Where Were You on 11 September 2001?
by Richardson ~ September 11th, 2007. Filed under: America, History.This is the “where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot?” question for our generation. I got up late, hours after the attacks a few time zones away, got on the net, and was trying to comprehend the picture I was seeing on the front page of the Korea Herald (my start page in those days); the Twin Towers burning. Just as I was grasping what had happened we received a call from my Mother-in-law in Korea, asking if we were ok. Later in class the professor allowed some talk of the attacks, but kept trying to steer conversation back towards East Asian welfare systems; I found it amazing that he didn’t seem to understand the magnitude of what had happened.
September 11th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
I was training for a long term care facility, and we were doing rounds. A friend told me with a bug eyed look to look at the TV in the break room. We all went and looked at CNN in disbelief and horror. At first, I thought it was a fire that broke out or something and clearly remember seeing the 2nd plane hit the tower. I was so dumbfounded it was beyond comprehension. I will never forget that day for as long as I live.
September 11th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
one thing i can’t forget. the smell. 3k lives at 150 lbs average.
the stench lingered on for days..
smoke that rose from the rubble..
by the time i got down there, nypd had closed off access to below 14th st i believe. still, i wanted to see.
i was warned to leave the area by an officer. i wasn’t the only one trying to get closer to the scene. there weren’t a mob but crowds were forming. they all turned around and waked the opposite way as haqve been directed by nypd.
i think i walked to 42nd st to catch my r train.. it wasn’t running. most trains weren’t running. one staion i walked to were empty. kind of eerie silence never before not heard in all my years in nyc.
somehow i wound up in queensborough plaza. there i saw many people waiting as i did. as i looked around, smoke still rose high into the air from where the towers had stood. i guess all the people at the station felt the same. though there were many people, they were all silent. looking down. i saw this one particular young women whose face were covered in sadness that no hollywood actress could replicate. some people i spoke to were uncertain and confused as to what happened and why….as i were. never take our lives for grasnted.
September 11th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I had just started my senior of high school. I was on my way to 3rd period class which was Visual Basic. My classroom didnt have a television in it so the teacher told us to go across the hall to the other classroom. From the very second I saw those towers burning, I knew this country had changed forever. I knew OBL did this because Al-Queda had wanted to go after WTC for second time since the 93′ attack was considered a failure by them. I also remember feeling empty inside because my aunt use to work in Tower 1 65th floor. She use too take me to work with here when I was around 5-7. Luckily, she retired just three months before the first attack. The last time I went on the very top was in 1998.
September 11th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
I was staying at a SOS Children’s Village near Cap Haitien, Haiti. During the attacks I was sick and sleeping in my room because I had eaten something the day before that turned out not being good for my stomach. In the morning an exited kid from the village came into my room telling some thing about New York and burning towers. I was feeling really sick and tired thinking wtf he was talking about and went back to sleep. When finally I got up at noon and went to the office everybody was sitting in front of a radio and listening to a national station. They had to translate the news for me since I don’t speak Creole. In the evening I saw the frist moving images from New York on CNN at the house of the director of the village and I started to realize the full extent of what had happened.
I was supposed to take a flight from the capital Port-au-Prince via Miami to Dusseldorf, Germany, on September 14th. I was hoping that, concerning flights, everything would be back to normal after a few days. But I was so wrong. When I came to Port-au-Prince there were no flights going anywhere outside Haiti for many days to follow. September 15th I spent travelling to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, by car. After a few days at the SOS Children’s Village in Santo Domingo I was able to get on a turist charter flight from Punta Cana to Dusseldorf.
September 11th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
I didn’t find out until the next morning Korean time. Some Korean neighbors were trying to tell me very excitedly what happened. I found the story so bizarre I went back in and turned on the TV to find out what actually happened.
“What were you doing when you heard about Challenger?” belongs in the same category. I was in Houston at the time, and it was a big deal there. On the day of the memorial, when Reagan gave his famous “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God” speech, people drove around with their lights on in sympathy with the families of the dead, many of whom lived in the area.
Park Chung-hee’s assasination was similarly shocking to Koreans, a friend told me. For Koreans growing up in the 60s and 70s, Park was the only president they knew.
September 11th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
My parents house, eating breakfast. My dad called my mom, and we put on CNN.
