I was pedaling to work when my phone rang, as soon as I answered my wife screamed “We’re being attacked, we’re being attacked!!!!”

Such foreign words to hear in the Land of the Free.

Once she calmed down and was able to explain what was happening, it still couldn’t be true (Orson Wells?!) and it remained unbelievable until I was able to find an espresso stand with a television near by. I clearly remember the 7 of us staring at that small black and white screen in amazement. Four of us were holding hands, complete strangers clasped together for support while we tried to grasp the horrors that were being played out in front of us, thousands of miles away.

Telling our group that I need to get to work, I asked if anyone minded saying a prayer with me before I left. We all bowed our heads and took turns sharing the pain in our hearts, each saying their piece through sobs and tears.

Since my discharge from active duty in the Marine Corps in 1987 I have flown ‘Ol Glory daily, and will continue to do so until one is laid over the urn that contains my ashes.

Such a beautiful site to see, Stars and Stripes displayed everywhere I looked from Sept. 12th and after, a nation of immigrants in solitude with the threads that bind us together.

Sadly those days, like many of the flags, have faded.

In honor of those who died directly, indirectly and in any and all related acts since, I ask each and every one of you to PLEASE fly our nations colors on this coming Sunday, Sept. 11 (at the very least).

Although I don’t always agree with who and what is going on in the White House, WE THE PEOPLE need to stay united and remember what sacrifices our fore-fathers and mothers made so we are able to live in a land as free as ours is today.

For those of you who have a hard time understanding that last sentence, look around the world at how some countries and cultures exist, and the atrocities some people are facing at this very minute.

Although ours is far from prefect it’s as free as your going to find, and the protections that that piece of paper called the Declaration of Independence provides us are some of the greatest gifts God has bestowed upon man-kind.

Semper Fi ‘365Stairs’ and all others who are now or have ever worn an American military uniform.

God bless us all.

To 365, sbre, kootchman, JanS and all other veterans on this Forum:

THANK YOU for your service to our country!

Like the bumper sticker says: “No Veterans, No USA”

And you know what? If this thread doesn’t get at least as much play as the “Joy Anderson” one, it’s a damn shame.

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I was watching live TV on the morning of 9/11/01. Normally I would’ve been eating my breakfast in grumpy silence, but for some reason, my son had turned on the TV news that morning, so we sat and watched together.

My head was on “instant replay” for months afterward. Like an endless loop of the Twin Towers falling, I kept running over the same two thoughts:

    1) I can’t believe I saw what I saw.

    2) How many people are gonna have to die for this?

Ten years on, I still can’t believe what I saw that day.

And I still don’t know how many people are gonna have to die.

I woke up late for work that morning. I got ready without turning on the news or radio. I remember my boyfriend was driving me in to work and we were looking at each other very confused because we couldn’t figure out why our rock station was talking about planes and buildings. I had just turned my phone on and had 3 new messages. The first message was a co-worker telling me to not come in to work because we were closed. I immediately called my co-worker. I remember not being able to understand anything he was saying… I thought the company we worked for had shut-down.

There was a very distinct moment when he realized that I had no idea what was happening. He slowed his speaking pace down and told me that the Twin Towers in NY had been attacked. I repeated what he was saying to my boyfriend – we did an immediate U-turn and headed home. The radio was making more and more sense.

When we got home and turned on the TV, what I was seeing didn’t make sense or seem real. My boyfriend went in to auto-protect mode – he drew all the curtains and made sure we stayed away from the windows. Then the first tower fell.

I called my mom and told her to wake up my dad and turn on the news – “The US is under attack”. I was on the phone with her as she woke my dad up and turned on the news and I heard them both gasp.

The rest of the day was glued to the TV, except for the moments when we felt like we just couldn’t watch anymore, so we sat and cried instead.

A while later in the day, I listened to the other 2 messages on my phone, one was another message from a co-worker and the third message was from my then 8 year old nephew. What I heard the first time I listened was something along the lines of “Hi Aunt Mimi – I’m watching the Power rangers and people are hurt, I love you.” And when I listened the second time I realized that what he said was “Hi Aunt Mimi, the Twin Towers fell and people are hurt. I love you.” That’s when I realized that had my phone been turned on that morning – I would have gotten the first news about it from my 8 year old nephew.

