How Did You First Hear Of 9/11? What Did You Feel, Everyone has a story to tell about this Options

[The Bobster]

. .

We're just a couple of days from the third anniversary as I write this. It was a momentous moment, one of those events that Changed Everything. I'm convinced that every one of us here has a story about when we first heard the news - my parents generation of Americans had Pearl Harbor, and I'm just barely old enough to remember (kindergarten) the day Kennedy was shot. Other events that stand out for me are Armstrong walking on the Moon, Nixon resigning, John Lennon's death and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

This is one is ours, and it always will be ... and not limited to Americans, either. I believe everyone will have a searing memory of whatever emotions they were feeling when they first heard about the destruction of the Twin Towers.

I did not hear about it until the next morning. I was only using the TV for rented movies at the time so I had let the cable service expire, and I probably wouldn’t have turned it on that evening anyway. A Korean friend called me to tell me about it and offer sympathy but her cell lost the connection before she could explain anything.

I heard about it in the elevator on the way up to my school then next morning, more than 12 hours later. The colleague sharing the trip upstairs made some mention of ti and when my face showed puzzlement he elaborated, and I accused him of making a sick joke. Then he showed me the Korean Herald front page he was holding. With the photos.

The only kids to do anything weird about it that day were the kindies, and they really didn’t understand the jokes they were making. “Hey, teach-uh! Teh-rah! Boom!” And hand motions of planes crashing … my Canadian co-worker frowned and that was enough to get them to cut it out. They are children and they are blameless.

The difficult thing for me was that I wanted to get to a phone or go online and talk to people back in the States, but I had a full day of work to do first. Naw, no one offered to let me take the day off – the school had just suffered a pair of simultaneous midnight runs, so there was no one to fill in for me – and it was the wrong time of day to talk to people on the other side of the Pacific anyway.

My biggest concern was about the ex and her family, who are from Iran and came to settle in Silicon Valley a couple of years after Khomeini came to power, largely because they had started drafting kids younger than my brother-in-law, who was 15 at the time … they are good people and America is a better place because they went there, but I also know how bigoted people are there and I could see nothing positive that might possibly happen as a result of this event. And I thought of a movie called “The Siege,” in which Bruce Willis plays a colonel who declares martial law in NYC after a much smaller sort of terror event and quickly rounds up all Middle Eastern males in Madison Square Garden for detention (and torture) without trial …

All my people are in California or on the West Coast, so I wasn’t worried about their safety, except that I didn’t know whether it was the start of something bigger and that things could have been happening in other places and to people I did know while I was busy grading some homework. Yeah, it was sort of difficult to be so far from home at that time. To this day, I feel as if the rest of the people in my home country were part of an important experience that I now lack in some way.

The Koreans friends here were sympathetic and compassionate. This is what friends are all about, of course.

in the week or so that followed I discovered it was unnecessary for me to have watched it all on the television in real time, and even though I didn't get around to restoring the cable service I was treated to the images nearly every time I walked into an Itaewon bar that had a TV roosting in the corner of the ceiling. And I leaned later that I that some of what I was seeing had been considered too horrific for American networks to want to show, such as the footage of people leaping from the upper floors as the inferno came to engulf them.

That's my story. What's yours?

I realize that most people posting in this forum are in the UK but I don't think that matters much - I think people in the majority of countries of the world will have a clear memory of the moment when they first learned about this, And they will likely also remember what they were feeling at the time.

Talk to me.

[CommieBastard]

I do remember being informed. As I recall, my words were "Bloody hell - this is going to start a war, isn't it?"

My next impression is that I was sick of hearing everybody talking about it when it seemed to me that everything useful had already been said.

[froggle-rock]

I was waiting for a bus, when a lady who was walking past informed me that a WTO building had exploded (or something like that).

Once I had a chance to digest the news, my thoughts were: How many people die from wars and malnutrition everyday? How many people die from arms brought from the US everyday?

I simply cannot feel hurt for people across the other side of the Atlantic, when I don't feel pain or sorrow for the homless of Britain that die in the frezzing cold evey year. -Or the many many thousands of people who die from famine, or disease. Diseases which are treatable in the western world.

It's either or rule, and I've gotten grief about it before. But this is what I believe. The reason I cannot 'feel' for all is because it hurts too much.

[CommieBastard]

To an extent, I agree with Frog - 11-SEP never had any real emotional impact for me, because compared to the constant everyday background noise of tragedy and suffering it was insignificant. It is special only in its political ramifications.

