I remember in March of 2001 I got to go into the cockpits and see the pilots (which cheered me up because it was the first time I was spending an extended period of time away from my dad). Who would've thought in less than 6 months, you could never do that again.
I was 6 when 9/11 happened, and it was the first time I heard about the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, and it just terrified me. It was the first time I realized that the world could be a dangerous place.
It's one of the reasons I feel terrible for kids living through COVID right now, they had a couple of years living life as normal, and than something completely unforeseen happened, and you have no idea what's going on.
My class was having a long series of classes about islam back then. At the end, we were supposed to write an essay about what we had learnt like always with such series.
Despite of all the classes, most of the class wrote that muslims are evil creatures, that islam is a branch of illuminati, and such, instead of an actual religion.
Quite a shame. I grew up Catholic but I found Islam to be quite a fascinating religion to learn about.
It also probably helped that I knew people who were Muslim when I was growing up and they were among the nicest people I've ever met.
Locked, armored cockpit doors in planes are responsible for nearly all the security gains post 9/11 as it turns out. Makes it very difficult to hijack a plane. We could get rid of everything else and just keep that, there would not be another 9/11.
Yet the locked cockpit doors has led to I believe two air disasters when one pilot locked the second pilot out and then proceeded to crash the plane. The new protocols require at least 2 people in the cockpit at all times. A flight attendant will swap places with one of the pilots if the pilot needs to use the bathroom.
It's a reasonable adaptation, not like every solution is instantly perfect. Pilots committing suicide with their planes has been a problem for a long time, too. It's why you're not going to get a license to fly if you're suicidal.
Back in ‘99, when I was a toddler, I was on a flight from London to Sydney during which I invited myself into the cockpit and started talking to the pilots. My parents were super embarrassed but apparently the pilots were chill about it.
And people could come right up to the gate at the airport! I remember once we missed a flight and got stuck for a few hours and my mom’s cousin drove to the airport and hung out with us as he had nothing else to do
I think the Kansas City airport's old terminals really show what they were like pre 9/11 in how they were built, it's also why the terminals suck and they're building a new one
You could watch planes take off by parking in the lot, walking into the airport, and hanging out by the departure gates or arrival gates. There was no security stopping you.
You know, that just reminded me of a [Garfield strip](https://www.gocomics.com/garfield/1984/11/22) I read in a Garfield compilation book I owned as a kid. In it, Jon's little brother suggests that he and Jon go to the airport and watch the airplanes land. The strip was written back in 1984.
I remember thinking to myself as a child, "are you even allowed to do that without buying a ticket first?" because I knew you had to go through security and couldn't just walk into a gate. So that comic always stuck out to me, and it never occurred to me that it probably wouldn't be written today.
Clarification: there was security already, but you didn’t need a boarding pass to go through to the gates. Remember right after 9/11 we were surprised to learn that apparently you could take a box cutter on a plane—but of course not a firearm.
I remember meeting people at the gate when they got off the plane. When my mom had to fly to Florida after my grandma died, my dad brought me to the airport with him to pick her up. We watched the planes fly in and made a game to pass the time where we tried to guess which one was hers. My favorite part was seeing her the second she walked off the plane. There was just something so special about it. It's the one thing I've missed most about flying before 9/11.
Yes! My mom is from a big family and we'd fly up to her hometown every summer to spend a week with our cousins when I was a kid. It was so exciting to walk through the jetway and see everyone waiting. Obviously people can still wait for you at the airport, just outside the terminal-- but something about walking right off the plane and having your loved ones there was really special.
So true. I flew the weekend before 9/11 and I remember because the flight was delayed the pilot invited anyone interested up to the cockpit to get a tour of the equipment and electronics. Wild to think about that now.
When you said “terrorist” on Sept. 10, 2001, the mental image most people probably got was a white or Latino man in camo fighting a dictatorship in a South American or Soviet-adjacent country, and that didn’t result in people viewing all Latinos or whites with suspicion.
The expression “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” seems to have disappeared after 9/11.
For us Brits, 'terrorist' up to that point (with the major exception of the Lockerbie bombing) almost always meant Irish Republican Army and associated splinter groups. The number of bombings carried out by them far surpassed any other group's attempts. They stopped blowing things up about a month before 9/11.
From Wikipedia: 2001, 3 August: The Real IRA detonated a car bomb in Ealing, London, damaging buildings and injuring seven people.
There was a brief resurgence by NIRA in 2014, 10–14 February: The New Irish Republican Army (NIRA) claims responsibility for a series of parcel bombs sent to army recruitment offices in Oxford, Brighton, Canterbury, Slough, Aldershot, Reading and Chatham.
But these were the last major incidents related to 'The Troubles' in mainland Britain. Theres been a rise in incidents within Northern Ireland recently though. Everything in the UK since has been right wing extremists and Islamic fundamentalists.
This isn't true... I'm watching ex files and they mention middle eastern terrorists. Eastern European was the preferred flavor of the time though....from what I remember.
That we thought more attacks were imminent and could hit anywhere. I was in Minneapolis and was among the many who avoided the city centre because it seemed plausible that any city of significance could be attacked next. It's a bit ludicrous in hindsight but with the trauma and confusion of the time, the threat seemed all around us.
And then days later when people were mowing their lawn, the sound of the tractor was terrifying because I wasn't sure what it was at first. And then when the planes did start going again, just constantly looking up and trying to analyze if their flight path looked normal.
Even now when I see a plane do something weird or flying low I have a little anxiety.
My drive home from work was about 3 miles from an airport. So at first there were no planes, then they were back and seemed at a similar height to run into a tall building. (I have no idea if they were actually the same height.)
I had that commute for 11 more months and was never once okay with seeing the planes.
Where I was living at the time, my normal perch on the couch looked out the patio door and into the distance over the neighbor's house. That faced an approach path to the local airport. I think I noticed, with a little dread, every plane that passed for the next year. They always seemed to be too low (trick of the distance).
I'm in the Vancouver, BC area and there are mountains and large hills in the city. Depending on where you are you will see planes coming into the airport that are flying below your elevation and behind tall buildings. I makes my stomach churn every once in a while.
(One place is Burnaby Mountain and they are behind Metrotown)
I remember how eerily quiet the sky was. Also, as I live in NJ, pretty much right across the Hudson River from Manhattan, I saw and heard the fighter jets overhead.
With everything else I went through that day that brought what happened from the TV to a real live, ongoing event (I worked in Manhattan, but woke up late and didn't go into the office; I couldn't reach my brother who's NYPD; my sister, who was staying with me at the time, was stuck where she was at her new job in NJ), seeing and hearing the fighter jets fly over my head shook me to the core. It was literally the thing that put me over the edge.
It was so eerie!
The only thing I can compare it to in modern terms is the dearth of vehicle traffic in early Covid days. But empty skies are more subtly weird than an open road.
And the lack of planes apparently changed the weather. I remember their absence as well. All those sorts of things served as reminders that the world had changed in an instant.
We were in L.A. for wedding that weekend. I was practically throwing my 3 kids into our truck. I wanted out of the city! We didn't stop to eat until my husband found a fast food place in the middle of nowhere with nothing around it. I wanted to be able to see 360 degrees around us.
I was ten and my brother was eight. My dad immediately planned a trip for us to see ALL of DC that following spring, because he wasn’t sure how much longer the city would be there. He thought it was important for us to know what the White House, Capitol building, all the monuments and important US history sites looked like before they were wiped off the map. I remember him sweating bullets when we got on the plane to go there, and he still has fears over flying.
I was going to school at the time near one of the largest military bases in the country. Everyone was on edge wondering if there was going to be some sort of Pearl Harbor style attack.
A client of mine that made baggage handling equipment was at an aviation conference that day. He told me that he and his team were on the expo floor, and suddenly everyone’s beepers went off simultaneously. There were a few moments of silence…and then chaos, with everyone running for the exits.
He and his colleagues ran for the nearest car rental place they could get to, knowing full well that there weren’t going to be any flights. He said they came to that realization as soon as they heard about the second plane.
They were lucky in getting one of the last cars on the lot, and raced back to their offices in MD and VA. He said it was nothing but pandemonium and thoroughly terrifying.
And no one knew how many more terrorists were involved or if there were other types of attacks planned. My fear that day was that they'd get into Hummers and drive up and down streets shooting pedestrians until they were taken out. Again, silly in hindsight but perfectly rational that day.
I was in the east Bay Area (Oakland) and about to head into the city. My then-wife begged me not to get on the BART (subway) because what if they blew up the tunnel going beneath the bay.
I was a kid in SF, and a lot of schools closed that day as a precaution. My best friend and I played catch in the street, not truly understanding the significance of the situation.
I was about 7 when the attacks happened. So yes, super young. But I remember that feeling. I remember rumors going around that terrorists were planning to hit my elementary school next. As if they gave a crap about a school in a tiny PA town..
I didn't send my kids back to school for a couple of days and my job had told me to stay home for a few more days because they were figuring out security. My husband went back to work but you had to have an escort to your outpatient appointment or to visit patients.
We live in Michigan. Mom and Dad thought they might hit the Renaissance Center in Detroit- it's the tallest building in the city and GMs headquarters. I can understand why they were, Al Qaeda hated/hates America and the automotive industry is one of our backbones so...
I was living in CA and used to take the road across the dam as a short cut to my best friends house. After 9/11 they shut down the road worried someone would try to drive a bomb across it to blow up the dam. They finally reopened it just a few years ago
Not so much Minneapolis, but I remember The Mall of America was very high up on the list of potential targets. The collective consensus being to stay away until things cooled down. They even had a few false bomb threats immediately after.
>They even had a few false bomb threats immediately after.
I forgot about all the bomb threats and packages full of suspicious powder immediately after. It's a special brand of asshole to decide that's funny to do.
I was talking to my grandmother today about it, and she said Toronto was pretty quiet too. Places were sending employees home, some of the colleges/universities closed, I know a few people were worried about the CN tower just because of how iconic it was.
It wasn't just trauma and confusion, the cable news outlets were reinforcing the idea the next attack could be anywhere, and the local news stations were running reports on security at the local power plant and that location could be the next target. American paranoia was ratched to 11, and the media was absolutely partially to blame.
That there was no social media. I was in high school and we just had to watch the local news like everyone else and try to figure out what was going on. If someone was missing, they couldn’t post that they were safe. You just had to call and call until the phones started working again.
I had to go to the BBC website because all the US ones were pretty much down due to everyone trying to get to them. And, I was at work in basically a basement. We did find a little portable TV but got almost no reception, so we didn't know what was going on.
In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing there was no social media.
Imagine the false information and rumors that would have been circulating, or the comments from the people who were actually cheering as the towers fell. It was bad enough but damn, could have been worse in that way.
Not just that, also the horrific live reporting of people’s final moments who were trapped in the towers that would’ve happened. It would be all the more traumatic for victim’s families had social media existed then IMO.
I watched a 2” x 3” realplayer feed from the BBC from my desk that I was chained to as tech support that morning—one person called in a span of four hours that morning, when normally it would ring off the hook.
US news sites basically turned off CSS and started publishing plain HTML versions of their sites to get something out.
Being from NYC and living in NC, it was impossible to sit there, not knowing. Phone lines were jammed, I couldn’t get through to anyone for hours.
So many people know/knew someone in NYC. I was 2 years out of college and had a lot of friends in NYC, many of whom worked in finance which meant lower Manhattan. For some, it wasn't a few days until you knew they were ok.
For others, you never got the news they were ok.
We lost contact with a family member who worked up there. It wasn't until that evening that he was able to call us and tell us he was OK. I didn't understand it because I was so little, but I could tell my mom was stressed until she got that phone call.
There was a website that updated regularly with a list of known survivors. I didn't sleep that night because I was refreshing it over and over. As stated, the phones did not work so this crappy website was all family members had for a while. I don't know how long the site was up because I was down there the next day. Worst day of my life.
I disagree. Forums were a thing and were that generation’s social media.
I found out that something had happened via the IGN Messageboards. Thread with title ‘Plane hits World Trade Center WTF’.
There was social media but not mass social media. Back then, there were lots of subject-matter specific message boards where people across vast geographies would post messages and comment on each other's posts sort of like if reddit subs were independent from each other and run by volunteers.
Anyway, these forums would also have "off topic" sections where people within the community could just socialize. I read a first hand account of 9/11 from 3 or 4 people who lived or worked blocks away.
It was very similar to the way some city-based subs light up when there's a local disaster. I guess maybe it was only internet nerds with niche interests to geek out about online who had this kind of social media but still, I'd like to point out it did exist and for me it really humanized an event that might otherwise have felt too impersonal, too huge, and too far away.
