Where Were You?

[agnesthelion]

I can remember hearing my parents recounts of where they were when Kennedy was shot and wondering as a child how they could remember such details.

Some of the kids in my neighborhood are now interviewing adults for school about where they were on 9/11 and I completely understand.

I was at work in my office building (I worked for a large bank in the Recovery/Bankruptcy dept) and one of my customers screamed at me for daring to call him when we were being attacked by terrorists. This was just after the first plane hit and it was not yet confirmed that it was terrorists yet this guy knew. I flipped on my radio and the whole office came to a halt as we crowded around the radio, stunned, listening....

I still get choked up remembering that day and the lives lost and families effected. Never forget....God Bless America.

Where were you?

 

[Apebull]

I was just leaving for work and my lil sis who lived with us at the time yells out of here roomas I'm walking out the door that a plane had hit the first tower. I just though it was a little plane andwhile it would do damage no big deal. Then I got in the car and turned on the radio right as the second tower got hit. I remember driving to work being 2 or 3months preg with my first child listening to the radio and crying so hard as I was driving. Let's just say NO work got done that day by anybody in our office.

I felt so sorry for my brother and his now ex-wife. She was in the hospital giving birth to their daughter that day. They had to keep yelling at the doctors and nurses to turn the TV off and focus on them. And yes he turns 11 today .

 

[mdith4him]

I always cry on this day. For me, I can still see all those horrible images, I can still remember how scary it was, and I can still remember every detail of that day.

I was a sophomore in high school. We had just started our second period for the day when a girl ran into the classroom saying a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I remember thinking she must mean a small, two-seater type plane--sad, but not the end of my world. My teacher turned on a radio, but I still didn't get it. Then they said the Pentagon had been hit by a jet. I lived 15 miles from the Pentagon. More details poured in through the day and I kept thinking of all the people I knew who might have been there.

When I got home mid-afternoon, I hadn't seen any TV and I didn't know the towers had fallen. My mom met me outside the house and asked me what I knew. After answering, she said the towers had collapsed. I couldn't fathom huge skyscrapers (two of them) falling. I remember questioning her two or three times about what she meant. "You mean they fell over?" "Like, they're not there anymore?"

We went to the kitchen where the TV was on. They showed the second plane hitting and I said, "Oh my gosh, look!" as if she hadn't already seen it more times than you can count. The images of the Pentagon scared me. It was so close to our house. I went to bed that night wondering if there was more to come.

School was cancelled the next day and I watched news all day long. We found out that several members of our church were killed or hurt in the explosions. When I went to school the next day an announcement was made that one girl, a friend of mine, had lost her mother. It was so surreal, so unbelievable...I couldn't really process it all.

That day sticks with me and what scares me more than the attacks is how some people didn't even remember what today was. People need to remember. Always.

 

[katherine at sacred stories]

I was in San Francisco so when I woke up it had already happened. I didn't turn on the television. I didn't find out until I got to work and everyone was gathered around a television in the lobby.

I burst into tears when I saw the Towers coming down. I had lived in NYC for many years and still had many friends there. I was traumatized by the sight.

I was director of a day program for people with autism and I got a call from the state agency that funded us. They told me to send everyone home because we were "at war" and our clients should stay at their residences. That was the mind set that morning.

My best friend was in NYC and she saw the whole thing, close up, from her office window. She had to walk home from Manhattan to Cue Gardens, Queens, because the subways stopped running. She and her husband walked over the bridge with other New Yorkers who were all traumatized and terrified that it wasn't over.

I still cry today, too. My heart goes out to NYC and everyone who lost loved ones.

 

[slavetoabunny]

I lived in California at the time, so we were 3 hours ahead of east coast time. I had just gotten out of the shower and went into the living room where the TV was on. I saw the live feed of the first tower on fire and thought "huh, I wonder what building in LA is on fire" and then I heard the reality.

