the day in September ....

Since I’ve lost you my old friend

I was in LA and between sleeping and driving to the office, I missed 9/11 in live mode. I watched everything that day but all of it was a few minutes or hours after it happened. I was alerted by my uncle in Australia--he was watching late night TV. He called me and he sounded very reserved, very flat and emotionless. He asked if I knew what was happening in NYC and I said his call woke me up. And I pressed him on what was happening but all he would say was turn on the tv. There were no words. At that point, both towers had been hit so I was watching a lot of replays.

I wasn't sure about going to work, but since I hadn't received any word not to show up, I decided to play it safe and went to work. And I missed the towers falling. Of course when I got to my DTLA office, there was a note on the door that the office was closed for the day. And I remember feeling sheepish about my lack of commonsense--why the fuck had I had driven into DTLA! Even if the office hadn't closed, that day was the one day when it would have been perfectly acceptable to not show up for work.

My mom lived just outside of DTLA and I went over and spent the entire day watching the news. I remember, leaving to go home in the evening and my mom questioned if I should go. I told her it was unlikely something would happen in LA, but I understand now that my mom just wanted us (she, my brother and I) to be together...just in case.

And an earlier poster is right--there's America before 9/11 and America after. Sometimes I think of a memory and I'll note that it was before 9/11. How 9/11 wasn't even something we could possibly imagine. I know that feeling is hard to fathom two decades after 9/11 because there's no need to imagine it now. But it really was a black swan, a paradigm shift and defining event for any American of a cognizant age.

[Quote]I was in NYC about two weeks later. What I remember: The smell.

That's something I remember as well when I visited in October 2001 and made my way as close as I could to the wtc site (about Chambers St. if I recall correctly). The site was still smouldering even then.

The smell reminded me very much of hotdogs burning on a gas barbeque.

R236 that storm did happen. The lightening and, especially, the thunder caused a great deal of panic, including calls to 911. It woke me but I am a very sound sleeper so it didn't seem that intense. It freaked out my roommate. People's nerves were really frazzled. There were two F16s circling low over the city for at least one or two days (not at night that I recall) and the sound and sight of of them really stressed me every time I saw them.

What many people don't realize is that the twin towers were visible from all over the city so many of us watched it all live. Even from a distance, and the impact it was having on the city....wailing and speeding ambulances, fire trucks and police vehicles, the traffic jams, the smell and sight of the smoke, made it all very visceral. When I got near my apartment in Park Slope soon after the first collapse, there was this white to grey smoke filling the streets, I thought they had blown up the subway on 9th Street.

Remember when that American Airlines flight crashed in Queens after taking off from JFK airport just two months later in November 2001?

Everyone thought it was the same fucking thing happening all over again.

I can't even imagine living in a world where people couldn't conceive of a terrorist attack like this happening. It's always been in the back of my mind as something that COULD happen. That kind of innocence died after 9/11and I guess it'll never come back.

I remember I was a teen so i was still living at home and my mom woke me up telling me someone had flown an airplane into the World trade center. I remember thinking she must have heard something wrong because that just wasn't possible. I was going to stay in bed but she came back into my room and said it was a terrorist attack and I really should get up. I didn't believe it until I actually saw it myself.

Miss Tori was the musical guest on Letterman’s first night back. She brought him to tears. This video always gets me!

R239, those lyrics are lovely. Did you ever record the song? If not, you should, even if it’s something that is just for you.

For some reason I just remembered this: the chirping of the firefighter’s PASS devices. 😢

[R193] There's an excellent documentary about that woman called The Woman Who Wasn't There.

OP, if you're still with us, I wonder how they teach it in school? What did you learn and what surprised you in this thread?

This is a commercial that played after 9/11. It’s an upbeat ad, if you didn’t know the context.

The context was, it was played immediately after 9/11. Postal carriers were carrying mail that appeared to have anthrax in it. Some was fake white powder, but they didn’t know that. The mail would go through the processing machines and when it would roll over that letter, there would sometimes be a puff of a white powdery substance. They would have to shut down that office, and test all the employees to make sure it was fake and they hadn’t just gotten anthrax.

People cried when they saw that commercial, because you would see the cheerful carriers’ faces in the commercial (I believe they were not actors) and know those people were risking their lives to bring your mail. That those people in the ad could die. And they quoted an updated version of the famous saying, “neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night shall stay us from our appointed rounds,” and you thought, hundreds of years ago, they never imagined this.

I think part of the reason they did that ad was because people were sending fake anthrax through the mail and terrifying people. They were trying to humanize the people who carried the mail.

Mail carriers were afraid they would bring anthrax home to their children. A dear friend was a mail carrier with a wife and small child, and he was worried about it, but determined to carry on. His daughter was about four or five. People really had a “keep calm and carry on” attitude about essential work. Imagine how pilots, subway operators and train conductors felt. Every minute at work they were thought to be in danger.

Not long after 9/11, Keith Olbermann wrote an autobiographical book. He mentioned that during the anthrax attacks, someone sent an envelope with a white powder to him, can’t remember if it was at home or work. He called the police, they made him take off every stitch of clothes and bagged it, and they had to decontaminate the place. It was extremely thorough. Guys had to go in with biohazard suits. He had to go to the hospital. They gave him a hospital gown or some scrubs to wear. It turned out it was fake. As you can imagine, he was frightened for himself and anyone else that could have been contaminated. It took a while to verify what it was.

9/11 is probably why we started using email instead of snail mail, and why video conferencing became popular.

I know that in the months after 9/11, a lot of people had the attitude, “we could all die at any moment, we need to get our lives in order.” I knew people who quit high paying jobs to move back to their small hometown, to be near their parents in case of emergency. Others decided to leave the rat race and take lower paying jobs doing something that was more meaningful to them.

And after a boss in one of the towers had ordered employees that went downstairs to come back upstairs and go back to work, and those that did were trapped and died, we all thought, if I’m in a building that’s on fire, I’m leaving no matter what the boss says. Who cares if I lose this job. It inspired a certain type of “no job is worth it” attitude. A lot of these events have changed the attitude of society as a whole.

Thank you R247 , for your kind comment. I have made a demo recording and will try to find a way of releasing this and other songs in the near future. I have not shared my writting output yet, so I greatly appreciate you response.

R242 thank you for corroborating the sound of that thunder near midnight on 9/11 that woke me up. It was horrific.