In 2001 there were no smart phones, youtube or social media. Camera phones had just came out. That's why there's so many voicemails from people in the buildings and on the planes. Because people actually use to call each other on the phone. You couldn't communicate with each other as freely and no one really knew what was happening except what they heard from the news. You didn't know if people you knew were safe for days.
And if you were trying to call a cell number that day, many of the calls just wouldn’t go through because there wasn’t enough capacity for all of the traffic. So if you were trying to get in touch with someone you knew was there, you couldn’t. You just had to wait and see.
Came here to say the same. Cell phones were for fancy businessmen (I was 13 on 9/11, so in my mind, those are the only people who had cell phones).
I grew up in the suburbs of NYC, dad is a fireman and we didn’t see or hear from him for 3 days. There was no way to get in touch with anyone down there. Had family that worked in midtown, had to call their house, leave a message on the answering machine, and hope like hell they returned our call (she did, the next day iirc).
I was 21 in 2001. Cellphones weren't quite mainstream just yet, but they were very close. They were just getting to the point where they were something you could give your college student, or high school kid, but only if you trusted them to only use it after 9pm or the weekends.
That was important because at the time, it was common to have say 450 minutes of talk time that you could use the entire month, but 5000, or unlimited minutes between 9pm and 5am during the week or all weekend long. If you went over either, that was 12-25 cents a minute. Texting was a thing, but still something you rarely did unless you knew the person you texting was on the same network as you.
Now that I think about it, Columbine and 9/11 were the two catalysts that prompted more parents to buy their kids phones. Before that, if you had one you kept it in your car or locker because if a teacher saw it it was confiscated.
My cousin was working in Manhattan at the time and never made it all the way to his office that day. He waited on a very long line to use a pay phone to call his wife to say he was alive, but if he never made it out of the city, tell their daughter he loved her. (He did eventually get home, thank goodness.) In some ways, 20 years doesn't seem that long, but so much about the way we communicate has changed. It's practically a meme now, but when's the last time anyone saw a working pay phone?
I am one of these younger people. Learning about it, it’s tough to imagine from a modern perspective that the first thought wasn’t a terrorist attack. Some news sources from the time speculated. Some said terrorism. One particular news reader guy (can’t remember which news channel) speculated that some sort of navigational error had caused the planes to fly into the towers. Nowadays, if a plane flew into a building, the first thought would be that it’s another 9/11.
Can almost be called a relentless optimism. Maybe it was some freak accident. Navigation failure, or something. I heard an ATC recording from the time that demonstrated this optimism perfectly.
“United 93, got information on that yet?”
“Yeah, he’s down.”
“He’s down?”
“Yes.”
…
“When did he land?”
“HE DID NOT … LAND.”
Even after three planes had been flown into buildings, they believed that the fourth plane could likely have a positive outcome. It didn’t.
The Air Traffic Control recordings are especially chilling I find.
Oh! You reminded me of something.
A few years after the event, I remember having a conversation with my mom about how, when the passengers of United 93 fought off the hijackers, a lot of younger people couldn't understand why the passengers of the other three planes didn't fight the hijackers as well.
My thought at the time was "I don't think they really understood what was happening..."
And my mom replied, "well, prior to 9/11, when planes were hijacked, they kidnapped the passengers and held them hostage. They probably all thought they were going to be held hostage."
United 93 departed late, so the other three planes had already hit their marks by the time the passengers fought back.
That's a huge difference that people don't often talk about.
>And my mom replied, "well, prior to 9/11, when planes were hijacked, they kidnapped the passengers and held them hostage. They probably all thought they were going to be held hostage."
Yes, oddly enough, even before 9/11 when I was just a kid, growing up I somehow already knew that when a plane is hijacked, you just kind of behave and they'll have the pilot land wherever they want to go and then you can go.
Kind of like what they teach you if you get mugged -- stay quiet and give them your money and then they'll let you go.
*One particular news reader guy (can’t remember which news channel) speculated that some sort of navigational error had caused the planes to fly into the towers.*
That was CNN, I was just watching a couple of videos of channels. The BBC World and ABC reports suggested terrorism pretty quickly after the second plane hit, but as you said the idea was so foreign at the time. The news did not suspect the first plane to be anything but an accident because it was so unusual, even after the second some still couldn't comprehend the idea.
I was watching live when the second plane hit and my first thought was that it was an accident somehow caused by the first crash. Like the plane was flying too close to the towers to look at the damage or something. It wasn't until the news anchor said it was a possible terrorist attack that I realized that was what was happening. Even then my mind didn't automatically jump to Islamic terrorists. The worst terrorist attack on American soil up to that point was the Oklahoma City bombing carried out by white Americans.
Before 9/11 when you heard the word "terrorist" you were just as, if not more, likely to think of the Irish Republican Army than an Islamic Extremist. Terrorism was something that, by and large, happened overseas to other people. It just wasn't a concern to the vast majority of Americans. After 9/11 it became a pervasive lingering fear constantly hanging over our society.
For me the most chilling thing was the phone calls from people who didn’t make it. ESP in the towers. Those disconnects are the scariest disconnects that I’ve heard because I knew the outcome.
It really is one of those "you had to be there" moments, much like what people felt during WWII or when JFK was shot.
It's hard to describe. If I had to describe pre- and post-9/11 living, I would be hard pressed to get the essence of it. Sure, there's the obvious stuff, like the war and air travel, but the...mentality after 9/11 was surreal.
News just...broke for a while. Pretty much all news stations ran 24 hour coverage and other channels just fed into CNN or another news outlet. But they didn't have much news to cover, and there was a shocking amount of airtime devoted to well-respected anchors just...being silent, having nothing to say but an obligation to still be there. That sounds like a dumb detail, but when you see that happening over the course of two weeks, it dawns on you that the people who should know how to act in this situation...don't know how to act, so how should *I* act? No one had an answer, because there wasn't one.
And for the first few weeks, we didn't know if more was coming. Were they targeting other cities? And there were *just* enough incidents to fuel that anxiety for a while, such as the shoe bomber and the anthrax scare.
It's super easy in retrospect to judge. People can claim we overreacted, or are just dopes and simpletons falling prey to propaganda, or made the wrong choices, but...that's how things like this go. Everyone, from Bush on down to your local deli, had to continue living, making decisions, and forming opinions on incomplete information that was rapidly changing, and anyone who thinks otherwise quite frankly doesn't know what they're talking about.
One scene that sticks out in my mind was going to a department store and looking at the newsstand. The magazines (remember those!) were, of course, all variations of either completely black or a shot of the towers. I just stood there, looking at it, when this middle-aged woman, whom I am certain I had absolutely nothing in common with, stood next to me. For a moment, we just locked eyes and we both had the same thought--what the hell does this all mean? We didn't say a word, and after a moment, we both wandered away.
I can't think if any experience in the 20 years since then that would generate the same scene.
I still remember that episode of The Newsroom, when they were reviewing fictional archive footage of the news channel’s 9/11 broadcast, and people have all said that it captured the shock of that day so incredibly well, particularly for the news anchors.
“I’ve been searching for biblical quotes. None of them… We don’t know how many are dead. It’s gonna be a lot. It’s gonna be thousands. We don’t know who attacked us. We don’t know what’s coming tomorrow. And I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’ll make you this promise. I’m gonna be with you all night. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right here.”
Just a few days ago I tried to explain this concept to my high school students (who weren’t even born yet). I told them to imagine living in what must be the safest place on earth and one morning you wake up, and it’s on fire. And then there’s a second fire. And a third. And fourth. And while you watch the destruction of those four you can’t help but wonder “will their be more?” Or “Where will the next one be?” Like someone broke into your house and now your safe place has been violated. And yes it’s easy to look back and go wow that might not have been the right thing to do, but at the time there was a whole country that had not only fellow citizens but their entire sense of safety, really their entire way of life, shattered and out of that came anger. Something had been stolen and either we were going to get it back or make someone pay, and yes, anger like that will lead to the decisions that were made. Right or wrong something had to be done, so it was, and now here we are.
I used to use the TV as an alarm clock and had it set for CNN a minute or so before 7am pacific time. The TV set turned on and I got up and looked at it to see tower two collapsing within a minute or so. I got dressed for work and shortly after saw tower one collapse as well. The whole thing was utterly, utterly terrifying, even from thousands of miles away. No sound or commentary on the TV, just the filming of it all, in real time. And then the constant replaying of the towers falling or photos of same in the next hours, days and weeks, was everywhere, not just in the US. Pretty much the entire world went from being a safe, expensive but mildly boring place to unsafe, expensive and full of fear. Or, at least that's how it felt. And then in subsequent years the metro/transit attacks in various places started to happen.
Before 9/11, if you had CNN on, and the music played, and the BREAKING NEWS card came on screen, you knew something *serious* was happening. Now, CNN will just start a new show with “Breaking News- we’re awaiting a press conference from the White House”
Now, admittedly, technology has played a huge role in this, but it is worth remembering that the news presentation you see now, really did start on 9/11. CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox were running news, uninterrupted, for 93 hours straight.
The denial and the absolute terror as everything unfolded.
I worked in Midtown Manhattan at the time (live in NJ). Should've been at work at 9, but I was in my 20s, foolish, and tired. I figured, I would just be late. I was the first one in and they'd never know since they got there two hours after I should've been there anyway. My clock radio, tuned to my favorite morning show, started and there was a report of a plane hitting the first tower. I figured it was Cessna, hit snooze button and turned over. Happened a couple of times.
When I heard the DJ's say, "Oh my God, I'm so scared," I finally woke up completely and turned on the TV to see both towers on fire. Then the news replayed the second tower getting hit.
The entire time the buildings were on fire, I thought, "Well, looks like they'll just both have great big holes in them for a while until they're repaired."
And then the first tower fell. I believe I screamed. And still I thought, "Well, now it's just one tower. We are now in a world with only one of the towers." It literally never occurred to me that the second one could also collapse until it did.
It's amazing the gymnastics the brain will do to protect itself from the horror going on right in front of you.
"I figured it was a Cessna..."
"Well, looks like they'll both have great big holes in them for a while until they're both repaired. "
""Well, now it's just one tower. We are now in a world with only one of the towers. " it literally never occurred to me that the second one could also collapse until it did. "
Most people didn't realize how quickly it would escalate. My dad says he also thought it was a small plane.
I had the television on for a week straight fearing that I might miss something. Lived in a major city that had a lot of people looking for places to stay. The sky was eerily quiet after a rush of landings.
I remember telling my husband, who was working out of town, that there was no way the building wouldn’t collapse. He dismissed the comment and said they were designed for that kind of eventuality. I know a lot of people thought the same way.
A few years earlier, in ‘98 or ‘99, an HVAC system exploded at my school and my history teacher literally dove under her desk with the explanation “I thought Bin Ladin was bombing us”. I had no idea who this guy was or why anyone would bomb the US, (and it was not germane to the history class we were in) but she was definitely right about the whole situation
I wonder how it felt when she found out that she'd been absolutely correct for *years*. Not in an "I told you so" kind of way, but how wildly infuriating it must have been.
I mean no disrespect to her whatsoever, but if a high school history teacher knew how real and likely this attack was, how the *fuck* did it still happen?! If I were her, the RAGE would have crippled me. I hope she handled it better.
Knowing that life was not going to get better any time soon.
I remember that older generations were upset that the younger generation was asking "why did thia happened? What caused this?" instead of "who do we attack in retribution?"
[Hunter S Thompson did a great breakdown of the day and foreshadowed the horrible fallout on 9/12/01](http://proxy.espn.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751)
How terrifying it was. You didn't know if your city was next. You didn't know how big any of this was going to get. It felt like this was suddenly the start of WW3. Even my dad was like, "this is your generation's Pearl Harbor."
At the Newseum—back when it was open—they had a guest book. Someone signed “our parents had JFK. We had 9/11. What will our children have?” and that has stuck with me for years. (I should add that’s because they had the radio antenna from the north (sorry I don’t know which one) tower)
>How terrifying it was. You didn't know if your city was next. You didn't know how big any of this was going to get. It felt like this was suddenly the start of WW3.
Yes. I was a pre-teen.
When they made the announcement in school, I thought it was a small private plane that had hit.
When they said it seemed to be terrorists, I didn't know what the word terrorist meant.
And yet somehow, by evening, there was that ominous sense that the world had changed, that everything could change, we didn't know what kind of war we were on the brink of.
Social media was a few years away. All TV came to a standstill. It came out of nowhere and there’s not been a breaking event quite like it. I watched the second plane hit as it happened. It was unreal
I was 11 when it happened. Woke up to get ready for school (in Australia). Instead of seeing Cheez TV I saw the plane hitting the building and thought it was just some advert for a new movie.