September 11th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
There is another aspect of this – how we got the news. Once I saw it on the net and we got the call, the TV was on all day. We were switching between CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, while surfing the net for news. Since we were several time zones away, both towers were already down, and footage of that was replaying over and over.
It doesn’t seem like six years have passed.
September 11th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
i was at home and my mother happened to be over at my home. when i woke up, she told me that i probably didn’t have to go to work and told me to go watch tv.
she has NEVER told me to go watch tv.
and then i just couldn’t comprehend what was happening as soon as i turned on the tv i was literally watching the 2nd plane hit the 2nd tower live.
it was like a hollywood movie, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case.
then i saw the people jumping from windows and i couldn’t take it anymore.
i had just been in new york for the US Open Tennis 2 weeks earlier.
just couldn’t fathom.
September 12th, 2007 at 2:51 am
Having just got back from the WTC in NYC the previous Friday, I was at my computer in downtown San Francisco working for Morgan-Stanley . It was the first week in the past month that I hadn’t been in the WTC every work day. I still have my access card. We were all watching the feed on our computer, as it was the headquarters of my company and they were saying that a plane had crashed into the WTC. I was watching live and saw the second plane come slamming into the building. I felt this violating rush of evil. I had just witnessed something so evil and I have never felt that sad, disturbed, and angry at the same time. I was frickin crying and gritting my teeth pacing around the office so pissed off at the horror. I called the recruiter that day to see if there was any way I could get in the military with my asthma, as I had been turned away from all the branches before because of that. No chance. One of my friends that I grew up with, played sports, got into trouble with, and shared some great time with was killed. Murdered. So sad.
Any American reading, please take heed to this part!!!
You know what made me even more upset??? I was reading and posting on a San Francisco blog that evening on craigslist.org A lady had just gotten back from a rally in San Francisco that evening and the rally WASN’T in support of the US. The rally was some far-left extremists (which is over half of San Francisco) that made the occasion into a rallying cry against white-male-republicans. They were screaming that all minorities were going to be targeted and brutalized and this was going to be the fascist-nazi white-male-republicans excuse to go on an ethnic-clensing spree. The lady that got back said she was white and that she felt so scared that she was going to get mobbed and had to leave.
All over the blogs in San Francisco, the far-left was spinning a terrorist attack on the USA from islamic extremists into a white-male-republican attack on minorities and all the crap you can think of FROM DAY ONE!!! Then came all the conspiracy BS, and then later it was all about the republicans wanting to build a stupid oil pipe-line through Afghanistan. It’s always about a damn oil pipeline somewhere to them.
You know…. I thought I was kind of liberal when I moved to San Francisco, but OH MY GOD!!! That area of the country is seriously ignorant when it comes to common-sense and life-wisdom.
Sorry…. it’s an emotional topic…..
September 12th, 2007 at 7:14 am
I was asleep on Camp Sears in Uijeongbu. My buddy across the hallway banged on my door and woke me up…I thought it was an alert. I didn’t have a TV, so we watched it over and over in his room.
Well, we did end up having an alert, placing extra guards around the base perimiter, and locking everyone down on post for a few weeks, which turned into months of modified curfew, which evolved into the curfew that we still have to this day, as if curfew would have prevented 9-11.
September 12th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Everyone,
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
I don’t doubt there will be more 9/11 (or Pearl Harbor/JFK/Challenger) like events in the future, hopefully not any as significant for the current generations.
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Perhaps a national curfew would help…
September 12th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
It was 3 AM in my time zone. I was just about to turn in after reading or writing for grad school when I turned on the TV to catch the latest headlines before turning in. It was some minutes after the first plane hit. They were still cautioning it could have been an accident. I knew enough to know that was untrue.
I debated a couple of minutes whether to wake my wife (Korean) up or not since she had to get up at 6. I decided to do it. I popped a tape in the living room VCR and woke her up and we watched in the bedroom and me in the living room as I paced back and forth trying to call relatives. My sister had a good number of friends who were stewardesses - some out of Boston - one whose family and in-laws had died in a crash on vacation on the west coast just some months before…
My wife and I had been married for 3 years, but this was only our first or part of our 2nd year in the US. I was explaining that unless this turned out to be some domestic case like with Oklahoma, the magnitude of this attack would mean war or at minimum a series of punitive bombings….
At that point, we both saw the 2nd plane strike the 2nd tower - and I told her “Too big….”
