OT: A remembrance - where were you?

Living in Farmington Hills and driving to Ann Arbor for work.  I worked a the building on the corner of 4th and Washington.   It was a beautiful morning and I was getting ready to leave for the drive in to AA.

Friend calls me at 8 and left a voice mail telling me "a plane just crashed in to the WTC".   I got out of the shower, heard this message so I turned on the TV and called him back.  I was watching the 1st plane burn, and was leaving him a message back....when the 2nd plane hit.  I think I said "holy s--t another plane just hit call me back"... and he did.

I waited a few hours and then drove in to AA late for work.  Everything was on lockdown.  Not a plane was in the sky and armed Military with Machine Guns were outside the AA Courthouse guarding it.

On the way home that night...every gas station was jammed with panickers trying to get gas before the supply was cut out from the Mid East. 

My freshman year. First 2 weeks on campus, up early for Latin (9am 101, damn Classics). Saw the second plane hit on tv, live.

I still remember the candlelight vigil in the diag, and all classes were cancelled.

I was standing on the roof of Scholastic Books, at Prince and Broadway, watching the entire thing unfold right in front of me.  Eight women at Scholastic lost their husbands that day.

Lots of crazy stories from that week.

Drove home to Chicago on Thursday, and flew right back to NYC again Monday.

Was just finishing a short surgery on the upper east side 68th and York.  Went to recovery room and looked at CNN.com and saw the first iconic picture of that first tower hit and smoldering.  Everyone was in the lounge with the television on and we watched the whole thing unfold.  They cancelled all other cases in the operating room that day.  The department chair who was visibly emotional and upset rounded us all up in the auditorium and ordered us to stay there until official orders.  They ordered in a huge amount of food to feed us and we waited and waited.  For nothing.  The traumas did not roll in.  We went down to the emergency room and it was all stripped down and looked like a huge triage/MASH unit.  They were ready for battle but unfortunately very few patients.  

I was teaching at a schol near JFK airport. I saw the middle school secretary walking through the hall outside my door, very unusual, with a preoccupied look on her face. Didn't know what was going on. Then they called us all into an impromptu assembly. They refused to say it was terrorism; they told the kids that two planes had flown into the towers by accident. Even the youngest kids were like, "Yeah, right."

Then we went back to our homerooms to wait for parents to pick kids up or just to wait out the day. My homeroom, we constantly checked the internet on the computers we had at the back of the room. So much misinformation that day.

Fortunately, in our entire school population, only the chorus teacher lost his roommate and a few kids lost uncles and cousins. Terrible, still.

I was living in California at the time and working independently. I got up around 7:15 Pacific and didn't know what was going on until 7:30 when my dad called me.

I was stationed in Heidelberg, Germany, participating in an exercise conference at a NATO headquarters in Brunssum, The Netherlands.  It was afternoon for us.  A British Lieutenant Colonel pulled me out of the auditorium to a TV set in his office, and told me about the first impact.  In spite of the obviously clear weather I hoped for the world's biggest pilot/technical error, which was dashed in any case as we watched impact number two.  

The sympathetic reaction to we Americans that day - from a NATO-plus crowd of ~30 nations - was enormous.  Also notable was the expression of solidarity.  I still, as of this morning, receive rememberance notes from good people I was serving with at the time.  

The drive back to Germany that night was a sober one.  

because I was on Pacific Time; first indication there was anything wrong was when I had trouble signing on to AOL. Then I got a call from a co-worker to turn on the TV, and by that time both towers were down. I knew nearly a dozen people who worked in the WTC, every single one of them were unharmed. Side note: Native NYer, this hit me pretty hard. I remember going up to the roof as a kid and seeing:

I was in MBA school. I was sitting at home playing a MUD when I should have been working, when other players started saying "HOLY SHIT TURN ON THE NEWS".

One of the more surreal days of my life. Peter Jennings saying "Oh my God" on television still sends chills down my spine all these years later.

Horrible day.

I was the Chief of Operational Law in the Counsel's Office.  I was driving back on base to go to work after dropping my son off at day care.  I was listening to NPR, and they broke in with the bulletin that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers.  I thought to myself that it could be an accident or terrorism, we didn't know which.  Then, as I was in line to come back in through the gate, I remember Carl Kassel breaking in to announce a second plane had hit the other tower.  I thought to myself, OK, terrorism.

For the first three hours or so, those of us in the military were doing exactly what everyone else was doing, watching the TV coverage in shock and trying to come to grips with its meaning.  Example, as the attack was happening, I passed through the gate with minimal screening, just as always in the days before 11 Sep.  Later that day, it took my wife hours to pass through the same gate because Security was closely examimining every vehicle.  But, that reaction only happened mid to late morning.

As we started to come to grips, we began taking action.  One of our component commands was Military Sealift Command, located in the Washington Navy Yard just a few miles from the Pentagon.  We were all worried about how they were doing, and when the Federal Government sent all the DC area employees home, we made arrangements to ensure we could stay in touch with their Legal Office, regardless of where their lawyers were working in the coming days.  One of our people was actually in the air flying to Washington for a meeting during the attack, and when the FAA said "everyone down, NOW!"  He spent several days in Cincinnati, and returned with 2 or 3 other folks from St. Louis when they could finally score a rental car.  The folks who monitor domestic air traffic said the few days when there was no civilian aviation at all was eerie.  Normally, their monitors are lit up like Christmas trees with all the air traffic, but those days had only a half dozen military flights over the entire U.S.

screaming that the 1st tower was hit by a plane. I was pretty hungover but sat in front of the tv all day in shock. I remember later that afternoon going outside when the FAA grounded all flights and was amazed that not 1 plane was flying in our country that day. Also being from PA I was worried when the news starting talking about a Plane over PA being hijacked and worrying about my family there. 

5th grade.  I didn't find out what was actually going on until after school when I got home.  But they cancelled basketball practice, and I remember being upset about that.  And that no one would tell us what was going on.  Teachers were crying, all afterschool activities were cancelled, parents were picking up students early and something was very clearly wrong.  

But nobody would tell us what was happening.  That was the most frustrating part.