[Patient #212]

I was in school that morning. An announcement was made that a "national tragedy" had occured, but that we were not-- under any circumstances-- to turn on a television. For my first two classes, the teachers adhered to this rule and just calmly continued teaching while wild rumors were exchanged.

Eventually, my Biology teacher turned on CNN and we all just stared for about an hour until someone from administration poked her head in to hiss at us to turn it off.

The school continued to try to keep us in the dark for the rest of the day-- I suppose to "protect" us.

[Snugglebum the D...]

I honestly don't remember exactly. I think my boyfriend phoned me from work and told me. I thought 'How awful' and then got on with my day.

The thing is - it's not my country and on the whole doesn't really affect me that much. Harsh but true.

[The Bobster]

Commie Bastard and Funked)out Frog are cool, and probably the 3-year mark of this event would be a good opportunity for people to think back on the intervening years and discuss whether the world at large has been making the best choices since then ... and if someone opened a thread about that I'd have a lot to say. (The Bobster is very much against Bush's war, hope you know.)

What I'm hoping for here is that people will share a personal story about that particular morning in our lives. Patient#212 has the right idea. I tried this on another discussion board and within a day about 2 dozen people who seldom had much to say in the past provided some really fascinating and often moving stories of their memories of that morning.

Don't wanna knock people down for expressing their opinions, and again, I have a lot on my mind about Bush and what he's been up to, but if the thread gets sidetracked and hung up in that direction we'll probably miss hearing a lot of stuff we would have liked to ...

Give you an example. A teacher had been working at a high school in Atlanta Georgia, USA, with a population of students that included some Arabs. The class discussion topic that day was Ethics. One of the (white) students opined that we need to kill every Arab we can. The teacher asked if he meant to include Ali here in the front row and the other students in the class as well. Later in the day, after classes, a muslim girl who habitually wore a hejab in class asked him if she could wait in his classroom unitl her father came to pick her up because she didn't feel safe outside. He told her he had a staff meeting but she could lock the door until he came back from it. At the meeting, the main question the teachers had was, "Is there anything on the agenda for this meeting more important than going home to be with our families right now?" No, there wasn't. Back in his classroom the hejab-girl has a problem - her cellphone has told her that her father is also not anxious to leave the house because he too fears for his safety. The teacher decides to break a thousand rules of common sense and school policy and offers the muslim girl a ride home in his car. Being alone in a car with a female student is not smart and good way to get fired ... but it was the right thing to do at that moment.

Anyway ... that's kind of thing I'm looking for.

[spiffilicious05]

I do remember being informed. As I recall, my words were "Bloody hell - this is going to start a war, isn't it?"

My next impression is that I was sick of hearing everybody talking about it when it seemed to me that everything useful had already been said.

That was my basic reaction. Although, I live in ny and I could see the smoke from upstate ny..which is pretty bad considering I'm four hours away.

Anyways, I remember seeing a teacher turn on the news during class and pretty much everyone in school just watched the news that day.

[Silver Star Ange...]

I was in art class, working on block lettering when my teacher turned on the news radio. People had been leaving school early all day, and I had no idea why until then. I remember the first thing I thought was "Oh my God... my father!" because he works on Wall Street. Second thing was "Oh my God... my sister!" because she went to school on 14th Street. Third thing was "Oh my God...my mother!" because she worked on 34th Street, so basically I was the only one in the Bronx. I was scared because I thought they had all died, and I would have to be an orphan.

I had thought the towers fell on their side, like when you knock down a vase. But later, I found out that they had collapsed. The rest of the day was a mess, because they wouldn't let me off the bus to go into my building alone. The bus driver had to take me to the district office, where we tried to call my father and mother. They didn't respond, so the office people called my old babysitter. When I got home, I just ran around the house, crying, trying to calm down, when my parents and sister finally came home. They had met up on 23rd Street and took Metro North home.

[beleraphon]

At work, and one of the consultants in the office who had an online news feed going stopped everyone working and told us of the info coming in. At the time I though it was a bad practical joke and the image of the plane going into the tower was done on photoshop - we all did till we checked a few more news sites and the truth hit us

As the temp and office pleb at the time I went out with about £20 from an impromptue whip-round and got a radio so we had BBC Radio 4 on all day keeping us updated and a couple of the guys totally abandoned all work to make a lot of phone calls to see if family, friends and collegues were ok.