The last words I uttered that day were when we went to bed and I turned to my boyfriend and said “I just wish I knew how important yesterday was so that I could have appreciated the feeling of safety and freedom… I can’t even remember how that feels anymore.”

^

Sept 11, 2001…

I was going through “Chief’s Initiation” on board the USS Abraham Lincoln. I had duty the night before (10 Sept) and was just waking up when i heard someone saying a plane had crashed into the WTC.

I knew a plane had crashed into the Empire State Building in bad weather a while ago, so I assumed that is what happened here. I went ahead and showered got dressed and went up to work in the trailer in the hanger deck that I was working out of. Looking back I knew something was wrong, but it didn’t register at the time, the hanger deck was quite and empty – something that NEVER happens when the ship was in the shipyard. I got to the trailer just as my phone was ringing.

It was my wife and told me that planes had crashed it the WTC, I told her it was probably because of bad weather. All she said after that was to tell me to get to a TV.

So I went up to the OPS Office where they had a Big Screen TV. I walked in just as they were replaying the second plane hit the tower. I think I stood there about 45 mins just watching, numb.

After the shock passed we started figuring out just what work needed to get finished FAST so we could get underway. We didn’t even know if we were going to be allowed to go home that night. As it was we were.

The next day it took us about 3-4 hours to get back to the ship as the guards at PSNS were checking EVERYONE.

Two days later I learned that a good friend of mine who I worked with everyday had been killed in the attack on the Pentagon. She had transferred because she was finally had a baby after her and her husband had been trying for years.

I have NO sympathy for terrorists and celebrate every time I hear of one being killed. They aren’t human.

I had just pulled in to the car rental in the MN/St. Paul and heard the the radio commentary… I saw the second plane hit in the Hertz office… I called home and told my wife to stay home, keep my daughter home, and to stay away from public places. I managed to get a room in A Holiday Inn Express and watched for three days.. I ended up driving home four days later in a rental car. A lot of the world was very kind to us that week. Canadian air traffic parked hundred of US domestic flights in Canada.. and gave great comfort and sanctuary to thousands of US citizens.

I also remember thinking if I could have done the acts that the NY police and fire departments did. Into the Valley they went..with too many others to follow… Semper Fi…

I was driving to work; had NPR on the car radio. I, too, thought at first it was an Orson Wells-type radio hoax. Soon realized it was really happening. Repeatedly realized that my mouth was hanging open and kept shutting it, over and over on the drive to work. At work everyone was told that if they needed to leave, it was okay. I stayed. In the afternoon my boss came around to check on us. Then the vice president of my division came around to check on us. Then the CEO of my organization came around to check on us. We heard that the Columbia Center had been evacuated. A colleague and I worked on a deadline until 7 p.m. and then I drove him home, and drove myself home at the end of that beautiful clear day. We should have ignored the deadline because we made some awful mistakes!

Things that are burned in my memory from watching all the TV coverage: the video of that poor doomed fire chaplain, looking very grave and concerned, with a sound track of loud WHUMPS as bodies hit the ground. The video of the second plane hitting the tower. The videos of the collapse of first one, then the other tower. The videos of people running in the streets, away from the avalanche? flash flood? can’t find the right metaphor! of smoke, dust, debris, and heat rushing toward them through street canyons. And the realization that somebody actually hated us enough, and had the power, to do this to us.

I will never forget the horror of realizing what those thumps on the soundtrack were, and suddenly understanding that there were people up there who were still alive, but for whom there was no option other than death by flame, or death by falling. The sickening feeling of knowing that although these people had survived the initial impact and were still alive right now…they were, for all intents and purposes, already dead. They couldn’t, and wouldn’t be saved. That just hit me really hard, like a punch in the stomach. I think we all (I do, anyway. Well, DID.) see ourselves living our life, almost like a movie sometimes, where you think “this can’t be happening” and “surely there’s a way out of this, or someone will come and save me” and most of the time, whatever it is ends well, and we go on living…I just couldn’t stop thinking about these people, and how in their lifemovie, the credits were already rolling, because this WAS happening, there was no way out, and although there were people coming to save them, there was no way they would succeed. It still chokes me up.