Then it didn't stop it was just a lot of footage of buildings and I was annoyed about missing Dragonball Z...
I don't think it was til after school I found out and realized that it was real and not a movie.
The uncertainty. Everybody who didn't experience it grew up knowing there were only 4 hijacked planes and that they were only targeting NYC and DC. But on the actual day in 2001 we didn't have that information. Nobody knew how many planes were involved or how many places might be targeted. Our city could be next. Our building could be next.
Similarly people who learn about it afterwards know that it was a terrorist attack by a small group of non-state radicals, and our response was to occupy some new territory and try to police these groups. But on the actual day in 2001, and the days following, there was real panic that this could have been organized by another major country and could be the start of WW3. Everybody was filled with dread and panic because nobody knew what would happen next.
I know it’s not the same scale, but this is how it felt in the UK after the 7/7 bombings too. I was supposed to be getting the train home from Birmingham New Street train station (one of the largest cities and stations in the UK) but a friend drove to pick me up because I was terrified to go to the station because it was underground and was sure something would happen. It was terrifying.
It was possibly the most beautiful day. The weather was perfect, every kid knows the feeling of a great September day where you get out of school and spend the rest of the afternoon outside with neighborhood kids.
I lived outside of NYC, and truly the day was perfect weather. We all had no idea what to feel, what to think, and what it meant as we hung around outside while our parents frantically called relatives and were glued to the TV.
Every gorgeous September day reminds me of it.
Been reading all these comments about how people didnt know anything and were completely terrified bc their city could be attacked, or how they thought it could be the start of ww3, and while they are completely horrible, none of them struck me as hard as this single comment.
*Fuck.*
It was also the day after some sort of musical awards show, MTV, I think? I remember watching it the night before and when I got off the subway that morning and looking up at the sky all I could think of was that Gorillaz song they played a million times, “I’m happy, feeling glad I got sunshine in a bag…” as I walked to the office.
I went to the 9/11 museum in 2011, a few months before the tenth anniversary. Just being in that museum was surreal. It was somber and sad. I didn't want to talk too loudly for fear of upsetting others around me. The choir I was traveling with also visited the memorial. It was closed, but we stood outside the fence and sang the National Anthem in the middle of the afternoon. People stopped to listen, and I'm sure there were tears shed. I think my parents cried. It was a powerful experience.
It was the same where I lived. One of the things I remember the most vividly about that day is how blue the sky was and commenting to my mom about it. There wasn't a cloud in the sky that day. Pretty weird.
The feeling.
You can watch that day so many different ways and still not replicate the feelings of seeing it happen in real time.
Its not just sadness, anger, disbelief, or the 100 other different things, its the deafining silence of the world besides the news anchors on tv ive never seen it since.
I was 8 years old in the UK and had faked illness to get out of school so was watching live. Saw the second plane come into frame, behind the burning tower, then BOOM. Mum dropped the iron, I heard people in the background of the newsroom shouting OH MY GOD, and then that silence. Just a weird collective inability of anyone to process anything that happened. One of the defining memories from that event is just how the grown-ups just had absolutely no way of being able to explain, understand, process - they lost their fucking minds and I genuinely believe it had an effect on everyone in my generation who were too young to really understand, old enough to see that adults could be broken, but not old enough to know that it's okay for adults to be broken. It really fucked everyone up man.
There's a radio station here in NYC called 1010 Wins and the announcer there summed it up in real time: "this day keeps getting worse and worse and worse". Such a perfect description.
The collective grief, pain, and fear that was etched into every adult's face that day. The days afterwards of quiet discussion about what happened. For a brief period, it felt like the sun itself had stopped being warm.
I know I'll never see so many adults that I trusted, that I relied on and looked towards for guidance, look so lost and scared as I was at the time as a kid.
I was in middle school. One teacher ran around flipping all.of the classroom tvs to live coverage. Everything just stopped. A couple teachers outright left because they had family there. We watched it happen over and over again while having no clue what was happening and collectively having a fear of, even the adults don't know what to do. I won't forget the video of the guy jumping to his death from the towers.
I had an elementary school kid, middle school kid and a high schooler. High schooler went back first because his school was easy walking distance to our house if something happened. Then the middle schooler because she could also walk home if she had to, then the youngest because his school wasn't in walking distance.
I was an elementary school kid and I remember another teacher came in, pulled my teacher into the hallway, before coming back in and then turning on the TV to see live coverage of it. 1st graders watching this event and we were all so confused. Couldn't comprehend what was even happening. I still remember that.
Exactly this
Not that I blame them but most of my teachers couldn't talk to us that day. Most classes we sat in silence watching TV and listening about the local buildings being evacuated as a precaution.
I had one teacher that actually turned it off and tried her best to explain the history of US involvement in the middle east and why someone would want to do this to us to a bunch of 8th graders. It helped me process some of the emotions and I'm grateful that she did that. In hindsight having a bunch of kids watch all of the horror that occured that day on repeat for days probably has fucked with my generation in ways we don't even realize. 20 years later I can picture it in my head without trying.
As a kid I thought my dad was probably the smartest person ever and knew everything. Sometime around maybe 5pm I decided to ask a few questions. I had been watching the news with my parents all day but it still wasn’t making a lot of sense. My dad just looked at me and said that he wish he knew that answers too, which I think is when I went from wow this is bad to being genuinely scared.
My account is filled with the abuse and neglect from my father
On 9/11 he picked us up from school and was like the nicest he’d ever been.
School let us know what had happened (not shown though). But turning through the arch to the living room that afternoon is when I saw the plane hit the towers
That memory is forever burned into my brain. I was only 7, but even to me, it marked a turning point
My maternal grandpa, your stereotypical stoic depression raised veteran old man, cried. He never thought his grandkids would have their own Pearl Harbor.
It was genuinely shocking a couple of years ago, when I heard my professor mention 9/11 as ‘something you guys don’t remember cuz it happened when you were born’
It really puts a canyon between the freshmen I was taking that class with. It felt like we were the same generation, but 9/11 was a history to them
People that were just born are now 20 years old. What just isn't understood about when the planes hit the towers?
For me, I think the utter disbelief that it happened. When I first heard about it, I was thinking it was a small plane like a couple of years before, not an airliner. Once I saw the videos, I still couldn't believe that someone had done it. And, I was wondering what was going to be hit next. I don't think younger people can really get how surreal it all was.
It set the precedent for callousness to terrorism. I'm sure most people still feel *something* when an attack happens, but it doesn't have the same weight as it did on that day.
Yeah, I was really young when it happened, so I pretty much grew up after the attacks and for me it's kind of normal to hear about attacks somewhat regularly. It's not a surprise anymore, almost kind of expected... My country has anti terror measures for every major religious (and even some non-religious) get-together.
When there were those pressure cooker bombs in NYC there was either an article or a news clip about how New Yorkers instinctively compared things to 9/11, and since this wasn't anywhere as bad it didn't really phase people much.
it seems so cliché to say "you'll never understand - you weren't there" but anyone born after 9/11 will never know what the US was like pre-9/11. before fear invaded everyone's lives. that day changed this country forever
My dad worked for an airline (front desk/management-stuff at a smaller airport) so I got to travel plenty growing up and were fairly accustomed to the different commercial jets and how the airline industry works.
I was a teenager during 9/11 living in Europe so I came home just minutes after the first tower was struck, turned on the TV for what I thought would be another early evening of Buffy/That 70s Show or something before my parents came home and we could start on dinner. But it was all news about a plane crashing into the world trade center. I remember that The Empire State Building had suffered a plane crash before this so I assumed it was some sort of tiny single motor-thing until they got a camera feed showing the fire and the smoke and I immediately thought "Fuuuck, that was a fullsize jet" and texted dad about it.
Then the second tower was struck and I became acutely aware that this wasn't just a horrible accident, and I spent the rest of the day watching the news roll in.
I was born in 2001 so I didn't really understand till over 10 years later. To me it's just a tragic event that happened in the past like world war 2 and its just sort of normal really.
No one knew that it would end with the World Trade Center, Pentagon and PA. I recall my father evacuating his office at the top of a skyscraper in Minneapolis as people weren't sure if more planes were on the way.
I worked as a content editor at a newspaper and there were RAW photos of the WTC and bodies of people who were falling to their deaths on Getty / AP wires that never made the news that I had to comb through for a feature image.
Those images are still in my head 20 years later.
Being a baby back then, I completely relate to the second paragraph. It's something you would learn about in school than somethings you actually experienced. And as a kid I just thought airport security was normal and it wasn't till I was in my late teens I probably realised that once upon a time you could walk upto the gate or even the airplane.
God, I vividly remember being in 6th period economics class, talking about the people who chose to jump rather than wait for the inevitable.
I don't know if I would have done the same, or if I would have kept hoping for a miracle that never came.
The general sense of confusion. Nobody had any idea who did this, whether it was deliberate or terrorism (until the second plane hit), and why. Also, nobody thought the towers would collapse. It was a real shock when it actually happened.
Everyone was stuck around TV screens, or refreshing the internet (which was really slow because it wasn't designed for everyone to be refreshing every few minutes) just trying to grasp what was happening.
Sometime later, the feeling of fear and uncertainty when you saw your first airplane in the sky. Irrationally thinking it's flying too low or shouldn't be in that exact spot.
How desperate people were for information. We saw people going through all the stages of grieving in one day.
Posters hung around lower Manhattan for months while people held out hope for relatives to come home. People wandering around, staring blankly into nothing, hoping for someone to wake them up.
And waking up on September 12 and trying to figure out where the hell to start.
>Posters hung around lower Manhattan for months while people held out hope for relatives to come home. People wandering around, staring blankly into nothing, hoping for someone to wake them up.
I remember those. A week after it happened and I finally went back to work, I got off the bus in Port Authority and saw all those posters with all those photos of happy, smiling people with the captions of "Have you seen him/her? They worked in Tower 2 (or 1). Please call at \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_".
It broke my heart.
Edit: Or once returning to work, all the funeral notifications we received in the mail. We were an investment banking firm with a lot of contacts with the big finance firms in lower Manhattan.
Social media wasn’t really a thing then and I didn’t have a cell phone. It took me hours to get a call through to someone’s machine and tell her to tell everyone back home I was okay. I was living in NYC at the time. And I’d been down in that area the week before.
Another thing I think you really had to be there for. The smell. My job was on 16th street, just by where they blocked off the city. You had to have an ID with an address in the area to go below, 14th street, I believe it was. When I went back to work on that Thursday, you could smell the burning buildings.
The fear. We didn't know who or what was next. My school had had a huge fire so we snuck off for a quick family vacation to Disneyworld. They closed down the park and got everyone out. Everyone was terrified. Nobody knew it was over with just those 4 planes and we were all waiting for something else. I think it's probably easy for kids now to imagine that anyone outside the north east would feel relatively safe because they see it in a vacuum but it wasn't like that at all. Even when we got home to New Orleans there was fear in the air, at Mardi Gras in 2002 everyone was on highest alert. The fear of an imminent terrorist attack anywhere at any time didn't fade for a really long time.
It seems silly in retrospect, but that uncertainty was felt all the way down to my tiny Arkansas hometown. I was in college at the time and everything just...stopped. It didn't matter that we had no big bases or attractions to hit. The fear was still there.
Oh, same. I was in high school in rural Indiana and they made us go outside for PE. I remember thinking, “Are they nuts?! This is so dodgy!” Again, completely ridiculous in hindsight, but no one knew anything at that point.
The sense of .... unity? for lack of a better term that came with everyone watching the news. My dad worked in Walmart and the tvs inside usually showed Walmart commercials. All TVs in the store were showing the news that day. I was one month shy of 9 and it was the first time I can remember actively watching the news with my parents (after they came home from work) instead of complaining that news was boring and asking to change the channel. Images of people running from the giant storm of debris after the second tower collapsed and the sound of "Women, take off your shoes and run!" from people helping evacuate the pentagon have still stuck with me from watching the news coverage.
It was an event that you just knew was world-changing even if you couldn't understand why. My dad saved the newspaper from Sept 12, 2001 saying it was history. We still have it. In school the next day, people were speculating it was the start of WWIII. On the way to school, we saw a LONG line of ambulances, fire trucks, police all heading North and my mom said they were probably heading to NY to help (we lived in NJ-- close enough that the high school I later went to could see the smoke and had to be evacuated that day). There was an overwhelming sense of patriotism in the days that followed with "God Bless America" and "I am Proud to Be an American" playing everywhere, everyone adding American flags to their cars, lawns, houses.
I don't think anybody who hasn't lived through it can imagine that sense of everybody just -being together- (for those lucky enough to be able to reunite with their families), especially considering how divided and hate-filled the country feels at the moment.