Reading all the posts in this thread of people greatly affected by that day has re-opened some mental wounds for me. And I do remember logging onto DL that day and we were all so angry, confused, and scared.

TMI, I was so traumatized by 9/11, my period started up again about two days later - it just ended a week before.

R147

For OP...

There was a hurricane a few hundred miles off the northeast coast on 9/11. Hurricane Erin.

Some posters, or maybe just one dumb asshole, saying that it wasn't a big deal outside of NYC and DC are lying. For one thing it was a terrorist attack on the entire country, even people who would normally sneer at the mention of NYC, were rushing to blood banks, sending supplies or volunteering to head to the city to help. It would be like saying Americans didn't care when Pearl Harbor was attacked, unless they were Hawaiians. I remember parents rushing to school to take their children home. I remember crying until I didn't think I could cry another tear. I remember especially crying watching Congress singing together, or when Queen Elizabeth ordered the guards at Buckingham Palace to play the Star Spangled Banner.

I was in high school at the time, and one of the things I most remember was no one knew if we could still have fun. We were all shocked and numb. I remember when Giuliani went on SNL and basically told us all to laugh, again. I remember going to my high school football game, just so we could forget for a few hours.

Also, none of us knew when or where another attack would occur. I lived in a smaller town in the South, but we were still afraid because one of the nation's largest nuclear facilities happens to be located here. In fact, a few weeks later when the government started listing potential targets, we were on there.

It changed America, but in different ways. For those first few months we were closer than we had ever been in my life, sort of like how the country must have felt in WWII. I never would have imagined we would ever be at each other's throats like today.

Things I remember right after 9/11 is being in D.C. and seeing jeeps with mounted machine guns and small rockets on them in the streets around the perimeter of gov't. buildings and snipers on top of gov't. buildings. When I went to NY (I refused to go to go to ground zero for years because I just couldn't.) But I was shocked to see cops with large artillery weapons and huge police dogs on every corner. Going into Macy's and other small stores and being searched. All I could think of was seeing this happening on tv in other countries, not ours. It was all surreal.

It was the first time that I felt what it must feel like to have survivor's guilt. I kearned that it isn't something you can control no matter how much you reason with yourself. It is just a feeling deep down inside that is hard to get rid of. I was raised in NY and my family were all in NY but I had moved my immediate family out years before to another state. But I still felt that somehow I had deserted others from my state by not being there. Thankfully that feeling only lasted about a year but I feel for anyone that has survivors quilt and hasn't been able to get rid of it.

These hijackers just needed a weekend out in the woods. Some fresh air! Nature! That’s why I wanted to drive the Talibanis out to Camp David. A little fly fishing, and a camp fire for some marshmallow roasting never hurt anyone. It was a very good idea. The best idea in the White House! Everyone said so. We even had some very nice, top of the line sleeping bags set up for them in the natural caves, down by the lake. Very peaceful! The best bats I’ve ever seen were sleeping in them. The Talibanis would have felt right at home! I was very nice! But they turned out to be not so nice. The marshmallows are delicious. I’m eating them right now. They made a big mistake. Sad!!!

I forgot about that R90. It was absolutely heartbreaking, everyone not white pasting their homes, businesses and cars with American flags. A bodega three blocks away had been around for years and for the first week put up barricades in front of their store AND flags because they were scared of being torched/looted. Then in NYC we had various threat alerts which were always, always manipulated. We'd go to orange level whenever it was politically expedient and the block where the alert centered would be wall to wall police cars and emergency vehicles. It was theatre right away. Then the unending funerals at St. Patrick's catherdal (I worked nearby).

9/11 was such a long, long, long, long day. The only time I ever got that "feeling" again was reading an minute by minute, hour by hour account of the day Eton Patz went missing (in 1977) a few years ago. That article somehow captured the endless day feeling, the same one on 9/11. At the midpoint I remember thinking about the impact politically - we'd lose our rights. And who was going to pay for everything (not vengeance - I mean literally, who would pay for the rebuild). I knew the impact would be capitalized on immediately by the right wing.

Guiliani, whom I didn't like then either, seemed genuine on the day. Didn't dream he'd become the craven embarrassment he became, where, to quote Joe Biden, every word out of his mouth was a noun, a verb and 9/11.

Even though supposedly you needed i.d. to walk below 14th Street at first (then it was amended to Canal) I walked down there no problem. It reminded me of a snow day, that kind of quiet. Looking back I can't believe I, and tons of others, walked down there. Not all the way, but the cloud was below 14th and for awhile hung around pretty far up to that line. Nobody asked for my i.d. I just crossed 14th with everyone else. A few weeks later it was a beautiful day and I went to DUMBO for some kind of ABC carpet discount event. Then I walked across the Brooklyin Bridge to Liberty Street and watched a back hoe digging out 7 WTC (you couldn't get any close to the big hole). I had worked in 7 before and it was just stunning to see it gone. Of course it was one of the first back up, looked just like the original except now green and state of the art with a little extra modernity. But essentially the same steps, lobby area, etc. Maybe not long after that the souvenir vendors set themselves up down there. When I was watching the dig I could see how much mud there was in the store windows on Liberty. I think it had rained, turning all the dust to slop, then dried slop.

So stupid to be down there. A friend of mine I met later on in the 00s got lung cancer and her sister died of it. They were living down there when the towers fell.

I still remember seeing people jump from that tower. So heartbreaking. I was watching the news when the first plane had crashed. As they were talking another plane crashed into it. It made me sick. One of the most horrible things I've ever seen in my life. To this day I still can't watch movies about 9/11. Can't do it.

Before 9/11, we’ll-dressed politicians could appear in public without an American flag pin on their lapels and not raise a single eyebrow or cause a moment’s doubt about their patriotism.

Though the most impactful, visceral tragedies happened on 9/11, it took New Yorkers several years to go through the different stages of grief. It was an open wound, at even if done with honorable intentions, the loss of the people in those towers was exploited to the point of indecency.

Every single news program, whether local, or national, constantly ran these day to day, hour to hour terror alerts. It definitely performed its intended objectives: keep Americans terrified and afraid for as long as possible, and an illegal invasion into a country that had nothing to do with it, won’t look so bad.

I remember flying into NY one evening, when they had just installed those two blue lights that emanated from the two huge, cavernous pits, where the towers once stood. I stared at those lights for what seemed forever, remembering how much I had loved living in the city, & how that feeling just wasn’t there anymore.

