I was 21 at the time, half a lifetime ago now. Was working building student housing at the Central Penn campus, when we heard the news over the radio. I remember my first reaction as “Holy Shit, we are at war”, followed swiftly by the hope that I would not be drafted into the military.
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My director was pissed that our fortune 500 company was losing productivity watching the TV, many on the team were reservists. She told us to stay focused on our work, we all blinked at her like she was crazy and she walked away not saying anything.
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“Why is the Internet so damned slow?!”
And then I eventually got to the CNN site.
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That’s another thing I remember about that day. As I recall CNN ended up tweaking their homepage to show a stripped-down/bare-bones version of their site to deal with the sudden bandwidth demands as everyone was trying to find out what the hell was going on.
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This is an incredible collection of memories.
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My sister was in high school a few blocks away, and watched the towers come down on TV and through the window, simultaneously. Then she had to walk North several miles (without shoes, but I don’t really understand that part of the story).
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Same here. Several months after the WTC debris was cleared and unofficially named Ground Zero, I visited one of my cousins and his family in Queens. He told me of GZ attracting tourists and morbid freaks… yet he asked me if I wanted to take a look at GZ, offering to drive me there…as if I came all the way from CA to join the gawkers. Just told him nope. He said nothing to that; I’m sure he understood.
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They still have that.
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That continued on for several years after it was cleared away and the PATH trains were routed through the area again. For 3 years in the mid ‘aughts, I worked around 2xx Broadway, pretty much a block away from it. Taking trains through Ground Zero coming and going to work.
Souvenir vendors popped up and gawkers were ever present. It did not put me in a good place.
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They were using the Ground Zero label even within the first week.
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Watching people riveted while watching TV isn’t exactly riveting to watch.
Well sure – if the entertainment value of 9/11 footage is your top priority and you have no natural sense of empathy.
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I still vividly remember the second plane hitting and don’t need a reminder. I was in a math class at the time and the teacher turned on the TV after the first plane hit. The rest of that day was spent with everyones eyes glued to the TV.
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This was not a pleasant time in Nepal, where I was staying on 9/11, in a town with a population mostly identifying as Muslim. Coincidentally, on my bus ride into that town a couple of days beforehand, I met some local Maoist resistance fighters who informed me that India had already locked down its Red Fortresses in anticipation of a major terrorist event. The fighters claimed that, if requested, they could hunt Osama Bin Laden and bring him to justice. I was visiting an American friend in that town on the border of India. My friend and I watched the replays of the planes hitting the towers, and then the towers falling, on Fox, which was available via satellite on her landlord’s television. It was a very disturbing day, when we bicycled through town, and very still and quiet, like the folks watching the news channel in Sears.
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I had a friend who was on the first plane that struck the towers. I didn’t find that out for several days after the event; when I found out, for some reason I was hit with a tremendous feeling of guilt. I don’t know if it was a form of “survivor’s guilt” or what, but thinking about him even now brings that all back.
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I was nearby in New Jersey. After we determined that my father hadn’t been killed when the plane slammed into his offices in the Pentagon (he was late for work), we spent the day trying to find the people we knew who had worked in Towers. Three didn’t make it. One was found late in the afternoon, up around West 34th street asking people “help me find my shoes, I’ve lost them.” He was covered in soot, shoeless.
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I was at work in our London office when a very good friend called me to say a plane had hit the building and they were evacuating. I said call me from the outside and that was the last thing I ever said to him. Since our offices were on 101-107 of WTC1, no one from the office got out. I lost a lot of friends and colleagues that day.
I remember at the time of the conversation we thought it was minor - when I used to work in WTC, there were always small planes like Cessna’s flying below the level of our floor and when he told me (in a calm voice), I just assumed it was something of that size and they would get out. It wasn’t until we got the TV’s running a bit later that we realised the extent of the impact.
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For me it does, only because it brings me back to that day and knowing how I felt as things unfolded. And I lived in Boston at the time, where two of the originating flights were from. Feeling confused, shocked, helpless, and sad.
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I lived in small town America at the time. The people there were mostly celebrating that a bunch of liberal abortionist Jewish heathens got taken out. No joke.
And my opinion of my fellow man has sadly not even gone up since that day.
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