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General => History and Mythology Board => Topic started by: Jitter on September 11, 2021, 12:06:07 PM

Title: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Jitter on September 11, 2021, 12:06:07 PM

Is twenty years long enough to be history? Do you remember 911? Where we you? Were you scared?

I was in Finland so it was afternoon, about 4 pm when the first plane hit. I was hanging on IRC a the time so got news quicker than most in Finland. In 2001, websites were not as important news outlets, and the quickest coverage would have been on TV, but we were at work and didn’t have a TV. An old colleague just called yesterday (because today is Saturday) and reminisced how he heard from me what was unfolding. I also remember several other colleagues talking in the hallway, joking and laughing and I was mad at them. In retrospect I understand that some people react to a scary situation like that, but I remember telling them off: everything is going to hell and you are just laughing about it.

The first plane was a shock but of course thought to be a terrible accident. The second plane revealed that Things Are Very Bad. The scariest for me was the hit on the Pentagon. Information was of course unclear, and at some point the word via IRC was that the entire Pentagon is destroyed or on the way of becoming so. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking about the repercussions. The worst rumor was that US bombers are in the air, headed for Pakistan (I don’t know why it was supposed to be Pakistan) and that they may be carrying nuclear warheads. For a while I thought this is it, we are all going to die now.

The death toll was and continues to be staggering, and my heart weeps thinking about it still. And I’m not even an American. It didn’t touch me personally, and yet it remains one of the absolute worst days in my life. It wasn’t literally the end of the world, but for a moment it surely seemed like it might be.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Jitter on September 11, 2021, 12:25:13 PM

Two further points. Firstly I know many of you weren’t even born at the time :) I would actually be especially interested in hearing how those of you, who were children, felt about it and what you understood.

Secondly I intended this thread for remembering the one historical event. If we wish to discuss the longer term consequences it will probably be better suited for the Politics thread.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: tehta on September 11, 2021, 01:49:28 PM

I was in the US, studying at Berkeley. (I am semi-old.) I was asleep during the first Towers impact, and found out because my parents called me from Poland to tell me they had heard more planes were hijacked and hitting all over the US. I do not remember worrying about my own safety (why would anyone hit an off-campus apartment?) but there was a sense that things would never be the same.
I ended up watching the news all day with classmates, including the hearbreaking footage of people jumping. I remember that we were very hopeful that some of the firefighters who went in would come back out...

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Opaque on September 11, 2021, 02:11:16 PM

I think I was in history class when I first heard of the attack. It was maybe an hour or two after everything went down. It was... hard to describe.  Fear may not be the right word. Tense maybe? I could feel the seriousness of the situation through my whole body. The history teacher tried his best to keep an even tone in his voice while he told the class what happened and what might happen later but he was obviously barely holding it together. The whole school was very quiet the rest of the day.
I felt sick for weeks after hearing about the first responders dying while trying to rescue people from the rubble. They pulled out so many bodies from all around the areas. Never seen so much devastation. Everything just became terrible so quickly.
It's kind of silly but South Park aired an episode soon after. It was dumb and nonsensical but it made people laugh which helped some people cope with the tragedy. I know it made my brother and I feel better about it. I can see why laughing can be seen as disrespectful but like you said some people use laughter as a coping mechanism.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Jitter on September 11, 2021, 04:31:38 PM

Opaque how old were you at the time? If you don’t want to say, that’s obviously fully ok!

We had just bought our first own apartment and were about to renovate the kitchen. We had to go there and do the demo on the old kitchen and I remember thinking at that point (when the first fear of all out nuclear war was past) that we are screwed, there will be global recession and the apartment we just bought expensive would have an immediate price crash. But that didn’t happen either. So many things changed so much, while some things I thought would have changed a lot, didn’t.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: JoB on September 11, 2021, 04:38:28 PM

Quote from: Jitter on September 11, 2021, 12:06:07 PM

Do you remember 911? Where we you?

Working as an external consultant at a bank in Luxembourg. The brokers, with TVs running in their offices all day long, passed the word around, and the IT dpt I was with got one set up in ours shortly - we watched the towers go down effectively in real time. We all kept working, but I sent a couple short e-mails to the staff of my own employer in case they hadn't heard, and by the end of the day, I had fact sheets on the towers, pentagon, and the airplane models involved pinned to the wall. (I'm kind of a "get to know the layout" guy whenever I chance onto a place/area of interest.)

Quote from: Jitter on September 11, 2021, 12:06:07 PM

Were you scared?