Fast forward years later, & I sat alone on my bed, watching the execution of Sadaam Hussein. My Facebook feed started to chirp, and there were dozens of my friends, celebrating his public hanging.

That’s when I knew that Americans had lost more than loved ones & friends. It had it’s heart and soul cut out, & we would tolerate almost any injustice, even when perpetrated on an evil man, who was innocent of the charges brought against him.

I'd been in the city for a couple of years. I was getting ready to go to work, turned on the news as I was getting ready and saw what was happening.

I watched the first tower fall from the roof of my building in Brooklyn. Ran to my friends' apartment.

In the afternoon, there were rumors that the smoke cloud had anthrax in it and the fallout would take a ton of people out. I got up and went to the grocery store and spent $50 — a king's ransom to me in those days — on nice things for lunch. I thought, well, if this is it, let's at least eat some good stuff while we can.

Looking back, I'm surprised I was so pragmatic about it. I'm also surprised I only had a few drinks that night.

You rock R263. I totally identify. I too went to my Brooklyn apt. roof and while I didn't hear that the dust making its way to Brooklyn had anthrax in it, if I had, my reaction would have been the same. I'd want one last great meal, made up of things I couldn't afford or couldn't eat because I was and am always trying to watch what I eat and always on a budget. If some fancy restaurant were delivering I'd have blown out my credit card ordering things I never dared order. Somewhere in there I know would have been a huge vanilla shake, lol.

OP, we didn't have television back then. And even radio was in its infancy. Computers were still a science fiction-y concept in 2001. So we relied on word-of-mouth. It took nearly a week for people on the West Coast to learn about the Twin Towers going down. And another five to six days to confirm what happened at the Pentagon.

People were pretty upset, but mostly because we thought it was an alien invasion. Some of us still do. We have more information now, but people of my generation tend to respect the oral tradition, and we still get most of our facts handed down to us through a word-of-mouth network.

Don't quit your day job, r265. You'll never make it in comedy.

Me too R243. I remembered that during the benefit concert there was a fire fighter who had given his address in the Rockaways defiantly to come get him or something like that. When that crash happened I assumed they had taken him up on it. In my tinfoil hat mind that flight was shoe bomber number 1.

So much good could have come out of 9/11. Iran of all countries was sending sincere condolences. There was a real feeling of genuine good will across racial lines in New York. So much opportunity lost.

[quote]Unless you were in NYC or DC no one cared. I was in Chicago and everyone just bitched about how they couldn't get anywhere or how businesses closed, (which was correct, no one outside the USA cares about Chicago). At least we had some different TV.

Folks may have understandably cared more in NY and DC, but to say no one cared outside these two places is bullshit, and frankly, stupid. People all over the country were shocked, saddened, and pissed-off. Even the "old hippie" classic rock radio DJs were playing war-mongering songs. As for the rest of the world, there was a worldwide moment of silence later that week, and two images burned are in my memory: one is of hundreds of British first-responders lined up outside their stations saluting those who lost their lives that day. The other is of Pope John Paul II, clearly on his last legs, kneeling at the altar with tears in his eyes, praying (seemingly individually) for the innocent victims.

[quote] Now the anthrax that followed was scary,

No, it wasn't.

R266, Stop licking your fingers after touching your anal warts. It's making everything all pus-y around your mouth.

More first-rate comedy, r269!

P.S. Your mother is disappointed with how you turned out.

R244, there had already been several islamic attacks but never of this magnitude, in the US or anywhere in the world for that matter. There was an islamic terror attack on the WTC in 1993 that killed 6 and injured several hundred. I worked downtown on Gold Street. TVs in offices were on, we were watching it but it was really business as usual. I remember walking home that night across the Brooklyn Bridge, a little drunk and looking up at the Twin Towers, one completely dark and one all ablaze with light and wondering what a fucking sight! It just never registered that this might all be part of a bigger war going back 1,400 years. We had no clue.

In the late 90s I woke to the sound of helicopters over Park Slope (Carroll Street and 6th Avenue) in the morning of a weekday. The police had raided an apartment building on 4th Avenue and Union Street rented by muslim men who planned to blow up Atlantic Terminal. Explosives were found in the apartment.

Around that time there was an episode on PBS about Jihad in America, it is difficult to find it now.

What I find most bizarre is that before 9/11 muslims were a small part of the population, seeing hijab was rare, seeing a burqa almost never happened. For reasons I still do not understand, since 9/11 the muslim population in Brooklyn has exploded. Hijabs, muslim beards, burqas are now common in many areas of Brooklyn and Queens where they never were before. Please, someone tell me what the fuck is going on.

R272 here again. I think it important to mention that for decades, "Reverend" as he liked to call himself but he is really an imam Farrakhan of the nation of islam, broadcast on the radio every Sunday ranting the most racist shit about blue eyed devils and the evil Jews . I used to listen to these sermons from the imam wondering, "what the fuck?" No one stopped him or complained. A president and Congress post photos with this guy now.

A little blurb on the corner of the NY Times website said "Plane Hits World Trade Center Tower".

Instantly, I envisioned those old pix of that small plane that hit the Empire State Building in the 1930s. I surfed away, came back the NY Times and was startled by huge, bold letters of the headline.

I live in rural Wisconsin, where, to look up into the sky on a clear day and see white plane exhaust trails of jetliners is a common sight.

It was eerie to have sky, for a few weeks, totally devoid of them.

I remember at my high school there was one girl whose father was an United Airlines pilot. She was of course a wreck, because she nor her mother knew what route he was on, since he filled in wherever he was needed, and it was almost impossible to get in touch with anyone at the airline. The next day, she told us he was stuck in Nova Scotia. I normally couldn't stand her because she was a BITCH, but on that day I really felt strong empathy for her, I even hugged her at one point while she was crying.

I lived in Brooklyn at the time and was still getting ready to go in to work. Listening to WNYC, the NPR station, and they said something about a fire in the WTC. Looked out my kitchen window where I had a view of the Towers. Saw smoke, thought "wow I wonder how bad it is." Kept getting ready and occasionally looking out window, Eventually saw plane fly into south tower with my own damn eyes but it still didn't register! Thought maybe it was a small private plane that hit the building by accident. Turned on NY1 and saw the footage where it was definitely a jet. Called work to tell them I would not be coming in (office was in SoHo and you couldn't even get that far downtown for days). Tried making other calls but landlines and cell service was not working. I'd just gotten a cable modem (broadband was still new) so I spent the day reading and posting at places like DL. I was afraid to even get on the subway so I would only friends if I could walk there. The smell lingered, even in Brooklyn. Burned up bits of office paper landed on my roof, probably 5 miles from ground zero.

