Everyone has a 9/11 story. We'll tell you ours, you tell us yours. Go to the comments section of this post and join the conversation.
Bryant Park Project
I spent September 11th driving across America. I had just moved to Chicago, but I was back in Boston to pick up my car. That morning I was in my friend's apartment where I was staying. He had gone to work and I was watching The Today Show and getting ready for the drive back to Chicago. When the second tower was hit I called my best friend, who worked in the Twin Towers, but the call wouldn't go through.
I called my Boston friend at work, where he had no radio or TV. I turned up the volume on the TV in his apartment and held up the phone, while his coworkers gathered around the speakerphone in his office to listen.
After the Pentagon was hit, I realized I was in a major US city and would be safer if I left town. I stopped at Tower Records on the way out of town to get two new CDs to listen to on the drive. Clearly I had not yet grasped the magnitude of it all.
I'll never forget my ride on I-90 out of Boston, seeing an army of State Troopers speeding in the other direction, into the city, with their sirens blaring. I made my way across the country, alone, scanning from one public radio station to another, from Western Mass to Upstate New York to Erie, PA, and into Ohio. I never did listen to those CDs that day.
The rest stops were so quiet. I used a pay phone to call my parents, but still couldn't get through to my friend at the World Trade Center. All the TVs were tuned to the news, crowds of people from every corner of the country converging in front of them.
Because I had left so late in the morning I decided I couldn't make it to Chicago. I got a motel room in Ashtabula, Ohio. From the lobby I called my friend in New York, the one who worked in the Twin Towers. She picked up the phone.
My doorbell was ringing like crazy the morning of September 11th, 2001. I was in a deep sleep, having gotten off work at 5am after anchoring ABC's World News Now all night. So when the bell rang, I actually had a panic attack that something had happened to my parents, because anyone who knew me knew you didn't call or come by before 12noon.
It was my cousin who worked on Wall Street just babbling about terrorists. He told me to turn on the TV...and that's when I saw what everyone else had seen for the past couple of hours. I looked at my answering machine and the light was flashing, all friends and family wondering if I was okay.
I called into the ABC News desk and asked if they wanted me to come in. The editor said come at your regular time, you will do your shift live from Ground Zero.
I grabbed a pad of paper and headed out to do some reporting. First I went to interview people at a hospital close to the site, but there weren't that many people---just crowds and crowds of doctors waiting to help and people wanting to give blood. I then got as close to the scene as possible. I was stopped by cops because I only had my news ID ...not the police one. I had to get that at the office. So I spoke to people who were around about what had happened. I heard one of the classic stories, the lady who was late for a job interview that day in the towers. The day was full of surreal events like that. I saw a tank roll down my street.
I walked to ABC that night because there wasn't any public transportation. I picked up my pass, hopped in a crew van and headed down.
I ended up spending the next five nights at Ground Zero, reporting live from the time Nightline signed off until the early edition of Good Morning America.
It was an assault on all your senses. The burning in your eyes and mouth from the dust, the loud yells of rescue workers trying to dig into The Pile, the smell of fire and burned things, the taste of the dust on your tongue. I saw firemen sleeping in doorways, firetrucks from as far away as Maryland racing to the scene. On the way into the area, people would hand you fliers of their misisng loved ones and ask you to mention them on the air.
There were Red Cross volunteers who offered us coffee. Some residents just wanted to be interviewed....kind of to process things. One man told me the towers were the view from his window, his urban mountains.
I walked home every morning at 6am, tired, dusty and sad.
I was unemployed on 9/11/01 after quitting a high-paying job on a despicable daytime talk show that shall remain nameless (think of trashy people fighting, all the bad stuff--that's the kind of show it was). I was an emotional wreck that week, fearing I had thrown away my career in television. I was one week into my first prescription for Prozac and waiting for the drugs to start working.
I was getting ready to go into NYC from my apartment about 20 miles north for a job interview to be a temporary secretary. I was watching the news while getting dressed for my interview and saw the twin towers on fire.
After being paralyzed in front of the tv with my husband for a couple of hours, I remember being seized by the desire to do SOMETHING to help. So as soon as they started calling for people to donate blood, I went off to my local blood center.
I waited in line for six hours, which tells you how many other people had that same fevered impulse to do something useful in the face of the tragedy. Everyone was rehashing the news, listening on portable radios for developments, hoping for word on survivors.
While I was on line some volunteers from the Westchester chapter of the American Red Cross came by the blood line soliciting volunteers. I jumped at the opportunity, and ended up working in the Disaster Relief logistics department. We coordinated transportation of supplies and volunteers to American Red Cross shelters in NYC and to Ground Zero. I worked there day-and-night for three weeks, and it felt like a real contribution--getting stuff on trucks, finding drivers, getting people with construction and demolition equipment to send it to Ground Zero, stuff like that. I was struck again and again by how lucky I was to have a chance to do something tangible when so many people felt helpless. It was a bizarre mixture of pride and guilt.
