Where Were You?

I had just dropped off my oldest child for her first day of preschool, so I was a bit emotional as it was. When I first started listening to the report, I thought it was a spoof (local DJs have a strange sense of humor). When I got home, my husband, who is a police officer, had just returned from his shift. Once I realized it was real, I wanted to pick up my daughter, but the school was on lock-down and wouldn't release the students. I'll never forget the feeling when I called the school and was told I couldn't get my daughter. So, we sat in front of the TV. Right away, my husband blamed BinLaden and specualted on how the gov't would hunt him down. I really didn't think that we would go to war, although I figured there would be plenty of covert assinations. We live very close to an ANG base, and there were so many soldiers moving in and out for awhile, and we would see them out and about. It was a constant reminder of the lives lost... civilians, fire fighters, police officers, soldiers. Every day, my husband goes to work protected by a Kevlar vest. In 13 years, he's never been injured by a gun. Not much Kevlar can do if a terrorist wants to blow up a building. I don't really fear it happening, but I am sure those who lost loved ones on 9/11 didn't, either. Unfortunately, the religious fanatics are all the more dedicated now, seven years later.

I was in Juarez, Mexico, enjoying a respite from a summer of intense work. I was asleep when I hear the door open and my buddy saying, "It's all fucked up. They're flying airplanes into buildings!"

I crawled out from under the blankets asking, "What buildings? Whose planes?"

He answered, "Pentagon. World Trade Center. Airliners."

I was wide awake. I turned on my radio and tuned to a station in El Paso. After ten minutes I needed a TV. This need was met by the second-hand shop across the street. A thirteen inch black and white set was soon set up and showing the chaos, the smoke, the running people covered in dust.

My first thought upon seeing these images was the one that is correct; religious fanatics finally came through on the threats they had been making for decades.

My second thought was whether or not I could easily reenter the U.S. I had an opportunity to find out a couple days later when it was necessary to visit my bank. I walked up to the footbridge, paid twenty five cents (American), and pushed through the turnstile. At the American side I flashed my picture ID and was waved through without delay.

Three weeks later I repatriated, en route to Washington, DC. My buddy had no ID outside of paycheck stubs. Airport security in Dallas passed him through after he pleaded most convincingly and I vouched for him. When we reached DC we built the stage for the memorial concert that was held in RFK Stadium, October 21, 2001.

I recall that the security at the stadium seemed more rigorous than at the border as well as at the airports. This, and subsequent observation, lead me to assume that the actual level of national security is not commensurate with the amount of noise being made about it. And this neither surprises or worries me. Probably because government has been promising greatness and achieving mediocrity ever since I've been paying attention. At least it doesn't promise mediocrity and achieve total failure. At least not all the time.

The controlled demolitions of the twin towers and building #7 was orchestrated by your own government. It served as a catalyst to invade countries in the Middle East. Be afraid. There are some real whackos out there...

I signed up in the Delayed Entry Program for the Marine Corps right at the end of my junior year of high school. I was a senior, in French class when the first plane hit. The next period was in government class. Our teacher had the TV on and hardly a word was said during the whole class. I remember the surreal feeling when everyone, sitting quietly, watched the second plane fly into the other tower. It was at that moment I realized there was a possibility I would probably end up going to war after I graduated.

I joined the Marines with three of my closest friends. We were ready to stand up and avenge the helpless Americans who fell victim to a twisted, dark tragedy. Seven years later and one of them is dead and another has two Purple Hearts and still recovering from wounds that happened well over three years ago...in a war that had nothing to do with the people who were responsible for 9/11.

It makes me sick to my fucking stomach. I hate George W. Bush and everyone who enabled him. I hate the media. I hate all of the voters who rewarded Bush's lies and deceit by re-electing him for a second term. I hate I hate I hate.

But most of all, I miss my friend. Now think of how many friends and family of the 4,154 other troops who feel the same way. Ha, sad how this 9/11 discussion turned into a rant about Iraq. ...Maybe the two ARE connected after all!