R242 there was no storm, no precipitation, no thunder that night. You either imagined it or you were never in NYC on September 11th.

I remember it poured a couple of days later.

Yeah there was no storm.

I know it sounds naive but I never knew that so many people really hated us in the Middle East. I always thought of myself as pretty liberal. I come from a mixed race family and grew up without religion but 9/11 made me more suspicious of Muslims. I try to keep my prejudice in check and I notice when it's rearing its head but Im not as tolerant as I once was. Maybe it's just age too.

I was living in LA at the time and going to college - which was near LAX. There was a big rumor that LAX might be a target so classes were cancelled. Fun fact, exactly two weeks prior I was on the same plane, Newark-LAX, after a summer spent in Europe.

I remember going over to a friends house that night and since there was no surface or underground transport the cops could drive any direction they wanted to on the streets and avenues. I was walking on 22nd between 6th and 7th and the cops shined a spotlight on me. It was so surreal.

I also remember walking on 14th street around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. It was so quiet with no busses or traffic. Very few people out. No one really talking. Just kind of looking at each other. It was like the twilight zone.

And whoever said there was a storm needs to be shot in the face like Mary Jo Buttafucco. Fuck you whoever said that. You’re a fucking liar because you weren’t even there. I hate you.

R272 Same thing in Chicago, where once the burquas and hijab were a rare sight. I left NYC shortly after 9/11 and moved here, and it does seem quite odd so many muslims would want to move here too. Just within the last year, it has really picked up noticeably. I even see one Burqua-clad bird working as a barrista in a neighbourhood cafe... even her mouth is covered, only nose and eyes are visible. I'm rational, but it gives me the creeps.

There was no storm that night- but I remember what the other commenters are talking about. I think it was two weeks after there was a storm in the middle of the night and there was a clap of thunder that was so loud it terrified my whole Bronx neighborhood. It was late, bc I was sound asleep, and this shit was so loud my fiancée and I were jolted out of bed in terror, in less than a second. I have never heard thunder that loud since. But it wasn’t that night. At least that’s how I remember it. Can anybody back me up?

I lived below 14th Street at the time. The NYPD had put up barriers — the blue things they use to line the streets during parades — at 14th Street. I had gone uptown and was asked for ID to show that I did, in fact, live downtown before they let me through. I think that was the day after, or maybe 9/13. That procedure might have lasted a few days.

It was unreal. But what had happened was so beyond imagining that my sensors were blown out. I was just glad someone was trying to maintain some kind of order.

R263 I remember that too. I had a friend who lived on 13th and she had a bitch of a time going above 14th.

This is surreal to watch.

Matt Lauer has to transition from a fluffy book interview with a huge queen to the bulletin, and then they go to commercial. And the anchors' reactions and speculations that follow...

I was in Brooklyn and tuned in about 10 minutes after it happened, after getting out of the shower. (Cutting it close to the start of the workday, as usual.)

I tried to call my flyover-state parents for an hour, if not hours. I couldn't get through.

Finally, I got through. My mother answered. I said it was me, and I'll never forget the way she said, "Oh, thank God!"

She was made of steel. But I had never heard so much fear in a person's voice before.

I was so encouraged that no anti-Muslim shit was seeping into this thread.

When will we ever learn that we are told to fear and hate groups of people, so that we can be easily exploited and controlled by the people who claim to be protecting us from the people we are told to fear and hate?

If the United States wanted to end terrorism and achieve world peace, it could. It is absolutely possible. But we’re further away from that now than ever, because our country is filled with immoral and corrupt men, who want everything they can get from you. When we’re dead, their kids will fuck over our kids, and so on. We have the power to change this, but we’re not too bright, and too lazy too care about anything or about ourselves, or about each other.

R290 well hon you sound like the most racist person on here. Why don’t you take your tired ass and sit the fuck down.

OP - carry these stories with you thru your life and share them because the people that lived it won't be around forever to tell them.

My mother was dying at the time. She had emergency surgery that day. The next morning I drove to work and balled the whole way. I have conflated 9-11 and my mother's death. I cried every day for a year after she passed. I still can't bring myself to go to the 9-11 Memorial in NYC.

[quote]Matt Lauer has to transition from a fluffy book interview with a huge queen to the bulletin, and then they go to commercial. And the anchors' reactions and speculations that follow...

At 0:15:30 you can see the second plane flying in from the top right of the screen.

Here's GMA on that morning, the second plane hits at 0:12:30

[quote] And whoever said there was a storm needs to be shot in the face like Mary Jo Buttafucco. Fuck you whoever said that. You’re a fucking liar because you weren’t even there. I hate you.

Jesus Christ, let it go. Memory is a tricky thing, especially after a traumatic event.

I was in London working at Canary Wharf in a high rise. We got the news around 4pm and were sent home early as there was a real fear London would be targeted. Strangers were striking up conversations on the tube, which never happens here usually. There was a real sense of we're next (we were, but 4 years later).

The footage of the people falling was horrifying and seared into my memory to this day. I never looked at a jet flying overhead in an azure sky the same way again.

I remember going for several days and never seeing or hearing an airplane in the sky, after all the planes in the United States were grounded. I thought, this is the first time since the Wright brothers there hasn’t been airplanes over the sky in America. It was a surreal feeling.

One more day until ALL attention in on New York and virtually nothing on those who died in the Pentagon or in a Pennsylvania field.

Will Trump even mention it in a tweet?

r299, he'll somehow make it about himself. Like how if he was president then 9/11 never would have happened. Or, he was in his office in Trump Tower and saw the planes hit with his own eyes and how angry he got. Blah, blah, blah.

At the time, I heard someone on TV say that after the 1993 attack on the WTC, the street vendors jacked-up their prices for water and food. But after the 9-11 attacks, the street venders were giving their water and food away.

This was mentioned to relate how serious this attack was, and how moved people were, and how everybody who could do something, did something, because we all felt attacked.

I’m sure there were some people in NYC and elsewhere that were. It moved, but that is just individual outliers. The stock marker didn’t open, planes were grounded, mail was affected. Businesses nationwide shutdown early on 9-11. The whole nation felt it.

Here’s a time capsule for you, OP: the first David Letterman Late Show episode back in the air after 9/11. The main guest was Dan Rather.