I remember that chaplain, and I felt such love for him, standing in danger to bring comfort. Then the towers fell, and my heart stopped for a second, because I knew no one would be pulled living from that pile. (I can’t remember…did any survivors come from the rubble?) I cried so hard when I saw the photo of the firefighters carrying the chaplain’s body out. It just seemed like the final straw, like the most unfair blow of a day filled with them.

I was working out of town in Bakersfield, CA. Like others I got up, turned on the Weather Channel and saw one of the burning towers, the other yet unscathed. I switched to another network. While there was a suspicion of terrorism it hadn’t solidified yet. Between getting ready for work I caught film of the second plane hitting the other tower and the first tower fall. I had to go to work because the equipment would be on $400/hour standby but it was surreal. The rest of the day I watched the skies and no planes were seen except for high altitude fighter jets. It was so weird to sit there working but at the same time wondering “WTF”?

–

When I was ten our family toured around NY on a tourist boat. The World Trade Center was being constructed and one of the towers was up, and the second was rising. Both are in clear view of the old Super 8 movie camera lens that was recording the typical tourist movie. We just accepted it as “of course these are taller than the Empire State Building”…yawn. But to view the footage in hindsight is a reminder that things can change in an instant.

On September 11th I was on a plane that left Montreal at 7am. My flight made a landing in Chicago, and when i got off the plane, everyone was watching TV. I fly alot, so I went into the airline club room and was watching TV there. Just as the towers came down, a club official came over and turned off the TV. Everyone screamed at him, but he said “under orders of the federal government, we have been told that all TVs in the airport have to be turned off”. I was pretty upset before that but was pretty unnerved. I got on the phone to my family, my cell (which was just about out of power) and asked them to get me a hotel room in Chicago, as I knew that planes were not going to takeoff again that day. About an hour later, the TVs came back on. I sat there glued to the TV until around 2pm and then went to the hotel that my family managed to get me into. Took me 2 days to get a rental car, and I drove across county.

Like others posting here, there are may sounds and sights of that day I will never forget — the sounds of the people jumping, that were replayed and replayed that day or the sounds of the NYFD officers personal alarms after the towers fell.

Since then, I have met several Tower 2 survivors who heeded warnings and left as soon as the 1st plane hit.

I lookforward to visiting the new memorial this fall and to seeing the Freedom Towers when completed.

This week there are a series of specials on the National Georgraphic Channel…. and while I will never forget that day, it really brought back the memories of that awful day. Because of that, I am now reading the book “102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the FLight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers”.

Here’s a Mary Chapin Carpenter tribute song on YouTube:

I’ve always loved this one.

September 11th started out as a normal day for us. Or as normal as life was for us after losing my husband to cancer three years earlier. My oldest son headed out to college and my four youngest rushed to catch the bus to high school. I got some laundry in, did some housework and sat down to read the paper. My phone rang. I was told that a plane hit the Towers and to turn on the news. I watched horrified. I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to think. Suddenly a plane came from out of nowhere and hit the second tower. Then what none of us could have imagined became our reality. Here I was, sitting in my living room while 40 miles away…our lives were changing forever. All I could think of was getting to my kids. I was convinced we were going to die and I wanted us to be together when we did. I rushed to the school and there were kids outside screaming and crying. We lived in a small town on Long Island and the high school had less then 800 kids and I knew every one of them. Kids whose dads worked in the Towers, or somewhere in Lower Manhattan. Kids who didn’t know if they would see their parents again. The rest of the day was spent waiting. For news of a friend who was flying in from Seattle that day ( see my ‘friend’ Eds post above), for news of my Godson…a NYC Firefighter and for news of countless neighbors and friends. All of my loved ones were safe. Physically that is. My Godson will never be same after spending weeks digging out bit and pieces of his comrades from the rubble. I wasn’t willing to go with Ed the first time he went to the site. I did go two months later. We walked around Trinity Church looking at tributes. There was one sign that I found most heartbreaking of all. It had pictures of the two most beautiful little girls, about 2 and 3 years old. The sign said “We miss you Mommy”. New Yorkers became Heroes that day…and Americans from all over became New Yorkers.