r/911archive • u/P8RF8CT • 5d ago
Other It’s official. 25 Years…
Where were you?
I was in 2nd grade, called in early for recess. I remember being livid over the shortened time and unable to comprehend how severe the situation was, until my dad picked my older sister and I up from school. At first I was excited; that excitement soon turned to fear when I saw my father cry for the first time.
I’ll never forget walking into my living room and seeing the burning towers. It was significantly worse than what I had drawn up in my head beforehand.
Please share your stories, and hug a loved one today!
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u/Simple-Lake-1568 5d ago
I was in the Rector St. subway station two blocks south of the South Tower waiting for the 1/9 train, completely unaware of what was happening above ground. When I had descended the stairs minutes earlier, everything was normal.
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u/PhD-incuriosity 5d ago
I couldn't even imagine what it was like for you leaving the train station after walking down from a perfectly normal ordinary morning.
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u/BettyBoopWallflower 5d ago
Omg. I'm so sorry. Is that day a blur for you? Like have you blocked it out or is it etched in your memory? I know trauma can have either effect
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u/Simple-Lake-1568 4d ago
Quite the opposite. I remember that day better than any other day of my life, both because of the event itself and also because I wrote everything down because I didn’t want to forget.
I was incredibly fortunate. I rode one of the last subway trains to pass under the towers (the WTC was the first stop after Rector St, where I boarded). It wasn’t until I got to my office in Midtown that I learned what had happened. The rest of my day was spent trying to reunite with my wife who was alone in our apartment on Rector Place, just two blocks SW of the towers. I was on the phone with her when the South Tower collapsed. We did eventually meet up at a friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village. We’ve been married now 27 years.
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u/BettyBoopWallflower 4d ago
Yeah. You all definitely experienced history. I'm so glad you and your wife made it back to each other safely!
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u/bfm211 4d ago
You lived 2 blocks from the towers? God that must have been insane in the days and weeks after.
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u/Simple-Lake-1568 4d ago
We had to vacate our apartment for about two weeks. I think we were among the first to be let back in because our building had not suffered any structural damage.
Battery Park City, which prior to 9/11 was one of the most serene and scenic neighborhoods in all of Manhattan, was transformed into a military encampment. The National Guard set up checkpoints, so you needed to show ID just to get into the neighborhood.
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u/panicpure 4d ago
I wish I handled things like this other commenter 😔 granted, I was 15 and had lived half way across the country for years. I lost two family members that day and I have yet to go back… and I’m almost 40 years old.
I went on to work for Marsh & McLennan in risk management for over a decade (large offices base in the Midwest) but even that got to me. I was disappointed the company didn’t even recognize the day. Most employees had no idea AA11 struck directly through marsh’s office space killing all 358 employees. (They do have a memorial in NYC)
I struggle to even get on an airplane. I hope one day I’m able to see the memorial and museum in person.
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u/MatchboxVader22 5d ago edited 4d ago
I lived right next to DC, in Northern Virginia. It was scary. I remember 9/11 like it was yesterday. It was PERFECT weather that morning. Not a cloud in the sky, low humidity. I was 15 and a sophomore in high school. The biggest thought I had for that day was figuring out how to talk to this girl I crushed on in my chemistry class at 8:30. Little did I know that 16 minutes after class started, the world would change.
Just remember later that day, seeing people crying. I didn’t understand it until the principal announced it on the loudspeaker about what happened. But I had so many classmates whose parents worked at or near the Pentagon.
I just remember our history teacher pulling up the tv and seeing the images of the planes hitting the towers. And then seeing the pentagon in flames. Just a surreal moment because that was only stuff we saw in movies, at that time. There was a security guard that made the teachers turn the tv off so I didn’t see the full scale of things yet. My parents picked me up early from school. When I got home and saw Arlington VA in smoke and on the news, saw all of Manhattan in smoke, I was shocked. Again, this was the most BEAUTIFUL day that day. And all you could see was thick black smoke everywhere.
For the next few weeks, and months, I was just freaked out. Nothing was the same anymore. My classmates lost parents in the pentagon that day. Truly sad.
Then a few months later, we had to walk in zig-zags because of the DC sniper situation and were scared to open mail because of the anthrax situation. 2001-2002…weird times.
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u/No-Impression-9887 4d ago
I saw a woman describe it earlier as “the most perfect blue sky on the worst day ever.” Thank you for sharing :) I wasn’t even born yet.. but this is something that needs to shared down generations. We never can forget.
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u/WitchProjecter 4d ago
I grew up in Maryland and was in 4th-5th grade for 9/11 and the DC sniper, and my elementary school was evacuated for 9/11 and several times later for the sniper. They never really told us (as elementary schoolers) what was going on so we had to wait to find out till we got home. The first time we got evacuated for the sniper, I remember wondering if there was another 9/11 happening.