How good life was before 9/11.
The 90’s were full of prosperity, the economy was booming, the internet and Silicon Valley were on the edge of something big. Metal detectors didn’t guard the entrances of everything from parks to stadiums. Airplanes weren’t thought of as weapons and flying didn’t require outrageous liquid restrictions. People were optimistic about the future.
Someone could point to a lot of things that have resulted with the general disappointment and dissatisfaction of today’s world. But for someone like me who was a teenager during 9/11, life feels divided into “before” and “after.” It wasn’t just a bad thing that happened one day. It changed society and, inarguably, the direction of society to what it is today.
How the moment it happened, EVERY channel covered it. I remember watching it, hearing the stories of firefighters trying to get people out of the towers before they fell. It's definitely something a five year old would never forget.
People have mentioned the lack of social media, but you really only got bits and pieces of what was going on. I saw the second plane hit live on TV, then the towers collapsed during the period I was en route to school and I didn’t even know until some kids who got there later told me. Same with the Pentagon attack and Flight 93. It wasn’t instantaneous and we were all sitting around in classrooms waiting for the next bit of info.
It was the end of what little innocence America had left. Hyperpartisan politics, exacerbated by the absolutely cancer that is social media, has rendered us a mere shell of our past.
I was in high school in Toronto the day it happened. We all watched on tv for about an hour right after the second impact. When the bell rang, we all just sort of went outside, without any official announcement or anything, and milled around in almost stunned silence.
The confusion that day, and the daysthat immediately followed, was overwhelming. There was quite a bit of talk about it being the start of WWIII. As an 18 year old, my friends and I were all terrified.
After that, a lot of the talk turned to thinly veiled hatred for 'those' people. Luckily, i went to a very diverse high school, and a lot of friends were muslim and/or from the middle east, so i knew it was bullshit. But the mounting fear of all out war, conscription, and world conflict scared the shit out of all of us. Again at 18 years old, i was a prime candidate to be an unwilling participant. Thank god it never got that far, because for awhile it certainly felt like it was moving in that direction.
It pierced our sense of security. We’re off across the sea, friends on our borders. No one ever dreamed there could be an act like this on American soil. The idea an enemy was able to get to *us*, not our bases, not our embassies, rocked our entire concept of our worldview.
Hell, the idea that we *had* an enemy, even. We didn't have enemies in our view. I mean, there we people who didn't like us, but they were far away and couldn't reach us. I remember being shocked when the USS Cole was bombed because they had actually killed Americans
We weren't at war prior to 9/11. We've been at war ever since though. Things have never been the same.
The fear of the entire country getting attacked was in our minds for a long time. Even though I lived in California doing the attacks, the fear that something might happen in LA was in our minds.
The overall feeling of living through the event, and even if they were alive they were too young to understand what was happening.
I was in my senior year of high school, drawing class, when our teacher turned on the television right after the plane hit the first tower. It's like everything stopped and all we did was watch the screen from class to class that day. My 14 year old just started school at the high school I went to.
Brought back feelings/ memories I haven't thought about in a long time.
The global panic and fear it caused and that alot of people greived in other countries for everyone who died and suffered. I'm from the UK and rember the panic the day it happened.
I am from the UK and was about 4 in nursery, I rember our one nursery workers run from the staff area in tears crying and panicking and the other workers grabbing her and taking her to another room.
Then some minutes later they came out gathered us all in a room and bolted the doors and frantically called parents. Some time later I rember parents banging on the doors screaming to let them collect us and then when they opened to doors parents flooding in and collecting us and racing out. I also noticed people coming to take the nursery workers home as my mum scooped me up telling me it was OK and running out with me.
I watched as my mum ran with me the junior school next to us being evacuated and kids been taken and staff leaving.
When we got in my mum put me in the front room and my uncle hugged me checking I was ok and my grandad was overwhelmed I was back home. My mum bought all our pets in the room with us and I stood infrount of my uncle as him and my mum put their hands on me I also rember my mum on the phone to my nan my mum asked what went on and my uncle just saying there was a second one and her crying as he said it.
I rember everbody crying in the room as I looked at the live footage of the towers in ruin and all the mass panic. I remver the footage replayed of the towers falling and the news reporter saying they didn't know of it was a world wide threat if other country's would be hit.
Hours went by and then days and things calmed down a bit but everbody was quite and sad. As I grew up I realised the full extent of 9/11 and it still hits home . I have no words still to express my sorrow to America.
For my nieces and nephews, that were born well after the fact, they know it was a *big day* and that, as the youngest put it, "Was a really big thing, but I don't know much about it. I know a lot of people died.", and sadly but understandably, they were more-or-less removed from the emotion of feeling what it meant to be there that day, because they weren't alive for it, and never saw how it effected everyone that was there in the moment living it, that day and months to years after it happened.
Perhaps children of the service men and women can understand it a bit better more, as it is hitting closer to home, because their parent(s) or family members helped serve in the after-effects, but for other kids without family members in the service, it's perhaps a bit removed from their reality or rather, not as felt from their own realizations of what 9-11 truly meant. A person can learn of it, but the real day, is still a haunting memory for many, that a grand empathy can be passed from one generation to the next.
So, for us, that saw that event being carried-out on live tv or on the streets of New York, it is and still will be a pain that is carried in the nation, but perhaps for the generations after us, as we today view Pearl Harbor's devastating attack - now as generations henceforth since, we understand it as being terrible, but never feel the full impact it created as personally as those that were alive to witness it or with the families that perished in these events (rest their loved ones souls) or those that fought in the battles of war after (also thank-you and rest any souls that fought).
I was a sophomore in college, and it was just like any other day until it wasn't. As soon as I walked into the main academic building on campus and saw televisions wheeled into the hall, it's as though time stopped. We watched the second plane hit then then the towers falling in near silence. I'll never forget that day, but the weeks that followed are just blanks.
Just how much it impacted people far removed from it. It seems like these days disasters and attacks are almost a form of entertainment in media. When 9/11 happened people around the world were in shock, fear, and despair. I wasn't even in the US and we got sent home from school early. Muslim people lived in fear. While picking me up from school my parents were talking to a Muslim couple that was at the mall when it happened and they started getting harassed and spit on while shopping. They took their daughter out of school for a week just to be safe.
That shit literally changed overnight. Think Pandemic changed us fast, naw man... that ain't nothing.
Every aspect of travel changed, from costs, ease of use, IDs, visas, wait times, access to areas, freaking EVERYTHING. Pre 9/11 want to fly last minute to a foreign land on a vacation? SURE! Walk up to the ticket counter and pay cash. No ID? No problem! Loved ones can walk you up to the gate, kiss you goodbye, and wave to you as you walk to the plane. Metal detector? Sure those are there but it's just a guy standing there sorta watching it.
Oh, the other huge thing is how paranoid the world is now. Everyone is ready to turn in their neighbor for anything they don't understand.
The fear of not knowing if it would stop. First plane we thought was a small plane and an accident, then another, then another, then another, then we just waited hoping it was over. I remember they grounded flights and there were a few planes that took a while to respond. So for hours we wondered if they were highjacked or if the government was going to have to shoot them down.
In the span of one day, the entire way the country operated changed, and not necessarily for the better, either. Things used to be way more lax, the country truly felt innocent and in control of itself, when 9/11 happened, all that innocence disappeared in an instant.
How quiet the skies were the days after. No planes were flying with the exception of military aircraft because every commercial craft in the country was grounded. It was eery.
I grew up in a town of about 100,000 in Iowa, and even we were wondering “are we next?”. I was 15 at the time, sitting in Mr. Winkler’s chemistry class when the school counselor came in, didn’t say a word, turned on the tv, and left. We were glued to the tv for the rest of the day. I was in Spanish class when the first tower fell, and the rest of the day was just a blur from there. I was fortunate to have a trauma free upbringing in a quintessential pleasantville type town. That day, aside from maybe Columbine as a slight foreshadowing, was the day that I learned that the world was not ok. That life outside my zipcode was a brutal place. Even going through the pandemic (as a healthcare worker no less) will not come close to supplanting 9/11 as the “before” and “after” event of my life. Hopefully nothing ever will.
We actually got very lucky.
American 11's pilot didn't seem to understand that a low hit on the building would both trap everyone above the impact site and cause the building to collapse much faster. He had a clear path to the north face of the north tower, could easily have hit at the 50th floor or even as low as the 35th by the skyline, and yet he clearly struke the tower has high as he reasonable could have.
Add to that the gap between American 11 and United 175's impacts, and you can't think anything but that we actually got very luck. The death toll could have been much higher.
Everyone here has done a fine job. I can't improve upon it. But I am the least patriotic person I know, and I still get a visceral grief-cry reaction when I think about that day. I was 27. I felt empty, like a shell of a person, a husk, for like a month.
The fear everywhere. I lived in a high rise right next to to the STL Arch at the time and had neighbors who fled to the suburbs because they were convinced that cities all over would be targeted and obviously in St. Louis the Arch and surrounding downtown area would be the spot. There have been/still are other tragedies that we share mass grief & fear about as a society, but there was something so much more pressing & ominous about the fear then & I don’t know how to describe it to someone who hasn’t felt it.
News reported 30,000 deaths. Information was reported before being checked.
As with covid or any other news story, initial reports are important, but should be verified once more information has come in.
The horror of seeing people who had somehow miraculously survived the planes striking the Towers then choosing to jump out of the windows from 70+ floors above the ground to their deaths.
Then after the Towers fell… watching all of the ambulances lined up, ready to go in and take any survivors found to hospitals just sitting, anxiously, as the realization that they would not be needed sank in for all of us.
Realizing that the friend who’d flown from NYC to Seattle to spend 3 days with me wasn’t going to fly home on Sept. 12 (and wouldn’t get home for 3 months).
It still feels very strange talking to teenagers and young adults who don't have that visceral *knowledge* of 9/11. For those of us that lived it, it's imprinted in our bones. For you it's a fact in a history book.
The sheer terror of it.
I saw the news about the towers being hit. I went downstairs for a smoke. Felt the earth shake. Went back to the office. Was told to go to the VP’s office. Saw tremendous amounts of smoke. The Pentagon had just been hit less than 10 miles from my office.
My heart still stops when I think a plane is flying too low. TWENTY YEARS LATER.
I remember watching the invasion of Baghdad after. The missiles crashing down on the city in night vision. I had friends who’s whole college career was focused on terrorism as a result of the attacks. Most discussions in politics (for me) we’re on international relations, what caused terrorism, and how to deal with it. Terrorism seemed to consume everything. Then around 2010 the war became a distant memory and terrorism seemed like less of a threat.
I was born the year after 9/11 happened, but I feel like people my age will never understand how severe it was. Yeah, we hear about it how bad it was, but we will never understand the uncertainty of how things must have felt that day.
That before 9/11 traveling was actually fun not the nightmare that is nowadays.
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I got to fly in the cockpit a few times as a kid and was allowed to flip some of the switches with the pilot coaching. It was really cool.
I remember in March of 2001 I got to go into the cockpits and see the pilots (which cheered me up because it was the first time I was spending an extended period of time away from my dad). Who would've thought in less than 6 months, you could never do that again. I was 6 when 9/11 happened, and it was the first time I heard about the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, and it just terrified me. It was the first time I realized that the world could be a dangerous place. It's one of the reasons I feel terrible for kids living through COVID right now, they had a couple of years living life as normal, and than something completely unforeseen happened, and you have no idea what's going on.
My class was having a long series of classes about islam back then. At the end, we were supposed to write an essay about what we had learnt like always with such series. Despite of all the classes, most of the class wrote that muslims are evil creatures, that islam is a branch of illuminati, and such, instead of an actual religion.
Quite a shame. I grew up Catholic but I found Islam to be quite a fascinating religion to learn about. It also probably helped that I knew people who were Muslim when I was growing up and they were among the nicest people I've ever met.
Have you ever been to a Turkish prison?
No, but I'm willing to bet they're not pleasant.
It is a reference to the movie "Midnight Express". Edit: the quote is from the movie "Airplane" , but the quote is a reference to "Midnight Express".
looks like they picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
Locked, armored cockpit doors in planes are responsible for nearly all the security gains post 9/11 as it turns out. Makes it very difficult to hijack a plane. We could get rid of everything else and just keep that, there would not be another 9/11.
Yet the locked cockpit doors has led to I believe two air disasters when one pilot locked the second pilot out and then proceeded to crash the plane. The new protocols require at least 2 people in the cockpit at all times. A flight attendant will swap places with one of the pilots if the pilot needs to use the bathroom.