All those in my office were, but just up the road was an office owned by the company Marsh, their New York office was in Tower 2 - about floor 30ish - they lost over 80% of staff assigned to that office that day.

After that initial 'shock' and the extended news footage and all the associated political stink that followed I must say I kind of got a bit tired and fed up with some of it - and now the extended rememberance and mourning is a bit like aggrivating a wound to make the scar bigger and more long lasting. The scar is always going to be there, the hurt was done, but now I do feel that we need to look towards healing.

It happend and it was dreadful, and the school siege in russia has happened, and that too was dreadful beyond words - so can we start to work together to stop any more hurt - please.

[Tarantio]

I remember I had been out the night before, and so I woke up late. Oh crap, I forgot the start of the story. Right. This all happened on my six-week holiday to Vancouver, so I was in the same continent at the time, though not quite the same time zone. I was staying with my cousin Sean in his downtown apartment that week, sleeping on the living room floor. Sean is a very politically minded person, in a sense. He has very strong views, and is a photographer and artist/writer for the magazine Adbusters, which almost no one in Britain has heard of, but if you've ever seen big black spots on ads in the states, then you might be familiar with their work. But more important than that, he's a great person and loves honesty, peace etc etc, and has been a major influence on my life. When he came to visit us last year I showed him Mr Snaffleburger and he loved the hell out of it.

So. story. I woke to Sean waving and shouting and such around the flat. He was screaming at me to wake up. "david wake up, wake up, they've crashed a plane into the pentagon!" He was exstatic. I thought he was playing a joke for ages, and then when I realised he wasn't eventually I think I said something along the lines of "serves the bastards right". Boy did I regret that line. At the time we knew very little about what had happened, as the whole thing was still in progress. He told me, after turning on his radio (he hates TV, and doesn't own one), that another plane had crashed, and we sat and listened to the full story and all the rumours of fourth and fifth hijackings, which reminds me, who ever gave two hoots as to the fourth crash over pennsylvania, was it? Anyway, I digress. The whole thing was a jumble, and it actually took us an hour to find out that the WTC had been hit as well, and then that just made me stop right where I was. I don't think I've ever felt as sheepish as I did when I heard that news. It went from a brave and bold attack on the country's military centre to a horror story. I couldn't believe it, but then no one could, and we all say that anyway, so thats irrelevant. Long story short, I went through the whole thing after that without thinking much about it, except, like Commie said, worrying about the ramifications and what was going to happen next, and trying to work out whether or not i could convince myself that the whole thing was justified.

We were delayed going home then, by three days, which I thought was great, but then I'm a big idiot. The affair sent Sean's girlfriend over the edge with her fear of flying. Beforehand they had been planning to go to Europe together, but she wont fly at all now these days, as far as I know...

[Forever Unknown]

I'm a sick little puppy. I warn you now...

I was at work at the time - working in a chocolate factory, where the radio was always on, so we heard the reports. As the day went on, the death toll and suchlike would change. At one time it was 5,000. Half an hour later, it was 3,000 (not sure on the numbers). Someone next to me pipes up "3,000? It was 5,000 earlier!". I replied with "Yeah, that's because 2,000 have popped it".

You may smite me now.

[Righteous]

I recall sitting in my acting class in the eleventh grade watching th TV wondering what the Hell was going on. That's all we did all day. No one did any work. We just watched in awe. As I sat in my chair during American history, I remember saying to myself, "This will start a war and it will never end." Here we are today in the middle of a war that will never end.

That was really the only part that made me upset, that the Untied States would be eternally fighting a bogus war and that this will be another Viet Nam.

[Phyllis]

I was asleep. My mom called me from work and told me to turn on the TV.

I just felt weird. It hadn't been that long since I left New York at the time. It was just strange to see streets that I formerly had walked on clouded in ash. I'd only been married for a few months, and we'd been living in this place maybe a couple of weeks.

Then I thought the same thing Sean did. "Crap, this is going to start a war." That's about it. Wasn't really worried about my in-laws living in NY because they seldom went around that area. Then I remember being relieved when it was the 1 year anniversary, because I thought maybe people would stop mentioning it every 2 seconds and they would stop with the damned patriotic Christmas lights. Those were a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I don't know why, but there's just something irritating about a garage door decorated with lights in the shape of an American flag. Our Christmas parade looked more like a 4th of July parade. I'm still not sure why that irritated me...lol. Ah well.