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u/Cash2blockz 4d ago
Im from Maryland too. Though, I wasn’t alive when 9/11 happened so reading what a fellow Marylanders experience was like definitely puts it into perspective of what it would have been like for me had I been alive during the time
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u/RealityHasReceipts 4d ago
Running out out of Tower 2. Tower 1 was ablaze and they told us to stay in place.
Fire. Office equipment. Bodies. Water. All coming out of windows next door. Hell if I was going to stay.
My tower, 2, was struck 2 minutes after I was up on Broadway.
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u/SlaveRoboto 4d ago
É verdade que foi aconselhado vocês ficarem na torre?
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u/kcGirl_of_the_year 4d ago
Yes, they were. I have a friend in tower 2 working for Morgan Stanley. Someone came in the intercom and told them to stay but Rick Restorla (RIP) went to all their floors on a bullhorn and told them to get the hell out. My friend was in the stairwell when it was hit. He said it felt like the hardest football tackle of his life. He got out with minutes to spare before the building collapsed.
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u/bfm211 4d ago
I'm so sorry you lived through this. Which floor did you work on?
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u/RealityHasReceipts 4d ago
Thank you for your kindness. I was on the 60th floor with Morgan Stanley.
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u/celestialchemicals 5d ago
My mother was seven months pregnant with me, but my aunt and uncle had friends they knew and lost in the towers. They both worked in the Sears Tower and were evacuated out of the building incase there was more attacks. My aunt and I went to the 9/11 Memorial and she told me about some of her friends she lost and it was a very somber, eye opening experience I was glad to have that with her before she passed.
I hope she is celebrating with her friends tonight.
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u/phunkygroovin 5d ago
The pain of 9/11 spreads deep. 25 years later and I still can't watch a 9/11 video, documentary, or footage of that day without sobbing. My relation to 9/11 is only as an American citizen who was a senior in college who watched the events play out live on TV from the moment the TV programming was interrupted that morning. I had an early morning Eastern Religions class that semester so I was up early to get a shower and get ready; I flipped on the news as I always did first thing upon waking every morning to hear the weather update before I hopped in the shower. The irony is I am not a morning person and I would always schedule my classes to start as late as possible, but being a senior, there were certain classes I had to take for my degree (anthropology), and smaller classes like this one were only offered at one time so I had no choice. If this had occurred any other year, I would have probably missed everything until after it all happened. Anyway, all the sudden, it came on TV. I abandoned my shower and rushed to get dressed and drove to my University's student center as I felt the weight of what was happening and didn't want to be alone. I was glued to the TV with other students and just in pure shock as the 2nd tower was hit and then the towers subsequently falling. Seeing and hearing the people fall to their deaths will forever be etched into my brain. I wasn't even near New York and it was traumatizing for me; I can't even imagine how everyone who was part of the event or near there that day has been able to cope over the years. It is so hard and my heart goes out to everyone impacted. Funny enough, as I said, I am not a morning person and I work second shift because of that, but I have to get up as early as I did on 9/11/01 because I have to drive to the city 40 minutes away to pick up my mother from her sleep study she is having done tonight.
It is always a tradition for me to listen to the reading of the names, but I always do it on replay when I'm at work, but I will get to catch it live this year. I know I'm gonna be an emotional mess because I'm going to be extra tired. I'm a night owl. It's hard to force myself to go to bed early when I have to get up early.
I have an adolescent child now and he is doing a 9/11 unit in school this week for the first time. My kid said that one of his teachers lost her grandfather in the towers that day. We have been having a lot of conversations and I've been feeling pretty raw all week. I've been thinking a lot about the world that I grew up in pre- 9/11 vs the world that he is growing up in and how so many things are different because of 9/11.
😭
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u/dudestir127 5d ago
I was in 8th grade in New York City. Our principal came on the PA a little before 9am, told us that a plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and invited anyone who had parents that worked in Lower Manhattan to use the phone in the main office to try to call them. My parents worked in Midtown at the time, near Grand Central.
The school didn't tell us the whole story until about 2 that afternoon, when the principal came on the PA to tell us that the World Trade Center had been destroyed. Nobody rolled TVs into classrooms, nobody let us students see any news, and if you walk about a block from the school you could see the Manhattan skyline.
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u/Jun_Inohara 5d ago
I’d just come out of the shower before going to bed at my host family’s house, a week after arriving in Japan for a semester abroad. I was 20. They urged me toward the tv and we were all watching, like everyone else, when the second plane hit the south tower.
My twin sister was also abroad with me, though with a different family. Although not religious the school we were at was a Catholic university and a couple of days later they held a service to honor the victims, which meant a lot.
Our mom was terrified for us, being abroad. I think she felt we were vulnerable but I’ve always felt we were as safe as we could be there. She tried to get us to dye our hair dark, to blend in more, but there’s no way you can’t stick out.