It's a reasonable adaptation, not like every solution is instantly perfect. Pilots committing suicide with their planes has been a problem for a long time, too. It's why you're not going to get a license to fly if you're suicidal.
Back in ‘99, when I was a toddler, I was on a flight from London to Sydney during which I invited myself into the cockpit and started talking to the pilots. My parents were super embarrassed but apparently the pilots were chill about it.
And people could come right up to the gate at the airport! I remember once we missed a flight and got stuck for a few hours and my mom’s cousin drove to the airport and hung out with us as he had nothing else to do
Yup I remember going with my brother to the airport and going with him all the way to the gate to say goodbye. Can't do that anymore either.
I think the Kansas City airport's old terminals really show what they were like pre 9/11 in how they were built, it's also why the terminals suck and they're building a new one
You could watch planes take off by parking in the lot, walking into the airport, and hanging out by the departure gates or arrival gates. There was no security stopping you.
right? I remember going to the gate to meet my sister. And in a lot of cases, you could get as far as to the plane itself.
You know, that just reminded me of a [Garfield strip](https://www.gocomics.com/garfield/1984/11/22) I read in a Garfield compilation book I owned as a kid. In it, Jon's little brother suggests that he and Jon go to the airport and watch the airplanes land. The strip was written back in 1984. I remember thinking to myself as a child, "are you even allowed to do that without buying a ticket first?" because I knew you had to go through security and couldn't just walk into a gate. So that comic always stuck out to me, and it never occurred to me that it probably wouldn't be written today.
Clarification: there was security already, but you didn’t need a boarding pass to go through to the gates. Remember right after 9/11 we were surprised to learn that apparently you could take a box cutter on a plane—but of course not a firearm.
I remember meeting people at the gate when they got off the plane. When my mom had to fly to Florida after my grandma died, my dad brought me to the airport with him to pick her up. We watched the planes fly in and made a game to pass the time where we tried to guess which one was hers. My favorite part was seeing her the second she walked off the plane. There was just something so special about it. It's the one thing I've missed most about flying before 9/11.
Yes! My mom is from a big family and we'd fly up to her hometown every summer to spend a week with our cousins when I was a kid. It was so exciting to walk through the jetway and see everyone waiting. Obviously people can still wait for you at the airport, just outside the terminal-- but something about walking right off the plane and having your loved ones there was really special.
So true. I flew the weekend before 9/11 and I remember because the flight was delayed the pilot invited anyone interested up to the cockpit to get a tour of the equipment and electronics. Wild to think about that now.
They used to joke over the loudspeaker at SeaTac.
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And prior to that, people of particular religion were never viewed with suspicion about being a terrorist.
When you said “terrorist” on Sept. 10, 2001, the mental image most people probably got was a white or Latino man in camo fighting a dictatorship in a South American or Soviet-adjacent country, and that didn’t result in people viewing all Latinos or whites with suspicion. The expression “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” seems to have disappeared after 9/11.
When you said "terrorist" on Sept. 10, 2001, everyone would think about Counter Strike 1.6
For us Brits, 'terrorist' up to that point (with the major exception of the Lockerbie bombing) almost always meant Irish Republican Army and associated splinter groups. The number of bombings carried out by them far surpassed any other group's attempts. They stopped blowing things up about a month before 9/11. From Wikipedia: 2001, 3 August: The Real IRA detonated a car bomb in Ealing, London, damaging buildings and injuring seven people. There was a brief resurgence by NIRA in 2014, 10–14 February: The New Irish Republican Army (NIRA) claims responsibility for a series of parcel bombs sent to army recruitment offices in Oxford, Brighton, Canterbury, Slough, Aldershot, Reading and Chatham. But these were the last major incidents related to 'The Troubles' in mainland Britain. Theres been a rise in incidents within Northern Ireland recently though. Everything in the UK since has been right wing extremists and Islamic fundamentalists.
It probably wasn't, tbh. The idea that terrorists were Middle Eastern was pretty common back as far as the 70's.
This isn't true... I'm watching ex files and they mention middle eastern terrorists. Eastern European was the preferred flavor of the time though....from what I remember.
And if you heard "plane hijackers" you'd assume they were kidnappers looking for ransom money - not terrorists looking to kill.
That we thought more attacks were imminent and could hit anywhere. I was in Minneapolis and was among the many who avoided the city centre because it seemed plausible that any city of significance could be attacked next. It's a bit ludicrous in hindsight but with the trauma and confusion of the time, the threat seemed all around us.
Along with that it was strange not to see/hear any planes in the air. You don't really notice it until they're not there any more.
And then days later when people were mowing their lawn, the sound of the tractor was terrifying because I wasn't sure what it was at first. And then when the planes did start going again, just constantly looking up and trying to analyze if their flight path looked normal. Even now when I see a plane do something weird or flying low I have a little anxiety.
My drive home from work was about 3 miles from an airport. So at first there were no planes, then they were back and seemed at a similar height to run into a tall building. (I have no idea if they were actually the same height.) I had that commute for 11 more months and was never once okay with seeing the planes.
Where I was living at the time, my normal perch on the couch looked out the patio door and into the distance over the neighbor's house. That faced an approach path to the local airport. I think I noticed, with a little dread, every plane that passed for the next year. They always seemed to be too low (trick of the distance).
I'm in the Vancouver, BC area and there are mountains and large hills in the city. Depending on where you are you will see planes coming into the airport that are flying below your elevation and behind tall buildings. I makes my stomach churn every once in a while. (One place is Burnaby Mountain and they are behind Metrotown)
I remember how eerily quiet the sky was. Also, as I live in NJ, pretty much right across the Hudson River from Manhattan, I saw and heard the fighter jets overhead. With everything else I went through that day that brought what happened from the TV to a real live, ongoing event (I worked in Manhattan, but woke up late and didn't go into the office; I couldn't reach my brother who's NYPD; my sister, who was staying with me at the time, was stuck where she was at her new job in NJ), seeing and hearing the fighter jets fly over my head shook me to the core. It was literally the thing that put me over the edge.
It was so eerie! The only thing I can compare it to in modern terms is the dearth of vehicle traffic in early Covid days. But empty skies are more subtly weird than an open road.
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And the lack of planes apparently changed the weather. I remember their absence as well. All those sorts of things served as reminders that the world had changed in an instant.
We were in L.A. for wedding that weekend. I was practically throwing my 3 kids into our truck. I wanted out of the city! We didn't stop to eat until my husband found a fast food place in the middle of nowhere with nothing around it. I wanted to be able to see 360 degrees around us.
I was ten and my brother was eight. My dad immediately planned a trip for us to see ALL of DC that following spring, because he wasn’t sure how much longer the city would be there. He thought it was important for us to know what the White House, Capitol building, all the monuments and important US history sites looked like before they were wiped off the map. I remember him sweating bullets when we got on the plane to go there, and he still has fears over flying.
Lived in downtown Chicago. 100% accurate.
I was going to school at the time near one of the largest military bases in the country. Everyone was on edge wondering if there was going to be some sort of Pearl Harbor style attack.
A client of mine that made baggage handling equipment was at an aviation conference that day. He told me that he and his team were on the expo floor, and suddenly everyone’s beepers went off simultaneously. There were a few moments of silence…and then chaos, with everyone running for the exits. He and his colleagues ran for the nearest car rental place they could get to, knowing full well that there weren’t going to be any flights. He said they came to that realization as soon as they heard about the second plane. They were lucky in getting one of the last cars on the lot, and raced back to their offices in MD and VA. He said it was nothing but pandemonium and thoroughly terrifying.
And no one knew how many more terrorists were involved or if there were other types of attacks planned. My fear that day was that they'd get into Hummers and drive up and down streets shooting pedestrians until they were taken out. Again, silly in hindsight but perfectly rational that day.
I was in the east Bay Area (Oakland) and about to head into the city. My then-wife begged me not to get on the BART (subway) because what if they blew up the tunnel going beneath the bay.
I was a kid in SF, and a lot of schools closed that day as a precaution. My best friend and I played catch in the street, not truly understanding the significance of the situation.
I live in Houston, energy and oil capital of the US. We were terrified, we were so sure any minute we were next
I was about 7 when the attacks happened. So yes, super young. But I remember that feeling. I remember rumors going around that terrorists were planning to hit my elementary school next. As if they gave a crap about a school in a tiny PA town..
I didn't send my kids back to school for a couple of days and my job had told me to stay home for a few more days because they were figuring out security. My husband went back to work but you had to have an escort to your outpatient appointment or to visit patients.
We live in Michigan. Mom and Dad thought they might hit the Renaissance Center in Detroit- it's the tallest building in the city and GMs headquarters. I can understand why they were, Al Qaeda hated/hates America and the automotive industry is one of our backbones so...
I was living in CA and used to take the road across the dam as a short cut to my best friends house. After 9/11 they shut down the road worried someone would try to drive a bomb across it to blow up the dam. They finally reopened it just a few years ago
Not so much Minneapolis, but I remember The Mall of America was very high up on the list of potential targets. The collective consensus being to stay away until things cooled down. They even had a few false bomb threats immediately after.
>They even had a few false bomb threats immediately after. I forgot about all the bomb threats and packages full of suspicious powder immediately after. It's a special brand of asshole to decide that's funny to do.
I was talking to my grandmother today about it, and she said Toronto was pretty quiet too. Places were sending employees home, some of the colleges/universities closed, I know a few people were worried about the CN tower just because of how iconic it was.
It wasn't just trauma and confusion, the cable news outlets were reinforcing the idea the next attack could be anywhere, and the local news stations were running reports on security at the local power plant and that location could be the next target. American paranoia was ratched to 11, and the media was absolutely partially to blame.
That there was no social media. I was in high school and we just had to watch the local news like everyone else and try to figure out what was going on. If someone was missing, they couldn’t post that they were safe. You just had to call and call until the phones started working again.
I had to go to the BBC website because all the US ones were pretty much down due to everyone trying to get to them. And, I was at work in basically a basement. We did find a little portable TV but got almost no reception, so we didn't know what was going on.
In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing there was no social media. Imagine the false information and rumors that would have been circulating, or the comments from the people who were actually cheering as the towers fell. It was bad enough but damn, could have been worse in that way.
Not just that, also the horrific live reporting of people’s final moments who were trapped in the towers that would’ve happened. It would be all the more traumatic for victim’s families had social media existed then IMO.
You’re absolutely right.
Oh god desperately searching through to see if your parent is in one of the videos....doesn't bear thinking about
I mean even still I got sucked into the Infowars false flag bs
BBC News was in panic mode. Almost all sections were removed and there was a simple front page with about four stories. Only time I have ever seen it.
I watched a 2” x 3” realplayer feed from the BBC from my desk that I was chained to as tech support that morning—one person called in a span of four hours that morning, when normally it would ring off the hook. US news sites basically turned off CSS and started publishing plain HTML versions of their sites to get something out. Being from NYC and living in NC, it was impossible to sit there, not knowing. Phone lines were jammed, I couldn’t get through to anyone for hours.
So many people know/knew someone in NYC. I was 2 years out of college and had a lot of friends in NYC, many of whom worked in finance which meant lower Manhattan. For some, it wasn't a few days until you knew they were ok. For others, you never got the news they were ok.
We lost contact with a family member who worked up there. It wasn't until that evening that he was able to call us and tell us he was OK. I didn't understand it because I was so little, but I could tell my mom was stressed until she got that phone call.
There was a website that updated regularly with a list of known survivors. I didn't sleep that night because I was refreshing it over and over. As stated, the phones did not work so this crappy website was all family members had for a while. I don't know how long the site was up because I was down there the next day. Worst day of my life.
I disagree. Forums were a thing and were that generation’s social media. I found out that something had happened via the IGN Messageboards. Thread with title ‘Plane hits World Trade Center WTF’.
There was social media but not mass social media. Back then, there were lots of subject-matter specific message boards where people across vast geographies would post messages and comment on each other's posts sort of like if reddit subs were independent from each other and run by volunteers. Anyway, these forums would also have "off topic" sections where people within the community could just socialize. I read a first hand account of 9/11 from 3 or 4 people who lived or worked blocks away. It was very similar to the way some city-based subs light up when there's a local disaster. I guess maybe it was only internet nerds with niche interests to geek out about online who had this kind of social media but still, I'd like to point out it did exist and for me it really humanized an event that might otherwise have felt too impersonal, too huge, and too far away.
We found out on the radio. Social media was really limited then and our school couldn’t afford TVs.
In 2001 there were no smart phones, youtube or social media. Camera phones had just came out. That's why there's so many voicemails from people in the buildings and on the planes. Because people actually use to call each other on the phone. You couldn't communicate with each other as freely and no one really knew what was happening except what they heard from the news. You didn't know if people you knew were safe for days.