There were so many other people who had this palpable need to help. Lots of people got turned away because there were more than the Red Cross could handle. I met a lot of people whose need to help was so intense they got a little scary. Some people demanded to be sent to Ground Zero--they wanted to put food and supplies directly into the hands of first responders, and they were devastated to be turned away.
I talked to hundreds of people who were turning their houses inside out looking for items to donate. People showed up with big vats of spaghetti they had made, but for safety (and I'm guessing legal) reasons we weren't allowed to send that food down.
After my three week stint ended (I REALLY, REALLY needed to earn some money) I finally allowed myself to feel some of the emotions that throwing myself into volunteering to avoid. But I also realized that I had stopped taking my Prozac at some point, and I just decided not to take any more. I honestly felt fine. Is that weird?
It was my third-to-last day at my job before I moved away from Philadelphia, back home to Cape Cod. As soon as I got to work, my officemate asked a question I am sure was heard a million times across the world--"Did you hear about the plane that hit the World Trade Center?" Any semblance of work was abandoned, and most of us gathered in the conference room, glued to the TV someone had dragged out of a closet. The reception was snowy, but clear enough for us to see the first tower fall. I don't remember if anyone made a noise. I do remember my boss wandering in, someone telling him the tower fell, and he said, "Oh," and walked out.
Word soon came from the Security Desk that all buildings around Independence Mall were being evacuated. At this point no one near any historical or national monuments was taking chances, I guess. A group of co-workers and friends and I gathered at one of our usual after-work drinking spots, my friend Suzanne's apartment on South Street. Most of the stores had closed by this time, and it was odd to see South Street deserted. The deli Suzanne lived over was open, however. And, even though it was still morning, we drank. A lot. We drank and watched the coverage--all day. None of us said much during our vigil, but I do remember my friend Jack say, at one point, "Things are gonna be so f**ked up for a long time."
I was in Cabramatta a western suburb of Sydney, Australia on September 12th -- it was still the 11th in the US -- in my flat when I first heard about the attacks.
It was my morning study time during my first full p-day of my mission [for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] in the field, and my zone leader called to tell us to stay indoors. My two companions and I thought that it was a joke since it was my first week in the mission field. Anh Bao (we were Vietnamese speakers with names in the language) who was going back home to Arlington, Texas in about six weeks jokingly replied to Anh Cuong over the phone, "Strike that from my list of places to see." I asked him what he was referring to. He said that he was not going to see the Empire State Building in New York because a plane flew into it. Anh Phuc joined us in conjecturing that it was some small private plane. "What damage could that do?" we smirked.
Later, Cuong called back telling us that we could go out after our study session but to stay away from American places like Maccas (Aussie for McDonald's); we still thought it was hilarious that the joke was still going. Somehow I talked Bao and Phuc to go for a run before we did our grocery shopping. We went for a jog around part of Cabramatta, and then proceeded down John Street towards the pedestrian mall and the Woolworths grocery store.
As we passed the Bing Lee electronics store we could not help but notice the images on the numerous TV sets of all different sizes on display through the front window. We stopped; it was not a joke.
Airliners, large ones, were flying into the World Trade Center. Immediately I became concerned about my father who was a Continental Airlines pilot at the time and for my sister who works for Delta Airlines; it was a strange relief to see the four flights listed on the screen were two American and two United.
(This is what I wrote on my Gather story about 9/11.)
I was at my office at 18th and K Streets in downtown Washington DC, catching up on email, when suddenly emails stopped coming in altogether. The Internet started getting really slow, though I did manage to get to the Yahoo! homepage to see a terse news blurb saying that a "small" plane had crashed into one of the WTC towers.
Within a few minutes the Internet was totally down, and we were mystified as to what was going on. We also had problems with our cell phones. Eventually, a relative of someone managed to call and tell us that a second plane had hit the towers. Because we didn't have a radio or TV in the office, we literally put the phone other speakerphone so we could hear what the person on the other end was listening to on their TV.
Not too long after that, we heard the report that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. At that point the associate director of our foundation made the decision to have everyone leave the office immediately, since we were just a few blocks from the White House. We were hearing rumors that the entire commuter train system had shut down - it hadn't, we later discovered - so we created a buddy system in which people who commuted from outside of the city could walk home with those of us who lived within walking distance. One of my colleagues buddied-up with me, and then we all went outside to start our walk.
It was a gorgeous day outside - simply gorgeous - and I'd never seen so many people on the streets of Washington.
I sent out a note via email as soon as I got home in Dupont Circle:
The streets are filled with people briskly walking away from downtown, trying to get their cell phones to work. It's not a panic situation by any means - just lots of people determined to get the hell out of there. Some people are clearly shaken, and are being comforted by friends and strangers alike. The streets are completely jammed with cars as people try to get out of the city. Since lots of us at our office usually take the metro to work (which has been shut down, along with all other commuter trains), those of us who lived within walking distance offered to bring home other people who would be stranded downtown.