... if I compare my memories to what other people tell of theirs, apparently not. I do not remember what meal I had that day (the bank had its own canteen, so I'm pretty sure where I had it) or what clothes I was wearing. I suppose that remembering earlier instances of terrorism both in the USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing) and around myself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Autumn), not to mention the Cold War, provided some perspective - and on the other hand, I don't think that anyone I talked to in those days foresaw the WoT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror) resulting from the event.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Opaque on September 11, 2021, 04:49:21 PM

Um, I want to say twelve? Maybe? It was so long ago it's hard to remember. Much of my school years are very faded and fuzzy.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Jitter on September 11, 2021, 05:17:50 PM

Quote from: JoB on September 11, 2021, 04:38:28 PM

... if I compare my memories to what other people tell of theirs, apparently not. I do not remember what meal I had that day (the bank had its own canteen, so I'm pretty sure where I had it) or what clothes I was wearing. I suppose that remembering earlier instances of terrorism both in the USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing) and around myself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Autumn), not to mention the Cold War, provided some perspective - and on the other hand, I don't think that anyone I talked to in those days foresaw the WoT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror) resulting from the event.

It’s weird what you remember, or not. I am sure I have talked on the phone with my husband (or possibly on the IRC) but I have no recollection of any of those talks. Neither does he (I asked because I started wondering). We both remember being at work and wandering the hallways talking to people, but not to each other. I don’t remember the colleagues or know them any more, but the fact that we were physically in the same place sticks to mind.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: LooNEY_DAC on September 11, 2021, 11:21:30 PM

I arrived at work at my usual early hour that morning to find the break room TV on; the local station which was the only one we could get was simulcasting CNN's coverage of the first impact's aftermath, so after that, I and the ever-growing crowd of my co-workers as they arrived followed events in real time until the towers fell.

After some stunned silence, one of the managers said, "We need to get back to work; this sitting around is exactly what the enemy wants us to do." He was right.

You see, I was an enlisted man in the United States Air Force, stationed at McChord Air Force Base near Lakewood, Washington, and we were at war.

Within the space of less than an hour, every military installation in CONUS was at the highest possible level of alert.

It wasn't until much later that I learned that I had actually known one of the passengers (http://www.legacy.com/sept11/Story.aspx?PersonID=91688&location=4) of the lost planes: she was a friend of my 3 great-aunts' from Long Beach, CA, coming home from visiting family.

Of course, I was nowhere near alone in this; many of the officers at my base knew one or more of those who had been killed at the Pentagon.

It still gets to me though.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Róisín on September 12, 2021, 07:12:05 AM

Sympathy. I lost a cousin, an Irish-American engineer who was visiting one of the towers at the time.
As to where I was myself: Echunga, a little town in the Adelaide hills where we then lived, when I was woken by a phone call from a friend down in Adelaide telling me to most urgently turn on the television. And be braced for disaster. I did, and saw history in the making and the clear beginning of the end of the American Empire. I didn’t find out until a week later that I had lost a kinsman.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Vulpes on September 12, 2021, 10:11:56 AM

I was in Ottawa, where I was attending Carleton University as a PhD student. I had recently moved into a new place, and was in a small shopping mall getting a spare key made. I walked past Radio Shack, which hadn't opened yet, and wondered why there was a crowd of people in front of it. I figured there was a hot sale, and they were waiting for it to open. At the key cutting place, the clerk had a TV on above the desk. She said a plane had flown into one of the towers. I goggled at the footage on TV, and said something along the lines of, "How could anyone make such a mistake?" She continued, saying another one had flown into the other tower, at which point it dawned on me that this was not an accident. It also explained the crowd outside of Radio Shack - there was a TV on display inside, on and tuned to a news channel.

I don't remember feeling scared, exactly - Canada is sufficiently dull that even though I was in the captial, I didn't think anybody would bother flying a plane into, say, Parliament. Plus Carleton is a fair distance from there. But I did have a sense that This Changes Everything. I went to our lab and talked to my fellow students; nobody got much productive work done that day. I let my significant other who was in New Brunswick know that I was fine, and that nothing seemed amiss, but neither of us was terribly worried. It never occurred to me to try to go home. More information trickled in during the day, and it was soon clear that the crisis was over, but nobody knew how it would ultimately affect the world.

I realised this week with all the 20th anniversary coverage that the students in the 4th year course I'm teaching were all infants at the time, and that this is ancient history to them. I also realised that they have no concept of how important those TVs were, that people weren't hearing instantaneously on their news feeds or social media. I remember thinking at the time that it was amazing to hear about the attacks so fast!