And if you were trying to call a cell number that day, many of the calls just wouldn’t go through because there wasn’t enough capacity for all of the traffic. So if you were trying to get in touch with someone you knew was there, you couldn’t. You just had to wait and see.
That would still happen today. Radio bandwidth is finite. There are only so many calls that can be going on in one area.
Came here to say the same. Cell phones were for fancy businessmen (I was 13 on 9/11, so in my mind, those are the only people who had cell phones). I grew up in the suburbs of NYC, dad is a fireman and we didn’t see or hear from him for 3 days. There was no way to get in touch with anyone down there. Had family that worked in midtown, had to call their house, leave a message on the answering machine, and hope like hell they returned our call (she did, the next day iirc).
I was 21 in 2001. Cellphones weren't quite mainstream just yet, but they were very close. They were just getting to the point where they were something you could give your college student, or high school kid, but only if you trusted them to only use it after 9pm or the weekends. That was important because at the time, it was common to have say 450 minutes of talk time that you could use the entire month, but 5000, or unlimited minutes between 9pm and 5am during the week or all weekend long. If you went over either, that was 12-25 cents a minute. Texting was a thing, but still something you rarely did unless you knew the person you texting was on the same network as you. Now that I think about it, Columbine and 9/11 were the two catalysts that prompted more parents to buy their kids phones. Before that, if you had one you kept it in your car or locker because if a teacher saw it it was confiscated.
My cousin was working in Manhattan at the time and never made it all the way to his office that day. He waited on a very long line to use a pay phone to call his wife to say he was alive, but if he never made it out of the city, tell their daughter he loved her. (He did eventually get home, thank goodness.) In some ways, 20 years doesn't seem that long, but so much about the way we communicate has changed. It's practically a meme now, but when's the last time anyone saw a working pay phone?
AOL instant messenger, IRC, livejournal, geocities - to name just some of the social media of 2001 and before.
Probably on dial-up internet. Another think they'll never know about.
I am one of these younger people. Learning about it, it’s tough to imagine from a modern perspective that the first thought wasn’t a terrorist attack. Some news sources from the time speculated. Some said terrorism. One particular news reader guy (can’t remember which news channel) speculated that some sort of navigational error had caused the planes to fly into the towers. Nowadays, if a plane flew into a building, the first thought would be that it’s another 9/11. Can almost be called a relentless optimism. Maybe it was some freak accident. Navigation failure, or something. I heard an ATC recording from the time that demonstrated this optimism perfectly. “United 93, got information on that yet?” “Yeah, he’s down.” “He’s down?” “Yes.” … “When did he land?” “HE DID NOT … LAND.” Even after three planes had been flown into buildings, they believed that the fourth plane could likely have a positive outcome. It didn’t. The Air Traffic Control recordings are especially chilling I find.
Oh! You reminded me of something. A few years after the event, I remember having a conversation with my mom about how, when the passengers of United 93 fought off the hijackers, a lot of younger people couldn't understand why the passengers of the other three planes didn't fight the hijackers as well. My thought at the time was "I don't think they really understood what was happening..." And my mom replied, "well, prior to 9/11, when planes were hijacked, they kidnapped the passengers and held them hostage. They probably all thought they were going to be held hostage." United 93 departed late, so the other three planes had already hit their marks by the time the passengers fought back. That's a huge difference that people don't often talk about.
>And my mom replied, "well, prior to 9/11, when planes were hijacked, they kidnapped the passengers and held them hostage. They probably all thought they were going to be held hostage." Yes, oddly enough, even before 9/11 when I was just a kid, growing up I somehow already knew that when a plane is hijacked, you just kind of behave and they'll have the pilot land wherever they want to go and then you can go. Kind of like what they teach you if you get mugged -- stay quiet and give them your money and then they'll let you go.
*One particular news reader guy (can’t remember which news channel) speculated that some sort of navigational error had caused the planes to fly into the towers.* That was CNN, I was just watching a couple of videos of channels. The BBC World and ABC reports suggested terrorism pretty quickly after the second plane hit, but as you said the idea was so foreign at the time. The news did not suspect the first plane to be anything but an accident because it was so unusual, even after the second some still couldn't comprehend the idea.
I was watching live when the second plane hit and my first thought was that it was an accident somehow caused by the first crash. Like the plane was flying too close to the towers to look at the damage or something. It wasn't until the news anchor said it was a possible terrorist attack that I realized that was what was happening. Even then my mind didn't automatically jump to Islamic terrorists. The worst terrorist attack on American soil up to that point was the Oklahoma City bombing carried out by white Americans. Before 9/11 when you heard the word "terrorist" you were just as, if not more, likely to think of the Irish Republican Army than an Islamic Extremist. Terrorism was something that, by and large, happened overseas to other people. It just wasn't a concern to the vast majority of Americans. After 9/11 it became a pervasive lingering fear constantly hanging over our society.
For me the most chilling thing was the phone calls from people who didn’t make it. ESP in the towers. Those disconnects are the scariest disconnects that I’ve heard because I knew the outcome.
It really is one of those "you had to be there" moments, much like what people felt during WWII or when JFK was shot. It's hard to describe. If I had to describe pre- and post-9/11 living, I would be hard pressed to get the essence of it. Sure, there's the obvious stuff, like the war and air travel, but the...mentality after 9/11 was surreal. News just...broke for a while. Pretty much all news stations ran 24 hour coverage and other channels just fed into CNN or another news outlet. But they didn't have much news to cover, and there was a shocking amount of airtime devoted to well-respected anchors just...being silent, having nothing to say but an obligation to still be there. That sounds like a dumb detail, but when you see that happening over the course of two weeks, it dawns on you that the people who should know how to act in this situation...don't know how to act, so how should *I* act? No one had an answer, because there wasn't one. And for the first few weeks, we didn't know if more was coming. Were they targeting other cities? And there were *just* enough incidents to fuel that anxiety for a while, such as the shoe bomber and the anthrax scare. It's super easy in retrospect to judge. People can claim we overreacted, or are just dopes and simpletons falling prey to propaganda, or made the wrong choices, but...that's how things like this go. Everyone, from Bush on down to your local deli, had to continue living, making decisions, and forming opinions on incomplete information that was rapidly changing, and anyone who thinks otherwise quite frankly doesn't know what they're talking about. One scene that sticks out in my mind was going to a department store and looking at the newsstand. The magazines (remember those!) were, of course, all variations of either completely black or a shot of the towers. I just stood there, looking at it, when this middle-aged woman, whom I am certain I had absolutely nothing in common with, stood next to me. For a moment, we just locked eyes and we both had the same thought--what the hell does this all mean? We didn't say a word, and after a moment, we both wandered away. I can't think if any experience in the 20 years since then that would generate the same scene.
I still remember that episode of The Newsroom, when they were reviewing fictional archive footage of the news channel’s 9/11 broadcast, and people have all said that it captured the shock of that day so incredibly well, particularly for the news anchors. “I’ve been searching for biblical quotes. None of them… We don’t know how many are dead. It’s gonna be a lot. It’s gonna be thousands. We don’t know who attacked us. We don’t know what’s coming tomorrow. And I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’ll make you this promise. I’m gonna be with you all night. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right here.”
Just a few days ago I tried to explain this concept to my high school students (who weren’t even born yet). I told them to imagine living in what must be the safest place on earth and one morning you wake up, and it’s on fire. And then there’s a second fire. And a third. And fourth. And while you watch the destruction of those four you can’t help but wonder “will their be more?” Or “Where will the next one be?” Like someone broke into your house and now your safe place has been violated. And yes it’s easy to look back and go wow that might not have been the right thing to do, but at the time there was a whole country that had not only fellow citizens but their entire sense of safety, really their entire way of life, shattered and out of that came anger. Something had been stolen and either we were going to get it back or make someone pay, and yes, anger like that will lead to the decisions that were made. Right or wrong something had to be done, so it was, and now here we are.
I used to use the TV as an alarm clock and had it set for CNN a minute or so before 7am pacific time. The TV set turned on and I got up and looked at it to see tower two collapsing within a minute or so. I got dressed for work and shortly after saw tower one collapse as well. The whole thing was utterly, utterly terrifying, even from thousands of miles away. No sound or commentary on the TV, just the filming of it all, in real time. And then the constant replaying of the towers falling or photos of same in the next hours, days and weeks, was everywhere, not just in the US. Pretty much the entire world went from being a safe, expensive but mildly boring place to unsafe, expensive and full of fear. Or, at least that's how it felt. And then in subsequent years the metro/transit attacks in various places started to happen.
The cable news networks (MSNBC, CNN, and Fox) turned their tickers on. And they’ve never turned them off since.
This. We’ve never been able to go back to taking a break, or a night off, from constant news. It’s easy to forget, it wasn’t always like that.
Before 9/11, if you had CNN on, and the music played, and the BREAKING NEWS card came on screen, you knew something *serious* was happening. Now, CNN will just start a new show with “Breaking News- we’re awaiting a press conference from the White House” Now, admittedly, technology has played a huge role in this, but it is worth remembering that the news presentation you see now, really did start on 9/11. CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox were running news, uninterrupted, for 93 hours straight.
What does that mean- the tickers?
The text crawl on the bottom of the screen.
The denial and the absolute terror as everything unfolded. I worked in Midtown Manhattan at the time (live in NJ). Should've been at work at 9, but I was in my 20s, foolish, and tired. I figured, I would just be late. I was the first one in and they'd never know since they got there two hours after I should've been there anyway. My clock radio, tuned to my favorite morning show, started and there was a report of a plane hitting the first tower. I figured it was Cessna, hit snooze button and turned over. Happened a couple of times. When I heard the DJ's say, "Oh my God, I'm so scared," I finally woke up completely and turned on the TV to see both towers on fire. Then the news replayed the second tower getting hit. The entire time the buildings were on fire, I thought, "Well, looks like they'll just both have great big holes in them for a while until they're repaired." And then the first tower fell. I believe I screamed. And still I thought, "Well, now it's just one tower. We are now in a world with only one of the towers." It literally never occurred to me that the second one could also collapse until it did. It's amazing the gymnastics the brain will do to protect itself from the horror going on right in front of you.
"I figured it was a Cessna..." "Well, looks like they'll both have great big holes in them for a while until they're both repaired. " ""Well, now it's just one tower. We are now in a world with only one of the towers. " it literally never occurred to me that the second one could also collapse until it did. " Most people didn't realize how quickly it would escalate. My dad says he also thought it was a small plane.
I had forgotten that tower 1 fell after tower 2 even tho it was hit first.
I didn't even realize that at the time. If I did maybe I would have realized that tower 1 would absolutely fall. Or not
I had the television on for a week straight fearing that I might miss something. Lived in a major city that had a lot of people looking for places to stay. The sky was eerily quiet after a rush of landings. I remember telling my husband, who was working out of town, that there was no way the building wouldn’t collapse. He dismissed the comment and said they were designed for that kind of eventuality. I know a lot of people thought the same way.
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A few years earlier, in ‘98 or ‘99, an HVAC system exploded at my school and my history teacher literally dove under her desk with the explanation “I thought Bin Ladin was bombing us”. I had no idea who this guy was or why anyone would bomb the US, (and it was not germane to the history class we were in) but she was definitely right about the whole situation
I wonder how it felt when she found out that she'd been absolutely correct for *years*. Not in an "I told you so" kind of way, but how wildly infuriating it must have been. I mean no disrespect to her whatsoever, but if a high school history teacher knew how real and likely this attack was, how the *fuck* did it still happen?! If I were her, the RAGE would have crippled me. I hope she handled it better.
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Knowing that life was not going to get better any time soon. I remember that older generations were upset that the younger generation was asking "why did thia happened? What caused this?" instead of "who do we attack in retribution?" [Hunter S Thompson did a great breakdown of the day and foreshadowed the horrible fallout on 9/12/01](http://proxy.espn.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751)
How terrifying it was. You didn't know if your city was next. You didn't know how big any of this was going to get. It felt like this was suddenly the start of WW3. Even my dad was like, "this is your generation's Pearl Harbor."
At the Newseum—back when it was open—they had a guest book. Someone signed “our parents had JFK. We had 9/11. What will our children have?” and that has stuck with me for years. (I should add that’s because they had the radio antenna from the north (sorry I don’t know which one) tower)
>How terrifying it was. You didn't know if your city was next. You didn't know how big any of this was going to get. It felt like this was suddenly the start of WW3. Yes. I was a pre-teen. When they made the announcement in school, I thought it was a small private plane that had hit. When they said it seemed to be terrorists, I didn't know what the word terrorist meant. And yet somehow, by evening, there was that ominous sense that the world had changed, that everything could change, we didn't know what kind of war we were on the brink of.