I was in the public affairs office of Baltimore's second largest hospital, which is where I still am, though we've twice relocated to new offices. I called my sister in Annapolis, where she was home-schooling, so I figured she didn't have the TV on; her husband worked in DC at the executive office of the president, so she spent a few panicked hours not hearing from him. I called my brother in Alaska, where my mother was visiting, since I figured they were still asleep. I got a call from a friend of my older daughter, who was at the University of Virginia, to say that Barrie was OK, but had not been able to reach us. That friend must herself have been worried, because her brother worked at the Pentagon, where, they found out days later, he was killed by the plane.

Frank Moorman, skeptic

I was most likely at work (because I am always at work), but I really don't remember. I don't think I had a clear idea of what was happening until I got home at the end of the day and saw the news. On the other hand, I can tell you exactly where I was when the O.J. verdict dropped.

At the time, I was on a business trip to Silicon Valley. I went down to the hotel lobby to get breakfast and saw the news on the TV. At first I couldn't take it in - it was just too much like something out of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie to be actually happening. Not to trivialize it, but that's what everyone was saying.

I think I was more concerned about my wife than myself, because all flights were grounded and I didn't know when I'd be able to get back to Phoenix where I live. Fortunately I was able to get a flight that Friday, which I shared with about two other people.

In the days that followed, I tried to find a silver lining. I figured that people would take stock of American foreign policy in the Middle East and relate it to this act of blowback. This is not to make excuses for what was a terrible atrocity, but I thought people would ask, "Why do they hate us?" I never dreamed they would be so easily fobbed off with a clownish buffoon telling them, "for our freedom."

I've always felt since then that Osama bin Laden could knock down the WTC, but he could never destroy America, because it is an idea - free people governing themselves in a transparent and accountable manner. Since then, tragically, the US has come closer to a corrupt, dominionist, totalitarian police state than I would ever have thought possible. We have destroyed ourselves, or damn close to it.

- No More Mr. Nice Guy!

At the time I was living in Edmonton, Alberta. I was working afternoon shift and so was asleep. My wire was at work during the attacks, so her sister phoned to tell me to check out the news but didn't say exactly what had happened. After a few minutes I struggled out of bed and stumbled to the living room, minutes before the second plane hit.

I basically spent the rest of the day watching the news, stunned. I'm embarrassed to admit that I slowly got excited because I thought this would wake the sleeping giant that is the American military and there'd be a war for me to watch and cheer on from the sidelines. The USA was going to make whomever did this PAY!

But that never really happened. At least, not the way that I thought it would. I've grown up since then and no longer celebrate death and destruction. I also no longer vote conservative.

I remember parts of that day pretty well. It was the first day my oldest child spent in day care. She was just something like 6 weeks old and we were nervous that day to begin with; leaving our most precious person in the hands of strangers.

Heard about the first plane and guessed it was an accident although I also heard it was a big plane, a jet. I thought OK, big accident. Something must have gone terribly wrong.

When I heard about the second plane, I went to the conference room where our oldest doctor was watching the TV also. He said something that struck like a ton of bricks as I couldn't even comprehend the possibility that someone did this on purpose. He asked, "You know what this means don't you?" "What?...."

"War", was his response. My mind reeled because I knew he was right and that it was inevitable. I had some thoughts about what this would mean for our country. I've been so lucky when it comes to things like this. The military turned me down; I've never been drafted; the wars I've seen while alive were relatively short and sweet. But this was something different. Something dire. An after school fight that couldn't be avoided.

My sincere condolences to those who were near it or lost someone on that day.

When the first report came in on NBC, I was just arriving at work in my car and heard Bryant Gumbel mention that a plane had hit the WTC (I could pick up the local affiliate on the radio)....at that point, I think everyone had assumed it was some sort of terrible accident. I was at work for a little while, without radio or TV, and not online, before my adult daughter called in tears to ask, "Mom, what's happening?!!" and tell me about the second plane and the Pentagon. Let me interject that over the previous year, she had been somewhat cool and estranged from me around some family issues, and we hadn't really spoken in a while. Yet at the moment she saw the second plane hit on her TV, her only impulse was to call me. I went home and put on the TV, which by that time was running video of the attacks in a constant loop. I called her back and together, she at her home and I at mine, stayed on the phone with each other, crying together and watching for as long as we could bear it.
A few days later, reminded of how much family matters and how life can turn on a dime in its precariousness and randomness, we reunited and began to reclaim our relationship, which now flourishes. And on every anniversary of 9/11, my daughter sends out an email to all her family and friends reminding them what they mean to her.
I think today of all those who perished and all those left behind without their loved ones. It never gets any less sad and it never will.