 

[daisyandoliver]

I was in 1st grade. I'm a youngin. We were doing normal first grader work, like reading and playing. The teacher next door came over and told my teacher to turn the news on NOW. So she did and we all didn't know what was going on so she told us to keep on doing what we were doing and she watched the tv while we read... School ended up closing early and we had the rest of the day and the next day off of school. I didn't understand then so much but I do now. <3 I remember thinking OH MY GOSH IT IS IN NEW YORK IM GOING TO DIE. But then I didn't realize that NYC and where I lived were about 3 hours away from each other..

 

[CosmosMomma]

I was in 5th grade. I remember all my classmates being pulled out of class one by one by their parents, and eventually around 11 my dad came to get me and took me to my sister's best friend's house. They wouldn't let me watch the news so I listened from the other room, and I remember crying about the pentagon being hit, because my cousin worked there. It's weird to think that anybody under 6 or 7 at the time wouldn't really feel impacted by it even today, while those of us who were old enough to understand, could never forget that sinking feeling in our stomachs when we heard what happened.

 

[slavetoabunny]

Megz....it is sort of like I was 5 when President Kennedy was assassinated. All I remember from then is that my cartoons were pre-empted.

 

[Samara]

I was in theatre class my sophomore year in high school when I first heard news. We were all hanging out on or off stage and our theatre teacher had the radio on in the wings. He came out and said a plane had hit one of the trade center buildings. We all thought it was an accident. We went to our next classes and some of us spread the word; 30 minutes later all the classroom TVs that usually showed the morning announcements were on and tuned into the news. The rest of the day was a haze of disbelief. Nothing was taught the rest of the day...we just sort of traveled from class to class to keep watching the news.

 

[LakeCondo]

An old friend of mine was scheduled to have bypass surgery that day in the DC area. Needless to say it was rescheduled. I can only imagine what it was like for him & his wife to have to go through the prep again. He's still doing well, at least at last report [Christmas card].

 

[Blue eyes]

The attack was a Tuesday, and on just a day and a half before (Sunday), we were all at a building directly across from the Pentagon celebrating a family birthday.

We lived in a suburb outside of Washington DC at the time. My husband and his brothers worked in and around DC. I was busy with the kids in the morning at home and my husband called to tell me about the plane and to turn on the TV. Everyone's first thought was that it was just a freak accident.

By the time the 2nd plane hit and the Pentagon, my sisters in law and I were frantically trying to call our husbands to see where they were. All the cell phones were shut down and we had no way to communicate. It was such a scary, helpless feeling.

My neighbor and I met outside. She had family in NY. Her husband worked as a civilian on a base, something to do with computer satellites. He saw the 2nd plane hit before the news reported it. He knew it was an attack and he left work to make it out of base before he was shut in. The base mobilized quickly and he passed a truck loaded with armed soldiers just as he made it out the gate.

It was eerie in the days that followed that there were no planes in the sky - just an empty silence. On rare occasion, a fighter jet would fly over and our first instinct was immediate alarm -- is that an enemy?

And remember the flags afterwards? You couldn't go ten feet in any direction without seeing a US flag flying. They were on every car and every lawn and every building.

 

[littl3red]

I remember it pretty well, but in the way you remember things vividly from when you were young; it seems more like a dream than a memory. I was in first grade like Paige. I remember the principal getting on the intercom and telling us all that something very bad happened and asked us to have a moment of silence. A lot of the other kids wouldn't be quiet, and although I was a very talkative little one, and even though I hadn't known exactly what happened, I really felt the weight of it. Eventually the teachers got everyone to quiet down. The whole school was silent, something that never, ever, EVER happens, and I still remember it being so eerie. I remember the teachers telling us what happened and I didn't know what the World Trade Center was, but I knew it was something important. I remember the teacher from the next room over crying. Something like that, so out-of-the-ordinary, for a young child, can have a big impact. Seeing a teacher cry was really a scary thing for me.

