butthead aka 216

almost 9/11 damn man time flies

what a day that was shiit

non americans prob dont feel as strong or the same. everyone always says they remember where they were when jfk was killed and ppl have said 9/11 is the 'jfk of this generation of ppl' so do u remember where u were when it happened and what u were doin?


me-

in mr halihans 9th grade art class when first plane hit. not sure what was goin on, got an announcement school was let out early. then went to mrs johnsons social studies class and watched it unfold on tv. i remember nobody really sayin anything, just mrs johnson trying to explain it and talkin about osama. different teachers were in and out, very surreal.

then my mom picked me and my bro up from school and we watched tv all day at home. i remember when the first building collapsed it all kind of hit me suddenly. like... jus thinking my.god.so.many.deaths. like at that moment it just really hit me what this was for some reason. never really forgot that feelin of realization.

damn tho rip to so many ppl that day

Frownland

I was seven years old at the time, living in Arizona, which meant that the attacks began happening at around 5:45 AM for us. So when I was getting ready for school, my dad called me into his room to watch this movie with him. The second plane crashed into the building, and my dad was making phone calls directly thereafter, very lively about the situation. Then the first building fell and the second, and he told me that I was staying home for school that day, saying that "this means war" on the phone. I really didn't grasp the situation at the time and thought to myself "wow, my dad really liked that movie." Silly children.

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Scarlett O'Hara

I remember it was happening on the 12 of September and I was getting live footage on my tv and watching the dramatic clips, see bodys falling out from jumping out of the top floor windows. It was astonishing the amount of people stuck on the floors that had fires or smoke taking over the entire office. I was 12 years old when I was watching the tv. I wasn't at school because I was ill. I was very emotional over the thought of people who were suffering in the fallen towers and the families in their home scrambling to try and find their love ones.

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Trollheart

In Ireland, it was roughly 2pm when it happened. One of my colleagues came back from lunch (this was when I worked obviously) and said "Someone's flown a plane into the Twin Towers!" Nobody believed her. Then someone went online and said yeah it's a biplane. Soon after that real reports began to sort themselves out and we all sat stunned. My boss, a prick but well clued up politically, said "That'll be Mr Bin Laden then!" Even at that point there was nobody claiming responsibility, but he was right.

Work virtually stopped for the day as we all watched the news, and contacted our agents in the US, some people trying to get in touch with relatives there. When I got home it was all over the news. It was heartbreaking.

Don't think for a moment non-US citizens were not hit emotionally by this. We were. When they had that memorial mass for the victims we were all standing in our sitting room watching the telly and I just broke down, sat down and cried. Yeah, I know: baby. But it only just then hit me what had happened, what we were mourning, and how senseless it was.

I remember thinking "I'm living through history. This is going to be on the school curriculum forever now. Nine-eleven is a worldwide event, a tragedy of epic proportions. And the world will never be the same again."

And it hasn't.

God bless all those who lost their lives that day, firefighters, cops, workers in the tower, passengers on the plane, the crews, and everyone who still lives with the memory of that awful day etched into their souls.

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djchameleon

I was 17 at the time and still in boot camp. I believe it was week 6 or so. I remember that I failed my PT test and had to go to the solo make ups by myself. I was still learning the difference between cheifs and officers because they both wear khaki uniforms but obviously you are only supposed to salute officers.

So I was walking by myself that morning and I saw a flood of khaki uniforms on the base and had a feeling that something was up. It was too strange. I also decided it would be better to salute everyone than to pass up officers and NOT salute them but at the same time chiefs hate to get saluted. One chief stopped me and said "I work for a living, don't salute me". The second chief to stop me was one of the pesky chiefs on base that goes around giving demerits to recruits and it gets reflected back to the division that they are a part of. Well lucky me I ran into this douchenozzle and he gave me a demerit.

After I took the test and got back to the rest of my division they were gathering up people that either lived in Manhattan or had parents that worked down there. My mother didn't work in the towers but she worked in a building that was pretty close to it. I later found out that she didn't go into work that day but I was worried about it until I got a chance to call her. They decided to give the recruits a chance to call up their parents to find out if they were okay but only the ones that lived in Manhattan/worked in the towers everyone else was kept in the dark pretty much. They wouldn't let the rest of them see any footage of what happened for a couple of days and we only got to hear the address from Bush. I didn't get to see the footage of the plane crashes til weeks after I graduated from boot camp.

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Plankton

I was at work, watching it all unfold on the net. I felt just pure sadness. The days that followed were nothing short of ultimate patriotism for the most part. People gathering on corners, holding American Flags and signs showing support for our nation. We even took some video while driving through the streets, and after a few passes on a certain busy block I got pulled over for having my GF hanging out of the car with a camera in hand. They let us go after I told the cop I was a vet. It wasn't easy explaining the events to my (then) 7 year old daughter.

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duga

I was a sophomore in high school living in Singapore at the time so it was about 8:45PM for me when it started. My dad was watching the news and I just happened to walk into our tv room and he says to me "Some idiot just flew into the world trade center". We honestly didn't know if it was an attack at the time and since it was international news, no one wanted to speculate until it was for sure. Once the second plane hit, everyone knew. That's when I started to get kind of emotional. Once the first tower went down I started to cry...it was weird, too. I wasn't consciously considering how many people had died right at that moment, I didn't even process that until later. The whole impact of the event must have registered with my subconscious, though, so the tears started coming. Our school principal insisted on not cancelling school the next day to show our resolve or something (I went to an American school)...but our buses - which were very much red, white and blue WE ARE AMERICA school buses - were all painted to disguise them as your typical Singaporean bus. We also had armed guards outside of our school called Gurkhas from then on (Nepalese elite soldier guys who basically stood like stones all days at the entrance). I believe they are still there.

One thing that really stood out to me, though, was I remember thinking "well, if they planes hit the side of the building, they will fall like a chopped tree, right?" and then I felt it was very weird that they went straight down. I thought about that before any of the conspiracy theories started popping up, so that's maybe why I bought into a lot of them.

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Paedantic Basterd

I can't actually believe how long it's been. Seeing everyone describe how young they were is just... weird.

I was in 7th grade, and we listened to the radio all morning. We were 12 and it was so far away we didn't really understand the significance and the radio was boring, but our teacher must have realized that we were listening to the writing of history and made us sit in silence all morning as it developed. Also, at 12 I thought that the pentagon and the White House were the same building.

John Wilkes Booth

I was in computer class in 9th grade. Didn't really feel much about it. It took coming home to my mom crying to figure out what a big deal it actually was. To me it was just some distant event like the OKC bombing. I also didn't realize that they were talking about the twin towers cause they kept calling it the World Trade Center, which I had never heard of.

Freebase Dali

I was sleeping.
I worked nights, and I didn't have TV in my apartment so I didn't find out until I went to work that evening. The boss pulled everyone together and talked about it. I was like... "uh, what?"
Then we went back to our duties.

Since I didn't have TV, couldn't really afford to go out much, lived in Florida where I had no friends apart from people I worked with, I heard only word of mouth stuff. Therefore, it had a far smaller tangible effect on me than I'm sure it did for a lot of other people who were watching the news while it unfolded.

I don't think I even really knew much about 911 until I joined the Army almost 3 years later.

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