OP, if you don’t know anything about Dan Rather, he was the protege and eventual successor of Walter Cronkite, the lead anchor on CBS news. Rather was known for his eloquence and thoughtfulness. Back in those days, news anchors wrote their own copy. Rather (and Cronkite before him) was a sort of unrivaled chronicler and editorialist of the days’ news. He put things in perspective. He stood head and shoulders above the others.

Rather had gone to Afghanistan for CBS as a reporter and so he knew something about the region. Very few Americans did at the time. Most people had never heard the name Osama bin Laden. Rather went to report on the Taliban years before 9/11. So part of the reason Letterman had him on must have been because of his knowledge of the region, but largely because Rather had (and still has) a gift of putting things in context. To see Rather, an old school professional newscaster, break down in tears several times during this interview, was just heart wrenching. In those days, newscasters never showed emotion no matter what happened.

It’s interesting to note a couple items: at the time, it was feared 5,000 were killed at the WTC. That number came down as people were found to have been elsewhere that day, and duplicate missing reports were eliminated. And the praise for Giuliani seems impossible now, but he rose to the occasion then, even though he wasn’t well liked in NYC to begin with. 9/11 gave him his additional fifteen minutes of fame before he sank down into his usual, awful character.

You can see in this interview, the universal wish for revenge everyone shared. It’s a taste of what was to come.

I remember another talk show Rather was on about this time. An eloquent man, he quoted the last verse of the Star Spangled Banner, which I’d never heard before. It seemed apt at the time.

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand

Between their loved homes and the war's desolation.

Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n rescued land

Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

It was a game changer.

It was the kind of thing that would be interesting to go back and relive, if you weren’t emotionally invested in it, which was impossible. But the real, actual feeling in the moment was horrific. You felt so helpless, in the face of all the devastation. I felt like the world had been yanked out from under my feet- we had just celebrated a great Labor Day Weekend, school was starting, I was in love, 27 years old and life was great- everything changed in a matter of seconds. There was nothing you could do. It was like being kicked in the face in your sleep.

My partner lived downtown but he wasn't that close (good thing for health reasons). He said 14th and below were shut down to traffic for a week.

That fucking cunt said the air was safe to breathe. Now so many people have died or got cancer due to that nasty air.

That has always bothered me as well, R305. And every year, I read another item or article about yet another resident who lived in the vicinity dying from respiratory illness, lung cancer, or other cancers.

There’s just no way that a person can breathe that air, day in and day out, and not have some health complications arise. The closer one lived to the epicenter of the debris, the worse it had to be.

PSA for anyone on the thread who is a survivor and isn’t enrolled for monitoring or treatment.

Interesting that when I was watching the post of the Today show broadcast, Katie Courick mentioned how it was such a crystal clear day in New York. I’ve heard that comment the most of any other.

R299, a Trump tweet will be along the lines of the following:

“If they had been Trump properties, those towers never would have collapsed. Windows on the World? No great loss. The food didn’t hold a candle to the cuisine served at the Trump Tower Bar and Grill. In any case, had I been POTUS then, they wouldn’t have tried it on my watch.”

exactly 18 years ago we lived our last hours of innocence.

[quote][R299], a Trump tweet will be along the lines of the following:

"September 11th was a very sad day. Few people realize that after the Trade Center collapsed, my building at 40 Wall Street became the tallest in Lower Manhattan! The streets were closed off for weeks and my tenants BEGGED me for a break on their rent. I said NO!"

Our innocence was taken away. 9/11 was a game changer.

When I try to remember an old event, I sometimes wonder if it was before or after 9-11. 9-11 serves as a bookmark for a lot of reasons. I mentioned this once on DataLounge and was brutally criticized for it.

But it changed the way we board mass transportation, especially planes.

It militarized the police.

It destroyed the concept of personal confidentiality and the right to start over in life.

It brought on two Mideast wars.

I have no doubt that it had an effect on the subsequent dot-com stock market crash. That led to too-low interest rates for too long, which brought on the Great Recession.

In many ways, the terrorists won, after all.

The West Side Club was hopping that afternoon with queens playing the grieving widow card. The outfit de jour was black mantilla paired with ratty old jockstrap.

[quote]One more day until ALL attention in on New York and virtually nothing on those who died in the Pentagon or in a Pennsylvania field.

Vice President Mike Pence will be present and speaking during the Remembrance Ceremony at the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania tomorrow. It’s not true that no attention will be paid the non-New York victims.

[quote]When I try to remember an old event, I sometimes wonder if it was before or after 9-11. 9-11 serves as a bookmark for a lot of reasons. I mentioned this once on DataLounge and was brutally criticized for it.

I sometimes think about people who died prior to 9/11. Singer Aaliyah comes to my mind for some reason, probably because she does just a few weeks before.

I wonder if those people were better off, in a way, having never known how awful the world was about to become.

Horrible. Traumatic.

Did you hear that we carpet bombed ISIS today? What surprised me is, why not wait until it is officially 9/11 to do it? I can’t believe it is a coincidence that it’s so close to the anniversary.

When I was watching, before the second plane hit, I absolutely remember the newscasters speculation that there could be as many as 40,000 dead. Am I misremembering? Anyone else remember that? I have no idea who/what station I was watching — but the footage is seared in my memory. I remember that horrible, outlandish feeling of “relief” that it was “only” 3,000 people and not 20,000, or 25,000. And then you would ponder 3,000 deaths and you couldn’t even make sense of it. And you would feel utter guilt and despair that there weren’t more people, but you knew nothing would be the same again. And that the families would never heal.

Hearing that an *entire* fire station was wiped out — again, I still can’t believe it. And gradually all the stories came out, such as the rescuers who were in the stairwell that somehow remained intact though the entire structure collapsed all around them. Or the Chaplain/priest for another fire station who stayed with the men all the way in and was a rock for them in the horror — struck down by falling debris, the photos of them recovering his body and carrying him out. I agree, Giuliani was beyond heroic in those immediate days.

Our country needed someone to speak as he spoke, he was the actual leader for a week or two....at least that’s how I remember it. It felt like *he* and not the President led us. Bush sounded so weak with that megaphone on the mountain of rubble, far too little too late. How many days later did he do that again? And when exactly did Giuliani first appear before cameras? It definitely felt like Rudy was the de facto leader of America until Bush gave his speech to Congress. The one line of Bush’s speech I remember to this day is that we would cast them “to history’s unmarked graves.”

