20 Years in Reflection: Where were you on September 11th 2001

at work, boss told us all the there had been an accident and every news channel was covering it. a bunch of us went to watch his tv for a few minutes. we watched the 2nd plane hit live. every jaw in the room hit the floor. i can't remember what channel was on but i remember the female anchor being shocked and asking if the station was showing a replay while simultaneously realizing both buildings were now on fire. it was definitely surreal. i also remember walking back out to the floor and telling the few guys who didn't go watch that we are being attacked. every radio was on 1030am for the rest of the day. it was somehow easier to digest the news by hearing it instead of watching it.
 
If you are ever at Logan Airport, there are two gates, one in Terminal C Gate C19 (AA 175) and one in Terminal B Gate 32 (UAL 11) that have American flags on poles mounted to the jetways.... they are there to memorialize where the 2 WTC planes departed from...

flags-composite.jpg


Also on 9/11 they never use those gates, I have flown many times on September 11 out of Terminal C and Gate 19 is always empty on that day

 
In high school shop class. I had just finished fixing a projection TV and turned it on just in time to see the second plane hit. I'll never forget how everything got quiet.
 
I had taken that week off because my parents were in town visiting. Normally, I would have been in terminal B of Logan, luckily not on one of those flights though.

We were watching the news to catch a weather forecast and were just in shock. My sister and her family live in NYC and we couldn't get through to them for a couple of days. My phone never stopped ringing from friends checking on me to make sure I wasn't flying either.

It's a day/time that I will never forget.
 
Sitting in 5th grade home room. One of the teachers came into the room to tell us what happened. I didnt know what the TWC was at the time so i didnt realize what a big deal it was until they turned on the tv for us.
 
Was working a road job , a guy came by yelling from his car that one of the towers was hit. I got a am/fm radio I kept in my Bronco and turned it on. the national grid guys came down and we were listening (2 cops, 6 NG guys) when the second plane hit they shut the job down. I went to my parents home nearby to watch it with them.
a few days later, I was deployed to lower Manhattan with a multi jurisdiction force in support of the Feds.
Job was a perimeter security, mid-8a for a fed facility where the were pulling in many POI .
Two things I will never forget, the smell of the area, burnt electronics, and the many New Yorkers who were out walking on the midnight shift. To a man and woman thanking everyone who came to help. I lost count of all the states, cities and small towns I saw in my time there.

As a side note, many of the local and chain eateries fed the many out of town responders for free, just take care of your servers. I know tips were great in that time period
 
Surreal day for sure. I was driving to work, was at Wyoma Square in Lynn, when I heard the first of a plane hitting the WTC. I had flown a light plane down the Hudson River corridor maybe 10-11 years earlier, so knew it was not likely an accident. Sure enough, the other tower was hit soon after. I watched the towers fall on TV with some co-workers at work. Not an easy day.
 
Term B Boston, Gate 32 where AA11 departed from, my pic taken on 9/11/2016
AA11 b32.jpg

UAL175 departed Term C Gate 19, my pic taken 9/11/16
C19.jpgc19A.jpg
 
I was camping by myself at Nickerson State Park in my old VW bus. I was making breakfast at the campfire and listening to the Howard Stern show when he started talking about some idiot who hit the WTC in their plane. 20 minutes later other campers who were at adjacent sites were sitting at my site with me listening to the radio. All of us silent.
I’m standing in my kitchen crying right now making breakfast for my kids.
 
I was driving to work in Burlington and listening to Howard Stern when he mentioned that a plane hit the World Trade Center. Thought it was a joke at first. Watching the service on TV right now. Sad...
 
I was at work in the executive briefing center of EMC in Hopkinton. My boss came by my cubicle and mentioned that a plane had struck the WTC tower in NYC.
A little while later I went over to the lobby area where we had a couple of TV screens, now tuned to the news stations watching the North tower burn.
I saw the second plane strike tower 2 and immediately turned to a co-worker and said "So, if this how world war 3 starts?"
The thing I remember most is the lack of planes in the sky for the next several days. It was so eerie.
 
I was at work in the executive briefing center of EMC in Hopkinton. My boss came by my cubicle and mentioned that a plane had struck the WTC tower in NYC.
A little while later I went over to the lobby area where we had a couple of TV screens, now tuned to the news stations watching the North tower burn.
I saw the second plane strike tower 2 and immediately turned to a co-worker and said "So, if this how world war 3 starts?"
The thing I remember most is the lack of planes in the sky for the next several days. It was so eerie.

I might have mentioned this already, but I was at a grad seminar on the 13th or so and the other students were mentioning how scary it was to have military planes going over.