I do remember being a little jumpy about things for a while. One day a few weeks after the attacks I was walking along a busy street and noticed someone pull up, get out of their car, take something out of the back, and drop it in a trash can. Then he got in his car and drove away. I actually crossed the street to stay as far from the trash can as possible, and wondered if I should call police. I wasn't the only one feeling a little unsafe; a staff member on campus who lived near the Ottawa airport mentioned that whenever a plane flew over low, he'd get his binoculars and check whether its landing gear was down for landing! Not sure what he thought he could do if it wasn't...

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: midwestmutt on September 12, 2021, 10:40:15 AM

I was at work in my small hometown Post Office. For reasons I can't recall the Postmaster was out of the office that morning. The rural carrier and I saw the 2nd tower collapse on a small TV the office had for watching VCR training tapes. I remember the picture was pretty fuzzy since we only had rabbit ears for reception. When the PM called in soon after she got mad and told us to get back to work and not be watching TV on the clock because that's the way she rolled.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: viola on September 12, 2021, 09:10:00 PM

I was in canada at school and it was on the tv when I got home. They didn't tell us about it at school, I was pretty young. I was not normally allowed to watch or hear about things but I remember it was pretty much the only thing on TV and I ended up watching some of it. I remember being really curious and also while I didn't understand the full gravity, it was the first time I really learned that really bad things happen in the world.

Members of my family ran into problems with discrimination after it happened (my dad is from the middle east), especially at airports and at immigration points.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Lenny on September 13, 2021, 07:17:32 AM

I don't remember the day at all - I know my mother found out about it on the radio, but that was about it. I know I was in school that day because she told me. Was in Australia at the time. It didn't affect my life at all at that stage, and only much later did I get to know that all the protests against the Afghanistan war (which I did notice - there were some physical protests and posters all over in our relatively small town) and much later the fall of Osama Bin Laden was related to that. And, apparently, the restrictions on international air travel. And, now, as well as for a long time before now, influx of refugees (and the simultaneous influx of racists voicing their opinion about it - which would be nicer if they did it without trashing the place and setting stuff on fire).

I remember thinking as a child learning about it that it was sad, but later being incredibly shocked that people were upset enough about it to start the War on Terror and the entire war in Afghanistan (I'd thought for a very long time that the two were unrelated to 911). I didn't get it then, and to an extent still don't now. But that's for another discussion.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: wavewright62 on September 26, 2021, 04:06:11 AM

Late to the party, but here goes.
The events happened in the wee hours NZ time, early enough that the morning paper could feature a photo and preliminary details.  My husband came down the drive holding the paper with a puzzled expression on his face, and started blathering something about a plane hitting the Twin Towers and collapsing.  I was naturally horrified but asked him which one? to which he replied that it seemed to be both.  I scoffed - what, one plane had hit both? and then they both just, fell down?  Like, the top sheared off and fell down?  What?
I didn't get an answer because he was already on the phone, trying to reach his brother (it took him 5 hours to finally get a hold of him). 
We still had a TV at that stage, so I tuned in for a few minutes but tore myself away to go to work.  I was heavily pregnant at the time and doing temp work (I'd been job-hunting when I fell pregnant), this was to be my last week before stopping.  The people at my temp job were very solicitous of me in my dazed state and asked if I wanted to go home, but I refused since I knew there wasn't a blessed thing I could do there. 

My brother-in-law had a software company catering to the financial industry, with offices in a side street just off WTC Square, the Twin Towers visible from their office windows.  He was running late that morning and saw the first tower on fire from his ferry, but hadn't seen the actual plane strike.  A rumour was going around that a plane had hit it, and the assumption was that it must have been a private plane gone wrong or something, but the fire seemed too large for that.  The ferry turned around and went back to New Jersey, and like everybody else there he was on the phone trying to reach colleagues, when the second plane hit.  His office building was protected behind a taller one right on the square that had huge rents in it from falling debris, and by chance none of his people were on site with their clients in the Towers quite yet; they all escaped. 

Spoiler: body horror • show

But weeks later, when he could finally enter his premises and retrieve his servers, they were too clogged with the ubiquitous dust that lay a foot deep on everything.  They had to be interred with the other debris that contained pulverised unidentifiable human remains.