Once that was sent out, I created an email list called SEPT11INFO and urged everyone I knew to join it. Soon we had well over 1,000 members posting 50 messages an hour, posting news updates, passing along Red Cross info and dispelling rumors when possible. For example, at one point we heard a newscaster (I think it was on ABC) say that there were reports that a bomb had gone off in front of the State Department, and that smoke could be seen from the National Mall. Since I lived in a highrise, I had a decent view of both locations and could detect no smoke, though you could just see a wisp of it emanating from a few miles further south. That was the Pentagon burning.
September 11, 2001 was the second Tuesday of my freshman year of college. It marked my first steps into a shared intergenerational history, a new American era, and my own coming of age.
Where was I? In biology class.
What I remember more clearly, though, is when, four hours later, a professor, long in the tooth and compassionate beyond many, gathered us up under his parental wing in a makeshift political science classroom. It was a salmon-colored theatre space. Not knowing what else to do, we zombied toward the stage, and toward him. He was a shepherd for the babes. He guided us through the loneliness of realism, of fear, and of the purgatory between what had been frat parties and football games and what was now fallen towers. In that strange room we all turned men and women, if only for a moment. Later we would learn that one of us lost her father to the attack.
What I often ask people when this conversation comes up, though, is not the towers question, but, "Where were you when you saw a plane fly overhead for the first time after the attack?" I was driving home in October of that year. And it was momentarily terrifying.
Was this adulthood, this hyper-consciousness? Probably not. But it was the road to it, and the fear and the realism evoked by that experience was, perhaps, the loneliest feeling I've known.
In a way, I suppose we all were freshman of a sort on 9/11, though. And in our collective consciousness we share that, too.
I grew up in northern New Jersey, but I've been living in California for the last seven or eight years. On 9/11/2001, I was woken up very early in the morning by the telephone. It was my mother, calling me from her office in Fort Lee, just two or three miles from the New Jersey end of the George Washington Bridge. She told me that New York City was under attack, people flying planes into buildings, and she wanted me to know that she loved me, in case she didn't make it through the day.
I spent the whole morning in my tiny apartment in Oakland, three thousand miles away from most of my friends and all of my family, listening to the radio and obsessively checking email for updates on friends who worked in Manhattan. I remember when the NPR announcer said that one of the towers had collapsed, and the sense of horror and disbelief in his voice, and I just slid down to the floor and started crying.
I had to teach that afternoon--I was a graduate student at the time, and had a dicussion section to lead--and I thought about cancelling class but I wanted at least the illusion that things were going to be okay. I told the students that they didn't have to stay in class that day if they didn't want to, but most of them stayed, maybe for the same reasons I was staying. A couple of kids hadn't heard the news yet, actually, and one of them thought I was making it all up. Half of the time I almost thought that myself.
On 9/11 I was the manager at the local video game shop. That morning I was watching the news with my newborn daughter in her little seat at the dining room table. I saw the 2nd plane hit the towers about 30 minutes before I had to leave my house. At this point it seemed clear that there was little chance that this was an accident. All I wanted to do was to hold Emily and find my sister.
My sister lived in NJ but often traveled into the city for her freelance work. I knew there was little chance that she was anywhere near the WTC, but you never know.
After watching the in stunned silence for the next 30 minutes, I numbly hugged my wife and daughter and went to work. It was about another 30 minutes until I got to the shop where I immediately turned on the TV. I didn't expect many customers.
I called my Assistant manager and woke him. all I said was "Turn your f***ing TV on...now" and hung up.
About an hour after opening, a kid comes in..Probably 16 or 17. He seemed totally oblivious to what was going on. He wanted to talk about the Xbox for christ sakes..I ran him by saying "Hey kid, I appreciate that you think that the world revolves around you and your ability to smoke your best friend at Street fighter, but our world is slowly falling apart and I can't stand to believe that there is a whole generation of jackasses who don't think this matters. So get out...Now" I locked the store against the insistence of my District Manager and went home.
I was a sophomore in college that day, and I remember that I had to be at work really early-probably about 8:30 a.m. I sold candy and newspapers at the information desk. I remember being confused as to why a TV was rolled out in the main lobby area of my building, so I told my co-worker I'd check it out. When I saw all the smoke and the serious tone in Katie Couric's voice, I knew it was bad news. We immediately hopped online with our terribly slow computer in search of more information, and to e-mail our respective moms, even though we had no connections to NYC. Curiously enough, my lone class for the day had been canceled last week, so I had the whole day on my hands.
After my shift, I went over to my boyfriend's room, where a big group of us commiserated about what this might mean-were they going to be drafted was one concern. I remember that at some point, I got some lunch and decided to go work out, because I couldn't just sit around all day. I remember that my dad was SERIOUSLY pissed off at me for working out. He worked for a television station in Cleveland, and there were reports that Flight 93 had entered airspace over northern Ohio, and he was concerned because I lived in the tallest building on campus. It was very out of character for him to be so upset about something seemingly so small. I attended a prayer service later that night and when I returned to my room, I remember shutting the TV off and just going to bed. I really needed silence at that moment like I never had before. I also believe that I still have the e-mail newsletter that Peter Jennings sent out that day-he was my idol growing up and he so eloquently captured the feelings of that day.
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