Where Were You 20 Years Ago?

[J.D. Daily]

I don't remember anything in particular except I know I was getting ready for work.  I always listened to talk radio; so, I turned on TV news when I 1st heard a plane hit one of the WTC towers.  I turned on the family room TV, listened & watched the national news coverage.  When I saw the 2nd plane hit the South Tower I knew it was an Islamist terrorist operation.  Seeing the size of the plane that hit each tower, the smoke and the flames my engineer brain asked the question "Which tower will be the 1st to collapse?"  I don't remember if I went to work that day.  At work the next day I learned that I knew a passenger on flight 93.

[Ozark Huckleberry]

September 11, 2001. I was teaching Florida 8th graders early U.S. History. The school's cable feed was out, so we had limited access to network news. A couple of us that grew up in the days of TV antennae found ways to jury-rig workable substitutes so eventually the classrooms got workable TV signals over the air. As with most people, I pretty much knew from the first that it wasn't an accident.

 

Classes continued with the scheduled rotation throughout the day, but the halls and sidewalks were a lot quieter than usual. A few teachers tried to continue with scheduled lessons but found they couldn't push through the fog and quickly gave in to watching the news unfold through the day. I had a different role to play. The kids knew I was retired military, knew I didn't talk to them as if they were still in elementary school, knew I answered legit questions, whatever they were. It was perfectly in keeping with my students to arrive with an expectation I'd have answers.

 

I had just finished AOCS when we lost 241 service members in Beirut. I had studied political-military science at Naval Postgraduate School. I was on Sixth Fleet staff in Naples during the Bosnian War and its ethnic cleansing, and I was attached to Fifth Fleet staff in Bahrain and was standing on the pier when I heard the blast from the Khobar towers. So when kids came into my classroom, the questions started even before the bell rang to begin class; the news became background to discussions that skipped around from the fundamentals of Islam and the concept of jihad, to the history and nature of terrorism, to the post-World War I division and modern dynamics of the Middle East, to the interests and role of the U.S. in the Middle East. Wherever the kids wanted to take the talk, I'd go there with them.

 

I remember just one kid that tried to be a jerk (this was 8th grade, after all). I took him out to the ramp on the portable and my talk went something like, 'This is one of those really big days that everyone will remember exactly where they were and what they were doing. When your classmates talk about today years from now, do you really want them to tell their kids they remember you as the a$$hole in class who didn't care about what happened?' He was not a problem after that, for me or for his other teachers.

[bgavin]

I was cleaning out my desk at Intel.
This was the end-day for a long contract I worked there.
I was watching it on the internet while packing up my stuff.

I didn't know it at the time, but looking around the building, I was seeing stock values for retirement falling from the sky.
They never came back.

 

[Cold Lake Kid, SASS # 51474]

At home, recovering from a bout of pneumonia, sitting in the living room, watching Regis and Kelly(?) when they said they were going to the network.

I watched the burning tower in shock and wondered what the heck the pilot was thinking, then the other plane appeared and I guessed what was happening and yelled "OH NO!"  bringing my wife to the TV.

I was 57 at the time, no longer an active reservist, but I had an inkling some of my younger friends would soon be off doing things.

I was right.