 

[whitelop]

I was in the 6th grade and we were in homeroom. (it was a weird mid-morning thing) We were goofing off when someone came over the PA and told the teachers to turn on the TVs, and that we wouldn't be switching to our next classes. We sat in silence. If you can imagine a class of 35 6th graders in complete silence. We watched the whole news cast. We watched the plane hit the second tower. We never changed classes. A lot of kids got picked up early, I didn't. But my mom was white as a ghost when she picked me up at the days end. I went back to her barber shop with her and we watched more of the news. It was awful. I can still remember the people jumping from the buildings, that image will never leave my mind. EVER. Whenever I think about that day, thats the only thing I can see. The people. I'm sorry to bring that up, for you guys to relive that. But as a child, not even a child as a human being; thats a terrible thing to witness. To be honest, I don't know why they let us see it.

 

[littl3red]

See, they didn't let us see it, which I think was good. I don't think I saw the images until much later.

 

[MiniLopHop]

I was in graduate school in Ohio and in the lab all morning. When I left to go home I heard two people talking about it in the halls and I thought they were talking about some action movie. It wasn't until I was on the bus home that I heard the radio report- the second tower had just fallen. I was shocked. When I got home I started watching the news.

I had to teach that night because it took the school a while to close. One of my students had a sister in NYC and couldn't get in touch with her, she broke down in tears. I told her to go home and be with her family, I would count her as doing the lab. There were a few that left but the rest of us made it through with a slow numbness. The university was closed the next day.

Now I live outside of Philadelphia and worked with people from a site in Raritan NJ. It is spooky hearing them talk of seeing the smoke for days on end.

 

[mdith4him]

Blue eyes wrote:

It was eerie in the days that followed that there were no planes in the sky - just an empty silence. On rare occasion, a fighter jet would fly over and our first instinct was immediate alarm -- is that an enemy?

Yes, I remember that, too. Remember how all the major networks just had 24/7 news coverage for the following week? I remember when I finally saw a regular plane flying overhead about a week or so later. I watched it cross the sky and go beyond the tree line and I listened for a bit afterwards, thinking maybe I would hear an explosion.

I knew things were serious when a teacher came into one of my classes and asked my teacher, "Are you watching this? This is some serious sh**." I figured if a teacher was using that kind of language in front of students, it really must be serious.

 

[Nancy McClelland]

I remember all those things. I got to meet JFK when he toured Alameda NAS as I was the highest scoring student in the country on those baloney IQ tests--that was one month before he was murdered. I remember where I was when the Space Shuttle blew up on launch and the other one during re-entry. I was reading the newspaper and watching the news on 9-11 and saw the second plane hit, live. Lost a good friend that day too--he was one of many firefighters lost. Last time I saw him was at Sturgis, SD about a month before. I don't have an adequate vocabulary to express my true feelings of rage and sorrow.

 

[audrinasmommy88]

I was in the 8th grade and had just gotten into my history class. i remember walking in and sitting at my desk and wondering why everyone was crowded around the tv. I continued to sit at my desk because I was so tired and had a bad cold. Then I heard the gasps and crying and the principal came on the intercom. I didn't completely understand what was going on, but I knew it was bad. I made my way to the tv and watched what was happening. Thats all we did that day, watch the news. Our parents were calling in asking if they were going to send us home and the school said no because that was the safest place for us to be

 

[CharmmyBunny]

i dont remember it all that well i know that day i had a very high fever somewhere in the morning at around 103 i was in middle school at the time and it also happens to be my fathers birthday so when i came downstairs with the tv on i looked at the tv and asked why his birthday cake was on the tv and then vomited on the floor. my mom had me clean it up and myself sent me to school on the bus and i remember the radio and everyones silence by the time i got to school i saw the tv again (it was on in every classroom) and i passed out before i even made it half way through 1st period and was taken home. i have memories of delirious moments after that. but they were quite horrific(i was watching the footage on tv and that mixed with my fever i didnt know at the time how much of what i was seeing was real and not i found out later a good deal of it was but some memories were not shown on the tv thank goodness.). i had a fever of 105 by the time i got home. so its all a blur.

 

[CosmosMomma]

Well that doesn't sound like a pleasant morning, Lauren. :S

I was eating lunch and lunch got cut short. I was a little mad at my dad cause he wouldn't stop at mcd's or give me money to order pizza...until I got to my sister's friend's house and realized what was happening.