I lost none of my friends and family that day, but all the ones living and/or working in the city all had a tale - of trying to get home with the transport system down, clogged streets, clogged phone lines desperately trying to contact people, near-misses, people they'd lost, impromptu acts of community.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: thorny on September 26, 2021, 01:25:37 PM

I was doing a market harvest, along with a couple of farm interns who were here that year. Somebody was in the house when the phone rang; it was a neighbor who always has her TV on, calling to tell us about it. At the point when we turned on the radio, both planes had hit the Towers and a third plane was known to be off course and presumed to be intending to hit someplace. My immediate thought was "We're at war -- I wonder who with?" followed immediately by the second thought that it was terrible we were in such a state that I could think of multiple candidates.

At market the next day, somebody (I think the local fire department, might not be remembering right) was collecting for the NYCity firefighters, and we took a fast impromptu unanimous vote and did a group contribution from the market as a whole.

But I never thought "this changes everything". I still don't. Obviously it did for the people who died in the attack (and eventually in the ensuing war), and for their immediate family etc.; but for quite a lot of people in the USA, the only thing that actually changed in their lives, besides rhetoric, was that if you needed to fly anywhere it got a whole lot more complicated and annoying. But the USA has been in wars on and off throughout its existence; had had attacks on US soil before; had had terrorists blow things up before -- I was astonished that so many people seemed to be going around saying 'but how could this happen to us?!' It seemed to me utterly obvious that of course it could happen to us.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Grade E cat on October 17, 2021, 11:34:34 AM

Just noticed that topic was here, so I wanted to share my own memory, if a little late.

I was twelve years old at the time. I know my father had moved to his own place at that point, because I was having my week with him when my mother called his landline to tell me about the planes hitting the towers. From hearing her reminisce about it in more recent years, I know that thanks to her workplace's ties to the US, she and colleagues watched at least one of the crashes going on live. Between my young age and my autistic spectrum induced social obliviousness, I didn't understand it wasn't some sort of accident at the time of the phone call and may have needed to watch the news footage or something for it to really kick in. I had gotten a quite large drool-proof stuffed Hello Kitty at some "sell your old stuff" event not that long before that and I remember hugging it a lot while watching news footage. I remember a scare around one of my mother's colleagues getting an Amazon package delivered at their workplace not long after the attacks, when people were still legitimately worried that foreign offices of US companies might get targeted by terrorist acts. My junior high school had a music class in which we had been learning the French version of "The Ballad of Jesse James", and I came up with a parody involving Osama Bin Laden. I also remember someone telling me a joke about George Bush always losing at chess (rooks are called "towers" in French, it's all you need to know). A few years later, I was beginning one of my high school years and we were all getting our text books. The one for history had two photos on it, one was of the twin towers sometime between the first hit and their collapse.

When I was a kid, my mother managed to bring me with her to the US about once every couple of years. The last time we were there before 9/11, we happened to be in New York. At some point, we were on a boat that was in a place that had a good view of part of the skyline, including the twin towers. One of my mother's memories from that day is acting on an impulse to point the twin towers out to me that seemingly came out of nowhere.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Sc0ut on October 18, 2021, 04:47:06 PM

Quote from: Jitter on September 11, 2021, 04:31:38 PM

Opaque how old were you at the time? If you don’t want to say, that’s obviously fully ok!

We had just bought our first own apartment and were about to renovate the kitchen. We had to go there and do the demo on the old kitchen and I remember thinking at that point (when the first fear of all out nuclear war was past) that we are screwed, there will be global recession and the apartment we just bought expensive would have an immediate price crash. But that didn’t happen either. So many things changed so much, while some things I thought would have changed a lot, didn’t.

My experience was somewhat similar to yours. I was in my early teens, and my family had an unusually good year so we were installing a water heater in our apartment that day and doing other minor renovations. I was at home because it was still the summer holidays in my Eastern European country. The tv was on while everyone was busy around the house. After the first plane hit, we all gathered around to watch. I remember sitting on the rolled up carpet in the middle of our living room, watching the second plane hit and thinking in a sort of dissociated calm "guess there's no point in renovating anymore, there's probably gonna be a world war again". This is probably funny to those of you who were older when this happened, but to me back then, it seemed surreal that something so terrible could happen, and the fact that I saw it live on TV was a bit more than I could handle then. I was old enough to realise the tragedy at that point (and empathetic to an extreme), but nobody around me could have offered any reassurance, even if I felt like I could talk to them about what I was feeling. That was when I lost any remaining hope that the adults in charge have it under control, and that the world is a safe place in general.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Jitter on October 19, 2021, 04:29:43 AM

Thank you Cat and Sc0ut for adding to the discussion. “That’s when I learned the world is not a safe place” is momentous.