When I could speak, I said that the terrorists (since I doubted a group of Americans would take the time and money and organization to put together such an attack) had miscalculated, because this was too big. This would mean at least one prolonged war and would change the US (and world) from this moment forward.
I stayed up for days watching the news, taping it, and reading the internet.
The most interesting thing I caught not too long afterward was a speech - in NY - by Noam Chompsky…..where his disciples cheered even harder…..
I still have 6 video tapes from then. I used the first yesterday in my high school English classes for their daily journal writing…..a “where was I” piece….
I skipped one of my grad school courses the next afternoon, because I didn’t want to listen to a couple of the Koreans and a Chinese student. One of the Koreans seemed to like getting visibly angry when he heard my opinions on things. Like, the other Korean (most of the class was Korean…..it was just these two guys who were asses) asked me once what I thought about the Japanese Prime Minister visiting the war dead shrine, and I said in Western society, what he said on the visits would be more important than just a visit, because it is a cemetary for the soldiers throughout Japanese history…..not that contreversial of a thought…..and I have no dog in the hunt…..but the fat Korean did his usual….”So! You think………..” and repeated verbatium what I had just said in a huffy voice with scowling eyes….
One of the two Chinese students in the class was also a classic……every time someone mentioned a scholar who criticized China’s government or talked about democratic reform in China, he’d blurt out, “Stupid American scholars!!” Then bitterly complain about how they knew nothing about China or Asia. Which made me wonder why he was getting a degree in an American university….
I had had the prof for this class before, and he had been excellent at playing devil’s advocate against all students before. But, for some reason, that semester, he just let them say whatever they wanted, and two or three of us non-Korean, non-Japanese students just threw in the towel as well after the childish displays of anger…..and I always talked a lot in classes (usually….)…
I didn’t have it in me to go to this class the day after 9/11….
The next week, when I did attend, the non-fat Korean who usually acted like he was a co-professor in the course did bother to ask me how I was doing first —- before he explained that the Korean students on campus were worried the US would use the attacks as an excuse not to give visas to Korean students who had protested against the US in Korea…..I just shrugged still being depressed with the whole thing…..
And, as I noted, I played some of my taped coverage for my classes yesterday (I’m teaching ESOL here in the US), and a Palestinian-Jordanian asked me if I knew why they had attacked those buildings. I just shrugged and she continued that the answer was because America does that to everyone else.
I had a hunch what she would say, because she had told the class once or twice when she went on an anti-Bush speech how the Palestinians only throw rocks but the Israelis kill them anyway. And she explained to the class how the Israelies find out which Palestinians have money then kill them and take it.
I wish I was at least making some of this up…..
….but I’m not….
And I can also tell you confidently that Bush’s attempt at granting amnesty to illegals already in country has done absolutely nothing to win over the Hispanic community - at least not in my area…..
September 12th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
‘I don’t doubt there will be more 9/11 (or Pearl Harbor/JFK/Challenger) like events in the future, hopefully not any as significant for the current generations. “
I view history through a Buddhist cyclical rather than Western linear perspective. Life goes on, the world turns, and future generations will have their own emotionally infused historical memories.
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“Perhaps a national curfew would help…”
I don’t think I care for you to elaborate on that idea.
September 12th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
The curfew comment was in reply to #10 and not serious.
September 12th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
That’s a relief. BTW, I thought of you, Joshua at OFK, and our differences regarding Bush and Iraq when I came across this interesting little news item about how the brains of liberals and conservatives are wired differently.
[admin note: inserted link into text to fix sidebar issue]
September 12th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Heh, funny. I’d be interested in who did the research and how it affected the outcome. I am, however, a solid INTJ:
http://www.dprkstudies.org/2007/03/04/political-and-personality-introspection/
Who thinks of you when I read items like this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/22/AR2006022202012.html
September 12th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
I was stationed on Camp Casey at the time and fell a sleep watching the tape delayed Monday Night Football on AFN and woke up in the middle of the night to turn off my TV and saw the buildings on fire. I thought it was a movie or something playing but after a minute it dawned on me that it was real.
I banged on my buddy’s door who was a warrant officer to wake up. We sat there and watched the news and then went and woke the 1SG up as well. He then went and got the commander and we all watched it together. Some other people filtered into the room and we sat there and watched the news in amazement.