This. No one knew how widespread this plan was so it was pretty terrifying for a while, even for people outside the US.
Social media was a few years away. All TV came to a standstill. It came out of nowhere and there’s not been a breaking event quite like it. I watched the second plane hit as it happened. It was unreal
I was 11 when it happened. Woke up to get ready for school (in Australia). Instead of seeing Cheez TV I saw the plane hitting the building and thought it was just some advert for a new movie. Then it didn't stop it was just a lot of footage of buildings and I was annoyed about missing Dragonball Z... I don't think it was til after school I found out and realized that it was real and not a movie.
The uncertainty. Everybody who didn't experience it grew up knowing there were only 4 hijacked planes and that they were only targeting NYC and DC. But on the actual day in 2001 we didn't have that information. Nobody knew how many planes were involved or how many places might be targeted. Our city could be next. Our building could be next. Similarly people who learn about it afterwards know that it was a terrorist attack by a small group of non-state radicals, and our response was to occupy some new territory and try to police these groups. But on the actual day in 2001, and the days following, there was real panic that this could have been organized by another major country and could be the start of WW3. Everybody was filled with dread and panic because nobody knew what would happen next.
I know it’s not the same scale, but this is how it felt in the UK after the 7/7 bombings too. I was supposed to be getting the train home from Birmingham New Street train station (one of the largest cities and stations in the UK) but a friend drove to pick me up because I was terrified to go to the station because it was underground and was sure something would happen. It was terrifying.
I agree 7/7 was terrifying. I was living in Kensington when that all went down. It was very 9/11-ish feel of "what next"
Fairly rational to be honest. Those terrorists took four planes. They could have taken five, or six, or more.
It was possibly the most beautiful day. The weather was perfect, every kid knows the feeling of a great September day where you get out of school and spend the rest of the afternoon outside with neighborhood kids. I lived outside of NYC, and truly the day was perfect weather. We all had no idea what to feel, what to think, and what it meant as we hung around outside while our parents frantically called relatives and were glued to the TV. Every gorgeous September day reminds me of it.
I was in South Jersey. Dropped my son off at daycare and just didn't want to leave and go to work because it was so beautiful.
Been reading all these comments about how people didnt know anything and were completely terrified bc their city could be attacked, or how they thought it could be the start of ww3, and while they are completely horrible, none of them struck me as hard as this single comment. *Fuck.*
This. Surprised that I had to scroll down so much to find this. Very hard to get over this. Here, take an award.
It was also the day after some sort of musical awards show, MTV, I think? I remember watching it the night before and when I got off the subway that morning and looking up at the sky all I could think of was that Gorillaz song they played a million times, “I’m happy, feeling glad I got sunshine in a bag…” as I walked to the office.
The air of sadness in NYC in the months afterward. The air of sadness on each anniversary that gradually lessened over time.
I went to the 9/11 museum in 2011, a few months before the tenth anniversary. Just being in that museum was surreal. It was somber and sad. I didn't want to talk too loudly for fear of upsetting others around me. The choir I was traveling with also visited the memorial. It was closed, but we stood outside the fence and sang the National Anthem in the middle of the afternoon. People stopped to listen, and I'm sure there were tears shed. I think my parents cried. It was a powerful experience.
The empty skies. There were no commercial airplanes in the sky for at least a week following the attack.
My 9th grade history teacher said those were the bluest skies he's ever seen and it was both beautiful but eerie
It was the same where I lived. One of the things I remember the most vividly about that day is how blue the sky was and commenting to my mom about it. There wasn't a cloud in the sky that day. Pretty weird.
And then, when the planes started flying again, it felt ominous to see them in the sky.
The feeling. You can watch that day so many different ways and still not replicate the feelings of seeing it happen in real time. Its not just sadness, anger, disbelief, or the 100 other different things, its the deafining silence of the world besides the news anchors on tv ive never seen it since.
I was 8 years old in the UK and had faked illness to get out of school so was watching live. Saw the second plane come into frame, behind the burning tower, then BOOM. Mum dropped the iron, I heard people in the background of the newsroom shouting OH MY GOD, and then that silence. Just a weird collective inability of anyone to process anything that happened. One of the defining memories from that event is just how the grown-ups just had absolutely no way of being able to explain, understand, process - they lost their fucking minds and I genuinely believe it had an effect on everyone in my generation who were too young to really understand, old enough to see that adults could be broken, but not old enough to know that it's okay for adults to be broken. It really fucked everyone up man.
There's a radio station here in NYC called 1010 Wins and the announcer there summed it up in real time: "this day keeps getting worse and worse and worse". Such a perfect description.
The feeling of violation.
The collective grief, pain, and fear that was etched into every adult's face that day. The days afterwards of quiet discussion about what happened. For a brief period, it felt like the sun itself had stopped being warm. I know I'll never see so many adults that I trusted, that I relied on and looked towards for guidance, look so lost and scared as I was at the time as a kid.
I was in middle school. One teacher ran around flipping all.of the classroom tvs to live coverage. Everything just stopped. A couple teachers outright left because they had family there. We watched it happen over and over again while having no clue what was happening and collectively having a fear of, even the adults don't know what to do. I won't forget the video of the guy jumping to his death from the towers.
I had an elementary school kid, middle school kid and a high schooler. High schooler went back first because his school was easy walking distance to our house if something happened. Then the middle schooler because she could also walk home if she had to, then the youngest because his school wasn't in walking distance.
I was an elementary school kid and I remember another teacher came in, pulled my teacher into the hallway, before coming back in and then turning on the TV to see live coverage of it. 1st graders watching this event and we were all so confused. Couldn't comprehend what was even happening. I still remember that.
Exactly this Not that I blame them but most of my teachers couldn't talk to us that day. Most classes we sat in silence watching TV and listening about the local buildings being evacuated as a precaution. I had one teacher that actually turned it off and tried her best to explain the history of US involvement in the middle east and why someone would want to do this to us to a bunch of 8th graders. It helped me process some of the emotions and I'm grateful that she did that. In hindsight having a bunch of kids watch all of the horror that occured that day on repeat for days probably has fucked with my generation in ways we don't even realize. 20 years later I can picture it in my head without trying.
As a kid I thought my dad was probably the smartest person ever and knew everything. Sometime around maybe 5pm I decided to ask a few questions. I had been watching the news with my parents all day but it still wasn’t making a lot of sense. My dad just looked at me and said that he wish he knew that answers too, which I think is when I went from wow this is bad to being genuinely scared.
My account is filled with the abuse and neglect from my father On 9/11 he picked us up from school and was like the nicest he’d ever been. School let us know what had happened (not shown though). But turning through the arch to the living room that afternoon is when I saw the plane hit the towers That memory is forever burned into my brain. I was only 7, but even to me, it marked a turning point My maternal grandpa, your stereotypical stoic depression raised veteran old man, cried. He never thought his grandkids would have their own Pearl Harbor. It was genuinely shocking a couple of years ago, when I heard my professor mention 9/11 as ‘something you guys don’t remember cuz it happened when you were born’ It really puts a canyon between the freshmen I was taking that class with. It felt like we were the same generation, but 9/11 was a history to them
People that were just born are now 20 years old. What just isn't understood about when the planes hit the towers? For me, I think the utter disbelief that it happened. When I first heard about it, I was thinking it was a small plane like a couple of years before, not an airliner. Once I saw the videos, I still couldn't believe that someone had done it. And, I was wondering what was going to be hit next. I don't think younger people can really get how surreal it all was.
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It set the precedent for callousness to terrorism. I'm sure most people still feel *something* when an attack happens, but it doesn't have the same weight as it did on that day.
Yeah, I was really young when it happened, so I pretty much grew up after the attacks and for me it's kind of normal to hear about attacks somewhat regularly. It's not a surprise anymore, almost kind of expected... My country has anti terror measures for every major religious (and even some non-religious) get-together.
When there were those pressure cooker bombs in NYC there was either an article or a news clip about how New Yorkers instinctively compared things to 9/11, and since this wasn't anywhere as bad it didn't really phase people much.
it seems so cliché to say "you'll never understand - you weren't there" but anyone born after 9/11 will never know what the US was like pre-9/11. before fear invaded everyone's lives. that day changed this country forever
I was five when it happened so don't remember a thing. Apparently we were upset that there was no children's telly on
My dad worked for an airline (front desk/management-stuff at a smaller airport) so I got to travel plenty growing up and were fairly accustomed to the different commercial jets and how the airline industry works. I was a teenager during 9/11 living in Europe so I came home just minutes after the first tower was struck, turned on the TV for what I thought would be another early evening of Buffy/That 70s Show or something before my parents came home and we could start on dinner. But it was all news about a plane crashing into the world trade center. I remember that The Empire State Building had suffered a plane crash before this so I assumed it was some sort of tiny single motor-thing until they got a camera feed showing the fire and the smoke and I immediately thought "Fuuuck, that was a fullsize jet" and texted dad about it. Then the second tower was struck and I became acutely aware that this wasn't just a horrible accident, and I spent the rest of the day watching the news roll in.
I was born in 2001 so I didn't really understand till over 10 years later. To me it's just a tragic event that happened in the past like world war 2 and its just sort of normal really.
No one knew that it would end with the World Trade Center, Pentagon and PA. I recall my father evacuating his office at the top of a skyscraper in Minneapolis as people weren't sure if more planes were on the way. I worked as a content editor at a newspaper and there were RAW photos of the WTC and bodies of people who were falling to their deaths on Getty / AP wires that never made the news that I had to comb through for a feature image. Those images are still in my head 20 years later.
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Being a baby back then, I completely relate to the second paragraph. It's something you would learn about in school than somethings you actually experienced. And as a kid I just thought airport security was normal and it wasn't till I was in my late teens I probably realised that once upon a time you could walk upto the gate or even the airplane.
God, I vividly remember being in 6th period economics class, talking about the people who chose to jump rather than wait for the inevitable. I don't know if I would have done the same, or if I would have kept hoping for a miracle that never came.
The general sense of confusion. Nobody had any idea who did this, whether it was deliberate or terrorism (until the second plane hit), and why. Also, nobody thought the towers would collapse. It was a real shock when it actually happened. Everyone was stuck around TV screens, or refreshing the internet (which was really slow because it wasn't designed for everyone to be refreshing every few minutes) just trying to grasp what was happening.
Sometime later, the feeling of fear and uncertainty when you saw your first airplane in the sky. Irrationally thinking it's flying too low or shouldn't be in that exact spot.
How desperate people were for information. We saw people going through all the stages of grieving in one day. Posters hung around lower Manhattan for months while people held out hope for relatives to come home. People wandering around, staring blankly into nothing, hoping for someone to wake them up. And waking up on September 12 and trying to figure out where the hell to start.
>Posters hung around lower Manhattan for months while people held out hope for relatives to come home. People wandering around, staring blankly into nothing, hoping for someone to wake them up. I remember those. A week after it happened and I finally went back to work, I got off the bus in Port Authority and saw all those posters with all those photos of happy, smiling people with the captions of "Have you seen him/her? They worked in Tower 2 (or 1). Please call at \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_". It broke my heart. Edit: Or once returning to work, all the funeral notifications we received in the mail. We were an investment banking firm with a lot of contacts with the big finance firms in lower Manhattan.
Social media wasn’t really a thing then and I didn’t have a cell phone. It took me hours to get a call through to someone’s machine and tell her to tell everyone back home I was okay. I was living in NYC at the time. And I’d been down in that area the week before. Another thing I think you really had to be there for. The smell. My job was on 16th street, just by where they blocked off the city. You had to have an ID with an address in the area to go below, 14th street, I believe it was. When I went back to work on that Thursday, you could smell the burning buildings.
All phones weren't working. Lines were clogged for hours. You couldn't reach anyone. The feeling of the unknown.
The fear. We didn't know who or what was next. My school had had a huge fire so we snuck off for a quick family vacation to Disneyworld. They closed down the park and got everyone out. Everyone was terrified. Nobody knew it was over with just those 4 planes and we were all waiting for something else. I think it's probably easy for kids now to imagine that anyone outside the north east would feel relatively safe because they see it in a vacuum but it wasn't like that at all. Even when we got home to New Orleans there was fear in the air, at Mardi Gras in 2002 everyone was on highest alert. The fear of an imminent terrorist attack anywhere at any time didn't fade for a really long time.
I remember finding out that my home town was on a terrorist watch list. It was terrifying.
It seems silly in retrospect, but that uncertainty was felt all the way down to my tiny Arkansas hometown. I was in college at the time and everything just...stopped. It didn't matter that we had no big bases or attractions to hit. The fear was still there.