It was a powerful event and I believe a contributing factor in many things still that persist today, not the least of which is the continuing or in fact currently growing influence of various conspiracy theories on mainstream politics and on people who upon first inspection seem to appear fairly rational. I mean could Trump have been elected in a world with no 911? I don’t think so, how about you Americans?

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Opaque on October 19, 2021, 09:55:45 AM

Ah, that's a good question. There are a lot of people who like Trump because he has the life many people wish they had. Money, inheritance, power. And he tends to speak his mind with no filter and dosen't care what the consequences are. I'm sure that is part of why he's popular too.

But that alone is probably not enough to win any elections. A mix of terrorists attacks and the considerable amount of time we've spent in the middle east might have worn folks down.

I'll admit that I didn't give Trump a fair chance when he first started campaigning for presidency. The few times I saw him on TV he reminded me of a cartoon villain. Guess I wasn't far off though. Call me crazy but I prefer my presents to act more professional.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: translunaryAnimus (TA) on May 22, 2022, 08:41:41 AM

I was not born yet (would be a few short years after though) so growing up my only exposure to 9/11 were the days held in school where we'd say the pledge of allegiance (The USA Is really weird about national allegiance but now is not the time nor place to discuss that) and then have a longer than usual moment of silence afterwards. That and the horrible kids who would make plane crashing into the towers jokes constantly and get reprimanded by the teachers.

Never really understood what happened until my mom started crying one day while talking about it and showed me a picture of where the twin towers used to be. I do remember this scaring me at the time because I lived in the same state the attacks took place (I don't anymore) so in my child mind I was very worried about another attack occurring even though none had happened since.

Now that I'm nearly an adult (just gotta wait till summer comes and goes) it doesn't impact me as much, I suppose I feel disconnected from it because it seems like so long ago. But maybe that just shows how Americans have a terrible time scale because the USA really isn't the oldest country out there.

Not much of a dramatic experience or anything really, just how I as a member of one of the younger American generations views the event. I know it was a tragedy but it doesn't feel as present as it once did.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Jitter on May 22, 2022, 08:58:44 AM

Thank you MintheTea! A very interesting perspective. I started the thread asking whether 20 years counted as history, and your comment seals it that it does. It was a long ago. Not SO long for me as I remember it clearly, but long enough for people who are grown up already were not born at the time.

My oldest recently turned 18 so was a couple years late for the event just like you. I should ask him what he thinks and feels about it, I know they have studied it in world history in school and he’s quite interested in American politics (considering how he’s a European teenager).

This is exawhat I was hoping for when asking this question. It’s hard ro keep in mind others have very different perspectives, as demonstrated by my question “where were you”, implying that anyone interested in answering was around at all at the time. Thanks for reminding me that is not the case :)

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Róisín on May 22, 2022, 09:27:09 PM

I was alive but living in Australia. A friend rang and woke me and told me to urgently turn on the television because something dreadful had happened in America. She sounded frantic, so since she was normally a very calm person I scrambled to do so. I didn’t know at the time that one of my relatives had died in the disaster. He was an engineer, and had gone into the city for a project meeting at just the wrong time.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Kevin_Redcrow on May 22, 2022, 11:14:14 PM

I was between jobs at the time, so I tended to get up later in the morning than when I am employed.

First thing I'd do was log on to the 'net. It was dial-up 56kps at the time. I always started on the MSNBC website. The headline said, "Planes Ram, Destroy Twin Towers"

I utterly did not believe it when I saw it. The reason I didn't believe it, was that MSNBC at the time, would run a movie ad making it look like a sensational news article, so I actually ignored it. I thought it was an ad for a bad science fiction film.

But as I surfed my usual sites, I kept seeing more World Trade Center attack articles. I probably went along like this for 30 minutes with "thiscan'tbehappeningthiscan'tbehappeningthiscan'tbehappeningthiscan'tbehappening" running through my head.

I finally turned on my television and watched the horror for the next 5 hours.

Since 9/11, the world just seems to have become weirder and worse. I suppose if one lives past the age of 50, this  attitude is universal.

Title: Re: Where were you on 911?
Post by: Róisín on May 22, 2022, 11:34:00 PM

Speaking as someone past 80, ‘weirder and worse’ is about it. Though there are still good bits here and there, mostly good people.