Eventually an alert was called. I tried walking to my company area but the 2nd Tank DFAC had a bomb scare. What idiot on 9/11 would make a bomb threat at the DFAC? On Camp Casey someone did. Thus I couldn’t get to my company area and went to my baracks and watched the news. Eventually the bomb scare was over and my unit was organized to pull an insane amount of guard duty around Camp Casey and everyone was locked down on post.
Two days later my unit went to the field for two weeks for bradley gunnery. I was never so happy to get off of Camp Casey and get away from the insane guard duty we were pulling.
That day changed my life forever because a year and a half later I was crossing the berm into Iraq.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Are you implying I might not be happy, Richardson? Happiness is a temporary emotion. It is contentment that I seek.
September 13th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
I was on the way to a CCNA training class when I heard of the first airplane crash on the radio. At the time they thought it was an accident, but later while in the class we heard of the second crash and that it was no accident. Class was dismissed for the day, I went to a friend’s house for lunch and we watched the coverage on TV. I will not forget that day.
September 14th, 2007 at 8:49 am
I was on my way to a college class that I hated and I was listening to the radio, when I heard someone say, that they heard that a small airplane had hit the WTC, I was thinking, great another fool trying to fly. I parked my car and saw allot of scared faces, I knew that something was wrong asap.
I ran to the tv room and saw the video of wtc on fire, i took one look and stated that was not a small plane. we then saw the video of plane #2 hit, and i was thinking, ok some fu&^%$%^ are going to die because of this. Then I went to class and the idiot teacher was teaching the class, like nothing had happened. UN FRACKING REAL. University of North Texas canceled the rest of the classes for the day, and I went home and watched tv for awhile. All I remember was crying and getting angry alot.
6 years later, still hurts when I show 9-11 cartoons on my blog.
September 14th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
i lived about a mile from teh pentagon at the time. my roommate at the time was woken up from the blast — he said our building shook and the windows rattled.
i was working in Old Town Alexandria (suburban DC) and we could see smoke from one of the windows of the office. after a while of aimlessly walking around in shock int he office our boss said we could go home if we wanted, so i headed home with a co-worker. it took at least twice as long as normal because we were fighting all the traffic pouring (crawling) out of DC and some roads, including the one i lived on, were closed or moving so slowly you couldn’t cross them.
after watching the smoke for a while from the balcony of my apartment, my roommate, coworker, and i biked the mile to the pentagon. the things i remember most are teh huge jets of water from teh firetrucks and that there were helicopters everywhere — taking off, landing, hovering.
like kevin above, the services won’t take me because of a medical condition, otherwise i think i would have joined
September 20th, 2007 at 11:55 am
I woke up late that morning after a very late night at work. The sound of firetruck after firetruck screaming by my apartment’s window in downtown Manhattan eventually got me up, so I stumbled out of bed. As I always do, I listened to the messages on my answering machine that told me I had 12 messages. 12 messages? Once I started listening to them and people kept asking me if I was alright, I flipped on the t.v. and saw the first tower in smoke. Then the second plane hit and everything changed from surprise to outright disbelief. It seemed surreal, but the smoke in the distance and the smell that lingered for months made it very real. The most chilling site to me was the white, unmarked, refrigerated 18-wheelers that lined Second Avenue for more than 3 city blocks and sat idling for days. They were waiting to take away the corpses, but were never needed.
July 12th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
I was in my agency bldg across the river from the Reagan Airport. (South of Pentagon) I was in a training session on second floor facing the river. While I was watching the CNN coverage on the twin tower, somebody yelled from the hallway that “Pentagon is burning!!!” And I thought in my mind that he said “Twin Tower was burning!” so I replied to him that “We know, we are already watching on CNN feed.” Then he came into my class and advised us to look out the window to look at the Pentagon with thick black smoke.
I tried to contact my parents in Chicago to let them know that I am alright, but all phone lines were dead. I cam home at 8pm that night b/c everyone with family just left the bldg and those of us single people stayed to cover their work.
I finally able to contact my parents in Chicago and my sister in SF. My sister told me that she got woken up at 7AM PST when our aunt from Korea called her to see if I was okay. That’s when my sister found out about the attacks in NYC and DC. Our aunt in Korea saw the evening news on TV about the Pentagon Attack and she remembered that I worked for US DOD in DC area.
Talk about modern media advancement!! My sister found out about Pentagon Attack from our aunt in Korea who wanted to know that I am alive!!!