I was so angry then, I wanted to destroy them all. Now of course, I realize that I knew nothing, that I was lied to and manipulated, that war is hell, that it is so much more complex, that they cannot be “defeated” through killing them. Having said all that, I was still very satisfied when they finally got Bin Laden. The poster above (ElderLez?) said it so well, the countless missed opportunities are too many to count, and literally the entire world is still impacted by this single day, the echoes of it still ripple out. I was very proud of Obama for how he wanted BinLaden’s body disposed of.....they did it in such a way that America could see it happen for closure, but it didn’t cause a complete loss of dignity for the Bin Laden family, though again, I don’t entirely trust my memory. I remember Bin Laden being shrouded in white and watching the Navy drop him, looking like a mummy, into the sea.

[QUOTE] The West Side Club was hopping that afternoon with queens playing the grieving widow card. The outfit de jour was black mantilla paired with ratty old jockstrap.

Andrew Sutherland, nice to see you here!

I think this is the first 9/11 thread without a false flagger coming on and squawking about jet fuel and office fires.

I was in LA and our entire office was in shock. I was also freaking out because a family member worked in DC and it was rumored that the Pentagon was next.

It was such a long time ago, though, that the details beyond that is fuzzy.

[quote] I remember Bin Laden being shrouded in white and watching the Navy drop him, looking like a mummy, into the sea.

You imagined it. There is no footage of Bin Laden's disposal at sea.

There are a lot of faulty memories here. A lot of you really bought into the “War On Terrorism (and Brown People)” bullshit, too.

R15 got it right, except none of it ended in 2008. 9/11 brought us Trump, and fascism.

America died that day. The Obama years were the temporary dead cat bounce.

The terrorist totally won. Look at what they turned us into.

Is the new WTC also an insatiable bottom or a top?

R318, you probably heard those high fatality estimates after the towers fell, but on 9/11. Those initial high estimates were based on the number of employees in those buildings and fewer people getting out. As it turned out, most of the people below the impacts (and some above) got out.

But yeah, your recollection sounds accurate to me. I think by later in the day or early 9/12 they were down to 10,000, them 3,000 within a day or two. There were searchable lists of the “missing” by early the following week.

I remember those initial very high estimates. I think they were assuming all the offices were full and people hadn’t gotten out as well as they did. People saw the buildings collapse and maybe they assumed a lot of the people on the bottom floors thought they were safe and stayed. That’s what they used to do when a high rise had a fire high above, because fire travels up. People actually were told by the boss at one company to go back inside after initially leaving. The ones that listened, died. No one would stay now.

I think people back then also didn’t realize how incredibly toxic such a fire would be. They should have evacuated the second tower the second the first one got hit. If they had, most or all of the people could have been saved. It’s hard to believe they didn’t, out of liability concerns, but that’s how people thought back then.

People’s attitude towards danger has changed too. We don’t wait for authorities to help us any more, we help ourselves. Shortly after 9/11, the shoe bomber tried to get a match out to light the fuse on his shoe. The flight attendant and other passengers jumped on him, tied him up and kept him immobile until landing. Every flight since, any violent passenger has been jumped on and disarmed, mostly by passengers. That’s because of Flight 93’s example. People learned fast. And they haven’t forgotten since.

I think one thing people learned is, no one’s going to help you, you have to do it yourself. As a country. And we’re worse off for it. “Every man for himself” isn’t what a society needs to thrive. But the people at the top let the little guys down.

"Vice President Mike Pence will be present and speaking during the Remembrance Ceremony at the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania tomorrow. It’s not true that no attention will be paid the non-New York victims."

Set your watch and time how long the news report is about this event or the one at the Pentagon. They are forgotten amongst the glut of NY grief porn.

New York had maybe 90% of the victims, so I don't see why they shouldn't get 90% of the coverage.

I didn't see the buildings collapse. I saw them implode. I later saw Cheney making billions off 9/11. Make of that what you will.

I was in college at LSU at the time. I really don't remember it being a huge commotion. My roommate woke me up from a heavy drunk to tell me that a plane had hit the Tower. I remember people kind of milling about watching it on TV but don't remember classes being cancelled or anything. There was talk of the nuclear plant near there being a target but I don't think anyone but the hysterical took that seriously.

Little did I know we'd end up where we are today. I remember life being "simpler" back then for some reason. Maybe it's a nostalgia gloss and I'm conflating and comparing it to Katrina.

One Day.

I was pissed as FUCK because I had my heart set on a tourmaline and diamond dinner ring but HSN went off the air.

[quote]Set your watch and time how long the news report is about this event or the one at the Pentagon. They are forgotten amongst the glut of NY grief porn.

Dump was speaking at the Pentagon ceremony, and it was played in full on the cable channels.

I was as far removed from NY as you can get and it was like it happened in my back yard. It was horrible, traumatic. The horror of what happened to those people is incomprehensible. Imagine having to decide whether to jump or to burn alive. They say the people on the upper floors had the soles of their shoes melting from the heat. The last calls to loved ones and 911 responders are heartbreaking. It was a very dark time.

[quote]I remember Bin Laden being shrouded in white and watching the Navy drop him, looking like a mummy, into the sea.

You have a faulty memory R318. No video’s ever been released.

Oh, and MARY!!

[quote]When I was watching, before the second plane hit, I absolutely remember the newscasters speculation that there could be as many as 40,000 dead. Am I misremembering?

Yes, you are misremembering. There were high casualty estimates later that day, but definitely not “before the second plane hit,” which illustrates how faulty your memory is. Before the second plane hit, it was still being treated as a potential accident on the news, and no one was assuming that one tower would fall, let alone both. People weren’t even evacuated in the second tower until the second plane hit. People, including newscasters, were in a fair amount of denial about what was happening before the second plane hit.

[quote]When I was watching, before the second plane hit, I absolutely remember the newscasters speculation that there could be as many as 40,000 dead. Am I misremembering?

Yes, you are misremembering. There were high casualty estimates later that day, but definitely not “before the second plane hit,” which illustrates how faulty your memory is. Before the second plane hit, it was still being treated as a potential accident on the news, and no one was assuming that one tower would fall, let alone both. People weren’t even evacuated in the second tower until the second plane hit. People, including newscasters, were in a fair amount of denial about what was happening before the second plane hit.

So much MARY! in this thread.

R338, the point of my post wasn’t necessarily about the exact timing of the predicted casualties, but about the extraordinary number of deaths expected.

Nobody thought there would be casualties at first.