[PsychWardMike]

I was in Science class.

I actually thought it was funny, but then again... I was in 8th grade, and we kept making jokes about it. We thought it was just a fluke, or not. Oh well... So I'm a heartless bastard.

I do remember being annoyed with the schools for not letting us see something that would so OBVIOUSLY be national history and be on the news and around us forever.

[artist.unknown]

Hm...I was in school, and kids kept getting pulled out of class and taken from school or down to the office, because they wanted the kids with parents who worked in the WTC to see if somebody had made contact with said parent (which didn't happen, in one classmate's case, unfortunately). My other classmates and I made all sorts of joking speculation as to what was going on, because no-one would tell us, and we thought it was all wild coincidence. And then at lunch my vati came to pick me up and turned on npr and we listened to it in the car on the drive home. You could see the smoke from out the window. It really was an emotional thing afterwards, too, because I live in commuter suburbialand and everyone here knows someone who was killed or was there.

I'm not ashamed to say, though, that my first coherant thought was the same as Commie, Righteous, and Candice's--Crap, this is going to start a war. And no matter how connected the people in my area are to it, I'm frankly rather sick of it being used as a ploy to get an emotional reaction from voters, whoever, and to encourage mindless rah-rah patriotism (I'm not criticising anyone here). Yes, it was a horrible, but we've likely killed as many or more Iraqi citizens at this point than American citizens were killed then, so it'd be rather hypocritical of me to weight some lives as more important than others, right? September eleventh was tragic, and I'm not saying it should be forgotten or belittled, but we do need to remember to keep it in perspective.

[Marsyas]

I remember at the time I had the flu but was at school anyway, mom was going in for hernia surgery, and Dad was supposed to fly out to Washington D.C. the following day for cancer treatment at the NIH. Fun times already, let me tell ya...

I was in Adv. Chemistry at the time and we knew nothing about the initial hit until some time after the second plane hit. By the time I'd gotten to Algebra, my next class, all of the TV's had been turned on, but my math teacher didn't understand or care about what was going on. He thought it was just a random plane crash, so he made the librarian turn our TV off so we could do our work. About an hour later he learned what had really happened and he felt so bad about it that he let us watch the news for half the class period on the following day. We watched it all through my US History class and one of my recurring thoughts was that something just as bad would reciprocate from it...it always does. That seems to be a theme in our history - retaliation. I think part of that thought made me more sad than watching people jump out of windows 90 stories up. Good God...

I remember that they cancelled all after school activities and that I went home from what would have been marching band rehearsal and just sat there watching CNN wondering what was going to happen next and I felt just awful. My mom's cousin Julie lives within view of the Pentagon and I remember being very nervous for her since she works within the government as well. We didn't know where she was until she let us know how things went down from her perspective.

I saved a thing about it all from the Cincinnati Enquirer for the photos...everytime it makes me unreasonably sad.

[gothictheysay]

I was a *very* confused eleven-year-old. We were sitting in third hour class (reading for me) when the counselor came in and babbled something about plane crashes in New York. That was all I heard. A couple people ran downstairs to call parents on business trips, but I didn't know about the Pentagon till I got home. The rest of the day I was dazed and confused - walked in a trance for a few days, actually. I didn't know anything, so I started to strive to find things out...ever since then I do the same thing with any type of news. When I heard about the Pentagon crash, I freaked out even more - 85% of my extended family lives 3 hours from Washington D.C. (okay, three hours, but I was paranoid). The phone lines to there were pretty clogged and we couldn't get through for a while. Eventually I got my grandmother (it was her birthday...great for her). It was just such a total shock to me, because I was naive like that. We did journal-writing and other little stuff about it in school...it was scary, and depressing. I got home and Dad was home from work watching the news...I pick up old magazines still and end up seeing pictures of the people jumping out the windows, the look on people's faces...chills me to the bone, I'll admit, and I was waaay far away from what happened. I can understand anniversary-wise and whatnot...but...eh. The every-2-seconds thing - when people talked about it, I did get a little nervous. Actually, the first thing I did at that young age was fall into the patriotic scheme (I'm scared of myself now) because my country had been attacked, and it had scared the crap out of me, and I somehow thought...I don't know. After a few months, though, my head was finally clear.