I told them I found it comforting. They looked at me like I had two heads, but I'd been in the army for the previous 4 years and A-10s streaking overhead were a constant workday occurrence.
 
I was in second grade and they actually sent us home from school for the day, I remember going home shortly after it happened to watch it all on the news with my grandmother. Some odd years later I joined the Army (mostly because of 9/11). God bless the people who died that day and all of the people who have died in war; at home, or on the battlefields.
 
I had just come home from pre-school, went in to my brothers room and turned on his tv. I saw the image of the smoldering towers pop up and I remember calling my mom to come look.
 
standing in morning formation at FT.Dix. We, Alpha Co. 104th Inf. were headed to Bosnia on September 19th as part of SFOR 10 and had been activated and moved to FT.Dix for premobe training 20 August. I just read so atheist Military haters forced the Commander of FT. Dix to remove a cross on post. These clowns just made the list.
 
Up on scaffolding, building a chimney in Hingham. As the news came in, we watched F-15s from Otis roar over head. The sky then emptied of all commercial air traffic. I don't think anyone will forget where they were that day.
Those F-15's were sent to intercept any incoming airliners and they were unarmed. I later in my Military career met one of the pilots and their orders were to fly patterns around NYC and "intercept" any inbound airliners. Since they were unarmed you can guess their options. I just made my yearly donation to Tunnels to Towers, Frank Stiller is the man! It's very sad how it all ended and Americans are back at each others throats thanks to the anti-American left. Leftists are our greatest threat now, not some Muslim fanatic with a box cutter.:mad:
 
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Those F-15's were sent to intercept any incoming airliners and they were unarmed. I later in my Military career met one of the pilots and their orders were to fly patterns around NYC and "intercept" any inbound airliners. Since they were unarmed you can guess their options. I just made my yearly donation to Tunnels to Towers, Frank Stiller is the man! It's very sad how it all ended and Americans are back at each others throats thanks to the anti-American left. Leftists are our greatest threat now, not some Muslim fanatic with a box cutter.:mad:
I was there w you in C 181.
 
I was in Chicago. I was getting into an elevator and the dude in it has told me that NYC is under the attack and that Chicago will be next. Our company had 350 people from MA in Chicago at the trade show. Downtown Chicago was empty. No soul anywhere. I walked to the nearest rental car agency and rented all minivans they had. At that time nobody was renting there, so they still had quite few cars left. Our VP rented more cars in other 2 locations. We drove 18 hours straight from Chicago to Boston.
When we arrived to Boston, some of our people could not get their cars from the Logan parking lots for few days, their cars were moved into some remote parking lot.
 
I was in NyC 30 blocks north of the WTC, is been 20 fkkk years and I still don’t like talking about it, people don’t understand what a tragedy liked that causes on a human being , the victims, the whole city, there was human parts and papers across the bridge in Brooklyn, I still get quiet when I think about it… people that was there don’t want to watch the videos or talk about it ,we had enough living it one day.
 
I was in recruiter school at MCRD San Diego. Class was about to begin. When the first plane hit nobody knew what the eff was going on. When the second plane hit we knew. I am curious as to how different my life would have been (or perhaps how much shorter) if I didn't go on recruiter duty and stayed in the fleet.
 
Late on September 7th it was decided that a couple of us technical folks would join our sales VP and the account salesman on a trip to see Morgan Stanley Dead Whitter in the North Tower on Tuesday Sept 11th. We were going to drive down on Sept 10th and be there first thing in the morning on Sept 11th to troubleshoot an odd issue with a particular touch screen controller and the interaction with a legacy system. Around noon on Sept 10th, it was decided to do a conference call in place of an on-site visit as they couldn't get pre-clearance for us from Corporate Security. We would instead drive down on Sept 11th and visit on Sept 12th.

The morning of Sept 11th, we started the call 8:30 call with a tech support team at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.
We exchanged niceties and got to work, narrowing down the issue to a couple of possibilities fairly quickly.
At 8:46, the line went dead.
Someone happened to be in the café across the hall from the office when the first reports started rolling in.
I called my fiancé (Wife and I were not yet married) then gathered in the café along with most of our company and watched the news pour in.


I guess my take away is that life changes every instant. Some are inconsequential, some monumental, and you have no say which sort of change you will encounter at any given moment.
Take time for the important things. Hugs from your kids, holding hands with a loved one by a fire, shared laughs with friends, your favorite pet lounging on your lap. Watching the sun rise or set over the lake, the mountains, the ocean. Seek wonder in the most mundane moments.
I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the novel "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles


"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
 
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