Everyone thought it was a small plane that hit the tower accidentally... until everyone saw the second jet hit.

And nobody thought the towers would collapse...until the first one did.

R336, I’m not surprised that my memory was conflated. The news must have shown footage of something that matched the description *or* my memory created imagery, I’m not sure. Maybe what it was is that they didn’t show the disposal out of giving the family some dignity? I don’t know anymore. I still can see the “mummy” being dropped, wish I knew where it came from (this is why eye witness testimony now carries less weight btw).

R341, so true too, that at first everyone was saying they didn’t know the size of the plane blahblahblah. And NO ONE saw the collapse coming, it was absolutely UNREAL.

[quote]not to mention the millions most of those windows got.

Goddamn it, I KNEW I should have married one of those fucking WTC windows.

R333, LMAO!!!

My main emotion that day was anger. Anger that this country had spent trillions and trillions of dollars on defense in the last decade, and a bunch of clods with simple box cutters managed to circumvent all the high tech defense systems the US has been trillions and trillions of dollars on.

I was mad around 10:30AM, when it was evident no one in the entire US government knew what the fuck was going on, and everyone was pretty much on their own and had to fend for themselves until the vaunted US Armed Forces could figure what the hell just hit them.

I was mad when the entire US Congress, led by that stupid asshole Rick Santorum sang the national anthem, then being the true gutless, spineless cowards they are, went into hiding so they could save their miserable asses, while the rest of us were left to fend for ourselves.

I was mad when Dubya and Cheyney were clueless, and instead of being prosecuted for their stupidity, were handsomely rewarded for their fecklessness.

In fact, 18 years later, I'm still mad about how completely and utterly incompetent our US government is (especially the Defense Department), despite the huge amount of money given to it each year. And 18 years later, no one has ever been held accountable and no one will ever be held accountable.

Here we are 18 years later, with another asshole Republican president and a Republican controlled Senate and 9/11 could happen again tomorrow and nobody would do or say a damn thing about it because, well, Republicans are incompetent assholes now, just like there were in 2001.

Dubya and Cheyney weren't clueless. They were GUILTY!

The one I couldn't stand was "National Security Adviser" Condaleeza Rice.

Great job on the "advisement" there, bitch.

No one ever talks about that plane crash in Queens. What really happened there?

Also- if the person was responding to my post and calling my dumb, you misunderstood me. It FELT like a local story to be in NYC when it happened. It was happening to US. When I heard about people freaking out outside NYC, it just felt weird. That was MY experience living in NYC at the time.

calling ME dumb I mean

Another thing- my husband and I started saying "I love you" every time we went out the door and left the other one. Every time. But not until September 12th.

I was a third year law student at Univ. of Texas. Had a class with George P. Bush. The law school did not cancel classes. Was very nervous to sit in the same classroom with the President’s nephew.

The 9/11 Experience -- it's mindboggling!

I'm watching one of the older 9/11 programs and they said the city had requested 30,000 body bags so they did expect the numbers to be much, much higher than they were.

I remember media not saying a number of expected fatalities, but some mentioned that up to 50K people worked in the towers daily. They just put that out there.

After hearing that, it was sort of a relief that "only" 3k died.

I believe that terrorists from another country who learned how to fly to do this would have done enough homework to know to pilot those planes into those buildings later in the day, to maximize the damage. I mean they were giving up their lives to do this. But....if someone in power, in the USA, had planned this HE or she would have wanted to kill the least people possible. I mean if that person could make billions by killing a few thousand, why kill 10s of thousands.

R355 With terrorists, it isn't just about killing the most people, it is about terrorizing the most people. The timing of the attacks was near perfect to ensure that they were covered on live television as they happened, as they started to happen toward the end of the morning television news shows, such as Today and Good Morning America, and just as the west coast was waking up and turning on the TVs. Not to mention all the people who were in their cars, or using headphones, to listen to the radio as they rushed to work. If they had waited until later in the day, they might have killed more people, but it would have taken longer for the news to spread and most wouldn't have experienced it live.

[quote] R318: Did you hear that we carpet bombed ISIS today? What surprised me is, why not wait until it is officially 9/11 to do it? I can’t believe it is a coincidence that it’s so close to the anniversary

I’m sure he’d nuke them if he didn’t have staff telling him it’s a war crime.

Awful man.

It was surreal.

I live outside of DC. We were both home that day. A contractor mentioned he heard a plane had hit WTC so I flipped on the news. I thought he meant a small aircraft.

It wasn’t long before I heard the huge explosion of the impact from the Pentagon which is a few miles from my house. All cell phone service went out in my area and military police appeared at the end of my street and became a permanent presence for the next few months.

Washington DC was evacuated but nothing was running. The subway and buses were shutdown People were walking: a million people on foot, walking out of DC and the adjacent counties to get home - many walking up to 50 miles to get home. Roads were closed, we were under a state of emergency.

Reagan airpot was shut down for months, with some demanding it be permanently shutdown.

We knew it was war, because it was so damn quiet. In DC, we always know something’s hitting the fan because you’ll see an incredible number of pizzas being delivered to the White House. This time, it was Escalades blocking all the gates, snipers on all the roofs and dead quiet wherever you went.

For me, it was still seeing the Pentagon, I place I’ve been hundreds of time for work. That’s the image that was closest for me because of the banality. It was just part of my life to park at Pentagon City, walk over to the visitor’s center, get my badge and meet with clients.

To see the fire, the smoking ruin of the exterior, the death of 180 people still seems larger to me than the 3,000 in New York.

R355-the timing also ensured that the rest of the world was wide awake to watch. It was afternoon in Europe and early evening in Asia. It's estimated that billions of people watched the terror unfold on live tv. They picked that time for a reason.

Americans were incredibly stupid - both the citizens and the government, after 9/11. Invaded and have occupied Afghanistan ever since. How many lives? Then Iraq. How many lives? How many billions. But cozied up to the Saudis and Pakistan - the real issue. And never made a needed peace and way forward with Iran. To this DAY! Many Americans still blather about Iraq. Condi was on Colbert the other day, PUKING OUT her lies! And Colbert - who is supposed to be a liberal - lapping it up! It's depressing!

OP, my friend and I kept calling each other during commercials. We were glued to the (tube) TV.

I was in NYC and riveted to news reports from the first hour.

Reporters repeatedly said that 50,000 people worked in the towers.

By the afternoon, they were estimating 10,000 dead.