I'm frankly rather sick of it being used as a ploy to get an emotional reaction from voters

That is by far the worst. I hate that so much. Dear God. AAARGHH.
And the flags, and patriotic Christmas lights...heh. Yeah, a bit annoying. I wonder if they had the same reaction as I did and just didn't know it? *Shrug* Anyway...still a tragedy, but I won't get into how much I despise the war that sprung from it. And the security... some of it gets down to rights-invoking, and some... (Example: girl in my class with a muslim-derived last name's dad moved half a million dollars in one exchange, so the FBI seized his money. I'm a little iffy on that. And my teacher said, what with the in-depth searches, "It's a shame that the world has come to this" and I don't really agree. But I'm off-topic now. )

[froggle-rock]

I found this: old forum thread about 9/11, thought it would be good to link the two.

[eleraama]

I was also at school. The teachers had been spreading rumours, and they finally told us.... It was very shocking because I, like my dear ar.un, lived in New Jersey- a stone's throw across. It was kind of interesting because earlier that day I had had this terrible sense of foreboding... Evidently the same happened to quite a few people. Anyway, at school, a friend (the rabid canadian) and I were talking about it, being political people, and we both agreed that it was A) Osama and B)There was a war starting. We went home early, I to find my parents home watching tele. It was really awkward at school the next day because people had been related to people that didn't make it... The teachers didn't make us do anything, but we had to write out 'reactions' eventually... I wish I knew where that poem was.
*sigh.*
</depression>

[PsychWardMike]

You know, it's funny... I actually remember my mom's heart attack on 9/11. I didn't get picked up from marching band practice till 7:30 (ended at 4:30) Heh, some foreshadowing or what, right?

[Ashbless]

I was home with the radio and television off. I had the day off and was trying to get the house clean. I was also in my don't bother me refilling emotional batteries. My office phoned and I let the answering machine pick it up. The message ran something like "blahblahwork related stuffblah and wasn't that something - all that was happening down in the States."
So I turned on the radio to find out what work was blathering on about. Then I heard about the Towers. It was probably about 3 o'clock and the day was gorgeous.
My first thought, as the radio didn't say anything about who claimed responsibility, was that it was an American attack on America. An event like that had happened earlier (federal building destroyed in heartland of america) or does anyone remember Timothy McVeigh? My next thought on finding more info was, yep you guessed it, "This will start a war."
All the planes were grounded that day and I remember they opened up the newly built homeless shelter in order to house all the stranded passengers. They were also asking members of the public to house total strangers while their planes were grounded. My now ex. refused to consider it. I was impressed with those who did.

[ravein]

I was on my way to work, the thing that struck me then and still resonates with me now was the difference in reporting. The American reporters where freaking out, screaming into the mic's, loosing it as people jumped from the top of the trade centers. But the British reports where calm and collected. I guess when you have a World War in your back yard it is easier to stay calm. People in America had never witnessed anything like that. We where innocent. We lived through the Clinton years of complete happiness. We never knew these things could happen until then. Then there was the outrage that these people where innocent people just going to work. They never fired a weapon, they never made a foreign policy, hell half of them probably didn’t vote, but yet they died in a most horrific fashion.
Then it hit me that war was on the way and they dying had just begun.

PS. you may preface your comments with I am a heartless bastard if you want, but please be respectful of forum members who may have lost family members or friends that day. I sat and watched as a co-worker lost her brother. It was not an easy thing.

[Mutilation]

GODAM THEY CANCELED EVERYTHING ON TV!

Ok, so I come back home, hoping to find the video of Pokemon all ready to go (ok, it probably wasn't pokemon) and suddenly BAM! The news! I turn my video off, and I am presented with the same story again. This carried on for about 3 days.

I was thinking about the asprin factory they bombed.

[PsychWardMike]

PS. you may preface your comments with I am a heartless bastard if you want, but please be respectful of forum members who may have lost family members or friends that day. I sat and watched as a co-worker lost her brother. It was not an easy thing

Okay... assuming that that post was directed at me, I have to say that I think it was unfounded. Its not like I'm happy that it happened, but to a twelve year old kid who knows nothing of politics and hardly of anything geographical outside of the state of KY, you don't really feel the shock and pain that those closer to the incident did. Am I happy it happened? No. That's one of the few things the Republicans and I are in agreement - terrorism needs to be stopped, but this forum was specificcally about how you felt and reacted to the events of 9/11. That was how I felt. Added to that, my mother really did have a heart attack that day, so that was my more prevelant memories. That's all.