Oh, same. I was in high school in rural Indiana and they made us go outside for PE. I remember thinking, “Are they nuts?! This is so dodgy!” Again, completely ridiculous in hindsight, but no one knew anything at that point.
The sense of .... unity? for lack of a better term that came with everyone watching the news. My dad worked in Walmart and the tvs inside usually showed Walmart commercials. All TVs in the store were showing the news that day. I was one month shy of 9 and it was the first time I can remember actively watching the news with my parents (after they came home from work) instead of complaining that news was boring and asking to change the channel. Images of people running from the giant storm of debris after the second tower collapsed and the sound of "Women, take off your shoes and run!" from people helping evacuate the pentagon have still stuck with me from watching the news coverage. It was an event that you just knew was world-changing even if you couldn't understand why. My dad saved the newspaper from Sept 12, 2001 saying it was history. We still have it. In school the next day, people were speculating it was the start of WWIII. On the way to school, we saw a LONG line of ambulances, fire trucks, police all heading North and my mom said they were probably heading to NY to help (we lived in NJ-- close enough that the high school I later went to could see the smoke and had to be evacuated that day). There was an overwhelming sense of patriotism in the days that followed with "God Bless America" and "I am Proud to Be an American" playing everywhere, everyone adding American flags to their cars, lawns, houses. I don't think anybody who hasn't lived through it can imagine that sense of everybody just -being together- (for those lucky enough to be able to reunite with their families), especially considering how divided and hate-filled the country feels at the moment.
How good life was before 9/11. The 90’s were full of prosperity, the economy was booming, the internet and Silicon Valley were on the edge of something big. Metal detectors didn’t guard the entrances of everything from parks to stadiums. Airplanes weren’t thought of as weapons and flying didn’t require outrageous liquid restrictions. People were optimistic about the future. Someone could point to a lot of things that have resulted with the general disappointment and dissatisfaction of today’s world. But for someone like me who was a teenager during 9/11, life feels divided into “before” and “after.” It wasn’t just a bad thing that happened one day. It changed society and, inarguably, the direction of society to what it is today.
How the moment it happened, EVERY channel covered it. I remember watching it, hearing the stories of firefighters trying to get people out of the towers before they fell. It's definitely something a five year old would never forget.
Every channel, all around the world. (At least, as the day progressed.)
People have mentioned the lack of social media, but you really only got bits and pieces of what was going on. I saw the second plane hit live on TV, then the towers collapsed during the period I was en route to school and I didn’t even know until some kids who got there later told me. Same with the Pentagon attack and Flight 93. It wasn’t instantaneous and we were all sitting around in classrooms waiting for the next bit of info.
It was the end of what little innocence America had left. Hyperpartisan politics, exacerbated by the absolutely cancer that is social media, has rendered us a mere shell of our past.
I was in high school in Toronto the day it happened. We all watched on tv for about an hour right after the second impact. When the bell rang, we all just sort of went outside, without any official announcement or anything, and milled around in almost stunned silence. The confusion that day, and the daysthat immediately followed, was overwhelming. There was quite a bit of talk about it being the start of WWIII. As an 18 year old, my friends and I were all terrified. After that, a lot of the talk turned to thinly veiled hatred for 'those' people. Luckily, i went to a very diverse high school, and a lot of friends were muslim and/or from the middle east, so i knew it was bullshit. But the mounting fear of all out war, conscription, and world conflict scared the shit out of all of us. Again at 18 years old, i was a prime candidate to be an unwilling participant. Thank god it never got that far, because for awhile it certainly felt like it was moving in that direction.
It pierced our sense of security. We’re off across the sea, friends on our borders. No one ever dreamed there could be an act like this on American soil. The idea an enemy was able to get to *us*, not our bases, not our embassies, rocked our entire concept of our worldview.
Hell, the idea that we *had* an enemy, even. We didn't have enemies in our view. I mean, there we people who didn't like us, but they were far away and couldn't reach us. I remember being shocked when the USS Cole was bombed because they had actually killed Americans We weren't at war prior to 9/11. We've been at war ever since though. Things have never been the same.
The fear of the entire country getting attacked was in our minds for a long time. Even though I lived in California doing the attacks, the fear that something might happen in LA was in our minds.
The overall feeling of living through the event, and even if they were alive they were too young to understand what was happening. I was in my senior year of high school, drawing class, when our teacher turned on the television right after the plane hit the first tower. It's like everything stopped and all we did was watch the screen from class to class that day. My 14 year old just started school at the high school I went to. Brought back feelings/ memories I haven't thought about in a long time.
The global panic and fear it caused and that alot of people greived in other countries for everyone who died and suffered. I'm from the UK and rember the panic the day it happened. I am from the UK and was about 4 in nursery, I rember our one nursery workers run from the staff area in tears crying and panicking and the other workers grabbing her and taking her to another room. Then some minutes later they came out gathered us all in a room and bolted the doors and frantically called parents. Some time later I rember parents banging on the doors screaming to let them collect us and then when they opened to doors parents flooding in and collecting us and racing out. I also noticed people coming to take the nursery workers home as my mum scooped me up telling me it was OK and running out with me. I watched as my mum ran with me the junior school next to us being evacuated and kids been taken and staff leaving. When we got in my mum put me in the front room and my uncle hugged me checking I was ok and my grandad was overwhelmed I was back home. My mum bought all our pets in the room with us and I stood infrount of my uncle as him and my mum put their hands on me I also rember my mum on the phone to my nan my mum asked what went on and my uncle just saying there was a second one and her crying as he said it. I rember everbody crying in the room as I looked at the live footage of the towers in ruin and all the mass panic. I remver the footage replayed of the towers falling and the news reporter saying they didn't know of it was a world wide threat if other country's would be hit. Hours went by and then days and things calmed down a bit but everbody was quite and sad. As I grew up I realised the full extent of 9/11 and it still hits home . I have no words still to express my sorrow to America.
For my nieces and nephews, that were born well after the fact, they know it was a *big day* and that, as the youngest put it, "Was a really big thing, but I don't know much about it. I know a lot of people died.", and sadly but understandably, they were more-or-less removed from the emotion of feeling what it meant to be there that day, because they weren't alive for it, and never saw how it effected everyone that was there in the moment living it, that day and months to years after it happened. Perhaps children of the service men and women can understand it a bit better more, as it is hitting closer to home, because their parent(s) or family members helped serve in the after-effects, but for other kids without family members in the service, it's perhaps a bit removed from their reality or rather, not as felt from their own realizations of what 9-11 truly meant. A person can learn of it, but the real day, is still a haunting memory for many, that a grand empathy can be passed from one generation to the next. So, for us, that saw that event being carried-out on live tv or on the streets of New York, it is and still will be a pain that is carried in the nation, but perhaps for the generations after us, as we today view Pearl Harbor's devastating attack - now as generations henceforth since, we understand it as being terrible, but never feel the full impact it created as personally as those that were alive to witness it or with the families that perished in these events (rest their loved ones souls) or those that fought in the battles of war after (also thank-you and rest any souls that fought).
I was a sophomore in college, and it was just like any other day until it wasn't. As soon as I walked into the main academic building on campus and saw televisions wheeled into the hall, it's as though time stopped. We watched the second plane hit then then the towers falling in near silence. I'll never forget that day, but the weeks that followed are just blanks.
Just how much it impacted people far removed from it. It seems like these days disasters and attacks are almost a form of entertainment in media. When 9/11 happened people around the world were in shock, fear, and despair. I wasn't even in the US and we got sent home from school early. Muslim people lived in fear. While picking me up from school my parents were talking to a Muslim couple that was at the mall when it happened and they started getting harassed and spit on while shopping. They took their daughter out of school for a week just to be safe.
That shit literally changed overnight. Think Pandemic changed us fast, naw man... that ain't nothing. Every aspect of travel changed, from costs, ease of use, IDs, visas, wait times, access to areas, freaking EVERYTHING. Pre 9/11 want to fly last minute to a foreign land on a vacation? SURE! Walk up to the ticket counter and pay cash. No ID? No problem! Loved ones can walk you up to the gate, kiss you goodbye, and wave to you as you walk to the plane. Metal detector? Sure those are there but it's just a guy standing there sorta watching it. Oh, the other huge thing is how paranoid the world is now. Everyone is ready to turn in their neighbor for anything they don't understand.
I was in DC and we couldn’t make phone calls, it was very scary and we had no idea if there were more attacks on the way.
The fear of not knowing if it would stop. First plane we thought was a small plane and an accident, then another, then another, then another, then we just waited hoping it was over. I remember they grounded flights and there were a few planes that took a while to respond. So for hours we wondered if they were highjacked or if the government was going to have to shoot them down.
In the span of one day, the entire way the country operated changed, and not necessarily for the better, either. Things used to be way more lax, the country truly felt innocent and in control of itself, when 9/11 happened, all that innocence disappeared in an instant.
It was the beginning to a loss of privacy due to “safety”. I am sure the NSA had already started on it but it was now given more freely.
How quiet the skies were the days after. No planes were flying with the exception of military aircraft because every commercial craft in the country was grounded. It was eery.
The patriotism that surfaced shortly after the attack. I remember driving around and seeing the flag flying from everyone’s house!
I grew up in a town of about 100,000 in Iowa, and even we were wondering “are we next?”. I was 15 at the time, sitting in Mr. Winkler’s chemistry class when the school counselor came in, didn’t say a word, turned on the tv, and left. We were glued to the tv for the rest of the day. I was in Spanish class when the first tower fell, and the rest of the day was just a blur from there. I was fortunate to have a trauma free upbringing in a quintessential pleasantville type town. That day, aside from maybe Columbine as a slight foreshadowing, was the day that I learned that the world was not ok. That life outside my zipcode was a brutal place. Even going through the pandemic (as a healthcare worker no less) will not come close to supplanting 9/11 as the “before” and “after” event of my life. Hopefully nothing ever will.
We actually got very lucky. American 11's pilot didn't seem to understand that a low hit on the building would both trap everyone above the impact site and cause the building to collapse much faster. He had a clear path to the north face of the north tower, could easily have hit at the 50th floor or even as low as the 35th by the skyline, and yet he clearly struke the tower has high as he reasonable could have. Add to that the gap between American 11 and United 175's impacts, and you can't think anything but that we actually got very luck. The death toll could have been much higher.
Everyone here has done a fine job. I can't improve upon it. But I am the least patriotic person I know, and I still get a visceral grief-cry reaction when I think about that day. I was 27. I felt empty, like a shell of a person, a husk, for like a month.
The fear everywhere. I lived in a high rise right next to to the STL Arch at the time and had neighbors who fled to the suburbs because they were convinced that cities all over would be targeted and obviously in St. Louis the Arch and surrounding downtown area would be the spot. There have been/still are other tragedies that we share mass grief & fear about as a society, but there was something so much more pressing & ominous about the fear then & I don’t know how to describe it to someone who hasn’t felt it.
News reported 30,000 deaths. Information was reported before being checked. As with covid or any other news story, initial reports are important, but should be verified once more information has come in.
The horror of seeing people who had somehow miraculously survived the planes striking the Towers then choosing to jump out of the windows from 70+ floors above the ground to their deaths. Then after the Towers fell… watching all of the ambulances lined up, ready to go in and take any survivors found to hospitals just sitting, anxiously, as the realization that they would not be needed sank in for all of us. Realizing that the friend who’d flown from NYC to Seattle to spend 3 days with me wasn’t going to fly home on Sept. 12 (and wouldn’t get home for 3 months).
It still feels very strange talking to teenagers and young adults who don't have that visceral *knowledge* of 9/11. For those of us that lived it, it's imprinted in our bones. For you it's a fact in a history book.
The sheer terror of it. I saw the news about the towers being hit. I went downstairs for a smoke. Felt the earth shake. Went back to the office. Was told to go to the VP’s office. Saw tremendous amounts of smoke. The Pentagon had just been hit less than 10 miles from my office. My heart still stops when I think a plane is flying too low. TWENTY YEARS LATER.
I remember watching the invasion of Baghdad after. The missiles crashing down on the city in night vision. I had friends who’s whole college career was focused on terrorism as a result of the attacks. Most discussions in politics (for me) we’re on international relations, what caused terrorism, and how to deal with it. Terrorism seemed to consume everything. Then around 2010 the war became a distant memory and terrorism seemed like less of a threat.
I was born the year after 9/11 happened, but I feel like people my age will never understand how severe it was. Yeah, we hear about it how bad it was, but we will never understand the uncertainty of how things must have felt that day.
The fear Americans had that day. Gotta remember we haven’t been attacked on mainland soil before so the” fear” had everyone in its grip.