[quote]I believe that terrorists from another country who learned how to fly to do this would have done enough homework to know to pilot those planes into those buildings later in the day, to maximize the damage.

The timing had nothing to do with television audience. The flights they targeted were selected based on:

-size of aircraft and length of flight (to maximize damage) -aircraft type (so that they would have been trained to fly it) -the flight origins: from airports known to have relatively lax security -load factors for these flights, i.e. they selected flights known to have light passenger loads to make them easier to commandeer

R363 I would say it was both. Yes they wanted the things you mentioned, but Al-Qaeda was/is incredibly media savvy, so it would be naive to think that television coverage wasn't part of their planning. The point of terrorism is to terrorize the most people, and cause psychological terror, ensuring the attacks would be covered live on television accomplishes that.

they got what they wanted. Over 2 billion people watched the events live. What more could they have asked for? Even OBL said he didn't know the towers would come down and it turned out better than he ever could have expected.

Here’s something I remember: for about three months, before the attacks, I started getting emails from government agencies, such as the FBI, the CIA, and military contractors for recruitment/job opportunities. I found it odd at the time, because I wasn’t interested in that line of work, however, I did have my resume on job boards, even though I was employed.

I went on one interview that was specifically for underwriting materials made by Boeing, & other companies that sold to the US military.

During the interview process, I was told that there was a good chance that I would relocate to the Middle East for a specific amount of time, & would be provided with housing, etc., & would that be an option for me?

Anyhow, I considered the relocation for a few weeks, ultimately turning it down.

Needless to say, I’ve always thought it odd timing, since 9/11 happened several months later, & I am pretty sure that whoever was hired for that position, relocated, and probably did so for quite some time.

So question: what do the terrorists who plan attacks want? I’m not asking about the whack jobs that fly planes into buildings, or detonate a bomb strapped to their bodies. I’m asking about the people behind these attacks.

I ask, because I see no incentive in becoming a marked man, without a reason other than some stupid ideological beliefs about infidels. These guys are these incel, white supremacists, who are so frustrated with illusory narratives fed to them on 8Chan. These guys are usually pretty bright, & I don’t believe that they subscribe to the bullshit they’re selling to the dumb fucks who martyr themselves. So are they making money? Are they leveraging in order to get money? And if so, how much are we talking about, & who’s paying?

I watched this today and it brought it all back.

It was WTF shocking.

Earlier that summer, there was a travel advisory issued for Americans to be on high alert in a major city, possibly in Asia, possibly involving aircraft, on or about September 11. I remember this vividly because I was scheduled to be in Tokyo for a meeting on September 11, and feeling relieved that the meeting was moved to NYC. At the WTC. North Tower. I had just arrived about 10 minutes before the plane hit, and got out quickly. I'm fine for the most part but certain things/situations/noises can trigger panic attacks.

I remember a memo about terrorists using planes to crash into buildings.

Yeah, R277, you are correct, we don't live here and the two of is made it all up. You win.

R366, this was not an inside job. This was jihad, just like the first WTC bombing and the 30,000 islamic attacks since then.

Buckle up, ladies. We ain't seen nothin yet.

R370-Can I ask what the experience was like of being in the WTC and evacuating? If you're up to recounting, that is.

R373, I’m not saying it was an inside job. That said, it is now known as fact, that intelligence agencies were getting information that there was chatter of a possible attack, yet chose to ignore each other when one agency attempted to share the information with the other.

Also, I would have been a less than astute observer, had I not found it curious that 9/11, and a consequent war emerged not long after receiving multiple emails from government agencies for employment opportunities.

R375 There had been steadily increasing attacks in the two or three years prior to 9/11 by splinter groups likely tied to AQ and to what later became ISIS throughout India, Pakistan, across Europe and into Saudi. The most serious were the embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania and then the attack on the USS Cole. Conflict was unavoidable after this, despite no direct claim by AQ - just OBL reading poetry and praising it. The lack of response to the attack coming in the weeks before the 2000 election is believed *by some* to have encouraged more attacks.

R376, I watched a program maybe five years ago, I *think* it was produced by HBO? Anyway, to add to your post, it was a fucking fascinating documentary of all the intelligence officers who were at the front lines immediately preceding the attack, and then right after. There was a team of all women, led by a woman, and they repeatedly gave examples of how they heard enough chatter (I think they were NSA) that they knew an attack was coming, but they could never diss out when or how. And as the chatter got louder and louder, they were desperately warning other agencies and teams, but no one had enough info to work with — and no one took the all-female team seriously. It was amazing.

The original interrogators from the actual black sites were there, the CIA, they worked with the agents who were literally the first killed on foreign soil after 9/11 who were questioning fighters in Afghanistan and were killed by a suicide bomber. The CIA agent who skillfully selected that first headshot of a capture photo to humiliate and terrorize them was in it (oddly it won’t link!). One of them talked about how if they didn’t have the black sites they would have *never* gathered the intelligence they got.

It was raw and real. They weren’t trying to defend the morality or ethical lapses, they simply tried to describe the frame of mind they were all in after 9/11 — they were all ok with doing literally anything to take them down. It’s an important piece of history and must-see if you want to learn about the immediate aftershocks. Riveting.

Yes, while I’m sure sexism played a role, it was also a problem that none of the agencies seemed to talk to each other. And, the superiors in DC, wouldn’t pay attention to those below them. There was another program about an FBI field officer who was trying to bring attention to suspicious young middle eastern men enrolling in flight schools but no one took them seriously, either.

Ew, the false flag spaz is here.

Many workers evacuated from the north tower. Others didn't start work until 10pm, so weren't there. They would have killed more if they'd hit an hour later.

Yes r378, soooooo many missed opportunities. “Failure of imagination.”

Also recommend the Naudet brothers documentary @R368. REALLY upclose and personal look at the entire horrific day.

"Interestingly, there had been a trial run at our disaster recovery location a month or so before the attacks... almost as if a global bank had received a warning to get ready."

R89 Interesting indeed. That isn't the first time I've heard about large corporations brushing up their emergency response plans in proximity to the attacks. What was the name of the bank you were working at?

[quote]I remember thinking that they are definitely going to fly a jet into the white house. The White House was next.

I was a junior in high school at the time and several teachers and students kept saying that they were thinking that was going to happen.

R370 thank you I thought I was the only one who remembers that warning earlier in the summer about a terrorist attack in Asia. When the planes hit I distinctly remember thinking to myself "so not Asia".