I really don't remember. I know that's some sort of sacrilege, but I don't have the slightly idea of exactly what I did that day. I do know I didn't watch much about it until later in the week, but that day...

I was sleeping. I work late at night, so I only caught the story after I woke up.

In the days that followed, I watched Bush stagger into awareness that something serious had happened. I watched him turn from a swaggering fratboy president into a frozen paperweight of a president as he heard the news, and then into a swaggering war president.

I was MUCH in favor of military action in Afghanistan, in order to capture Bin Laden and find out more about what had happened. But then our presidential dullard went on to piss away vast amounts of worldwide goodwill, a cross-border cultural capital that could have been invested in friendship and activism that could have remade the world.

Instead, these few years later, everything is worse. Everything. We put a dimwitted fool in a place of power, and ... he did all the wrong things, instead of some of the right ones.

We'll be paying for it for decades. And he and his friends will be profiting.

I was in Copenhagen, Denmark in my home. I was sitting playing age of empires in the afternoon, when the phone rang.

It was a friend of mine, saying the twin towers had been hit, and it was the Palestinians that did it. At first I was waiting for the punchline, unwilling to fall for the joke. Then I thought, hmm what a strange joke this would be, then I noticed the sound of CNN in the background on her phone. I turned on the tv just as the first tower fell.

I was home alone, as my girlfriend was at work. I bought a pizza and opened a bottle of wine, and watched the tv for a little time, then packed the pizza, and the bottle and went to the apartment of the girl who called me. We ended up 5-6 people watching the tv, talking, and drinking way to much wine for most of the night.

On the way to work, listening to the radio as news came of 'something wrong' in New York--a plane had hit one of the towers of The World Trade Center. I remembered one or two other plane-hits-building occasions, thinking in terms of smaller aircraft, wondering how they let an idiot fly around Manhattan, when the second one hit. And at that point, just as I was rounding the N-to-E corner of the I-465 loop, an axiom popped into my head:

"Once is accident, twice is enemy action."

I didn't know for awhile just how right I was. Reaching the office, two sales managers were outside, smoking. "Is there a TV in there?" I said. "Conference Room," they said. And that was where we all went for the next few hours, where we saw the towers drop, and the great cloud, and the news industry went into a speculative headspin that they haven't yet recovered from.

Yet, for all that, the world didn't change.

I know that, for some reason, it did change for lots of people--or they claim it did. But all I saw was yet another tragedy in the endless procession of tragedies that make up human history.

People did things like this all the time, really. History is replete with atrocities that somebody thought was a good idea at the time, after all. Oklahoma City wasn't all that far away in time.
But then, we didn't go to war in Michigan after that one.

The other thing I remembered was a conversation about terrorism against the US that I'd had with someone at some pont before. I told him that even a nuclear attack was a pinprick on a colossus like America in terms of the damage it could do physically. But the problem was that such an event would transform the nation into the most dangerous, paranoid war machine ever known and woe to anyone it even suspected of threatening it, for they would be stomped out without mercy or remorse, and we could never change back to what we were.

Happily, 9-11 wasn't a nuke, but the echoes of the response don't fill me with confidence for the peace of the world. Revenge tales never make good national epics.

One of the values of the United States is not that things like this can't happen here, it's that they do happen so seldom that it causes comment.

Steve "An unstated driver of immigration" James

I was standing on the balcony of my office building on 32nd street watching the towers burn.

I was just leaving for work when my mother called. As was my habit, I'd turned off the radio some while before to keep myself from being distracted and actually get out of the house on time. Usually I don't answer the phone in the morning, and let it go to the voicemail, but for some reason I answered. My mother said "are you watching?" I said "watching what?" She said "Turn on the TV. You have to see the news."

When she said "any channel" I got really, really scared. But I figured someone had tried to assassinate the President - not what I saw. Like Jim, I turned on the telly in time to see the second building hit.

I did go to work, where we had a couple clandestine televisions tuned in to whatever channel they got (it really didn't matter), and we tracked the locations of various of our staff and family members who were on the East Coast. I remember one group just hired a car and drove back, which is about two days of straight driving. I remember how people in the online communities posted reports of people we knew in NYC and DC, their safety and locations. Or not.

We got a bomb report and were told to go home, and to check the weather number (usually used for ice storms) to see if we should come to work the next day.

I remember several days later, we went out on the lawn and watched as the first commercial planes cut contrails overhead.

I was in class when it all first started happening. We didn't even know at first, just went on with the coursework. The bell rang, we all got up and went to our next classes. In my next class, the TV was on. That's when I first learned of the events.

We didn't do anything for the rest of the day, just sat and stared at the TV, and talked about what it meant. I remember, very clearly, leaning over to a friend and saying cynically, "Watch, in five years they'll make a movie out of this." I was disgusted, shocked, and scared. It just didn't seem possible; to watch those towers fall, live on TV, it was just unreal. It was a movie, to me. It just seemed like some too-real special effects. But slowly, I guess, it hit me. I knew that things weren't going to be the same. I was pretty sure that there'd be a war over this...it was like Pearl Harbor. Somebody had to pay. Little did I know everything that would come of 9/11.

I was huddled in my cubicle, trying to find web-news sources that weren't choked with traffic. Until I couldn't take it anymore and just walked out of work to go home and be with my wife and kids in the event that bigger things happened and we needed to make a run for somewhere else. On the way out of work, I saw forklifts blocking off a road leading to a power transformer station with concrete barricades. On the way home I listened to reports of a plane going down in PA, and thought immediately that it had been intended for some target.

We spent a good chunk of the day trying to track down my father-in-law who works at the Pentagon. He turned out to have been working off-site, after having an on-site meeting canceled.

In Brighton Beach, more specifically. We had a crummy antenna for the TV, but nothing was working that day. No phone, no Internet, so when I stumbled out of bed a little before 9am to go job hunting, my roommate (who really should have woken me up right away) and I had to experience it all old school, and imagine it all as we listened to the radio.

Another roommate's boyfriend and I went to the local hospital later that day to donate blood (which is a big deal for me because I get sick and pass out when I have blood drawn at the doctor's), but they were overflowing with like-minded souls, so they actually turned us away.

Anyway, it was a few days before I saw any moving pictures of anything. In the weeks to come, I would want very much to leave NYC because the commercialization was already happening: people selling pictures of the towers on the street and whatnot. 9/11 (tm) indeed, Mr. Olbermann.

I was stuck in a barren island in the middle of the Aegean Sea doing my mandatory time. I then had to spend the next month on high alert patrols for some reason.

I was just previewing this for my own post of the same title as Brent's:

There's a cool, light rain falling here in mid-Missouri, a taste of fall in the air. In about an hour I've got a doctor's appointment, where I'll be told that I need to continue losing weight and deal with some other minor health issues, and that I have a low-grade respiratory infection. After I get back from that, I'll probably turn my attention to the next batch of work waiting for my attention. I've got a client coming by this afternoon to pick up a nice Oriental folding screen that needed some conservation work. And this evening my wife is giving a presentation to a local history society about the history of our little neighborhood which I'll attend. In other words, this is a fairly routine day. Normal. Like most days.

Except it's not really. It's the seventh anniversary of the 9-11 attacks.

And I'm curious - where were you when you saw/heard about the attacks?

Let's not turn this into a rant about religion, or the ineptitude/sleaziness of the Bush Administration following the attacks. Or even how America needs to "get over it." I don't want to blow things out of proportion. I'm just simply curious how you remember the day.

Me? I was getting ready to go to my art gallery, for a routine day. I heard a news report on the radio about the first plane hitting, and thought that it was some idiot in a Piper or something. But just out of curiosity, and because I needed to iron a shirt anyway, I turned on the TV across the room from where the ironing board was set up. And then I saw what was really going on. As I stood there, stunned, I watched the second airliner crash into the other tower.

How about you?

Jim Downey

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