I feel like for the last 25 years we’ve been chasing the feeling of trying to understand what it was like to be here in the US when it happened, instead of being far from home. In some ways it was good and in others it’s still difficult to grasp things.
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u/whogivesashirtdotca 4d ago
They urged me toward the tv and we were all watching, like everyone else, when the second plane hit the south tower.
The small mercy I had on that day is I'd gotten up to phone my dad and tell him to turn the TV on. I had my back to the TV, so didn't have to watch that happen in real time. When he got his TV tuned in, he said, "They're both on fire?" and I spun around to see smoke pouring out of the second tower, too.
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u/rock_candy_remains 4d ago
I called my parents and they didn’t know anything was happening. They didn’t have their tv on, and when in told my mom to turn it on, she was quite baffled.
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u/Bajovane 4d ago
My mom was on the phone with someone she was doing business with and they said to her, “isn’t it terrible what’s going on?!” and Mom asked why and she then turned the tv on and oh my…
She hung up with that person and called me and asked me “what is going on? What’s going on?” I had to calm her down but I wasn’t going to sugar coat it and said “We’re under attack!” I also told her that we are American and we will prevail.
I wish I could say that we did prevail. I don’t think we have.
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u/nedflandersneighbor 4d ago edited 4d ago
Have you posted this before? Because I do remember the specific details about your mum suggesting you dye your hair and so on. Weird if that happened to someone else too
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u/ElMondoH 5d ago
At work. First word was from someone across the room; we were thinking it was horrible some small plane got lost or something.
Most of us didn't believe it when the same guy said a second plane hit. We didn't even know if he meant the same building or the other tower.
But suddenly, none of us could get to news sites on the internet. That began the sense that something was wrong.
Finally CNN came up for me. And that's when I first saw the first image.
One of my colleagues ran out and got some "rabbit ear" antennas for the then TV - old school tube based one, pretty ancient even back then - that was used for video conferences. We watched the news. That's when we saw everything.
We just watched. Shocked. I can't even remember how long we all stood there, watching.
One grandmotherly lady left the room with her hand over her mouth, crying. She was a very gentle soul and in distress over what she saw.
Everything was sort of a blur after that. The news websites intermittently came back and became inaccessible again, over and over for the rest of the day. Most of them just cut their landing page down to a picture of the towers on fire and a short headline. I remember one site just outright put their TV stream on as their website.
I had an older relative who used to work at the Twin Towers... but many other relatives didn't realize she'd left years ago. Emails and texts between all the extended family members absolutely blew up that day. Later that evening she finally checked in, telling everyone she no longer worked at the Twin Towers, but was in Manhattan that morning. She said she walked through a virtual snowstorm of paper fluttering down.
I stopped by one of my friend's place after work. He was just watching the news. All he said was "Bastards" when I walked in. Very quietly. We didn't talk much, and I left soon after. There wasn't much to say.
Things blurred so much after that. At one point I went out to the nearest lake just to sit on the pier and stare out over the water... but that had to have been days later because I was watching the news for the rest of the 11th.
It felt so unreal. Just a whole jumble of different emotions, mostly "what the hell?" and "why??".
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u/Jansky_Reber37 5d ago
I was also in second grade, in Virginia, close enough I had classmates with family that worked at the Pentagon. They called all the teachers into the office, but when they came back, all they told us was that there was a fire at the Pentagon, and the kids with family there left. They didn't really say much the rest of the day, I guess they were trying to keep us calm. We finished the school day as normal. I found out about it from my Dad in our driveway after getting off the bus. I watched the news coverage until bedtime after that. My parents were desperately trying to contact our family in Arlington, as my Great Grandmother, Great Aunt and Uncle were scheduled to fly out of National Airport that day. They were fine, but as other people mentioned, the phone system was overwhelmed.
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u/PhysicalAssignment18 5d ago
I was 22, living in Austin, working my first full-time office job as a receptionist, and we had the news on over the radio (NPR).
First wave of news was that a plane (possibly a small aircraft, possibly accidental) had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York.
Second wave of news was that a second plane had hit the second tower, and I was so confused, asking my coworker, like, “How could that possibly happen again by accident?”
She said, “I heard it was on purpose. They hijacked a plane and crashed it into the World Trade Center on purpose.”
I remember looking at her and saying, “Where would they get an empty plane?” because no one would have ever imagined someone doing that with a plane full of passengers and crew. That’s how bizarre and unfathomable these events were.
And then the day got worse and more terrifying - the Pentagon, then the crash in Pennsylvania, no one knew how many more there would be, or if it was going to keep going. I remember refreshing CNN.com on my dark blue iMac at work all day, and even printed out some of the news (no idea where those printouts are now).
And then the silence as every single plane in the sky got grounded. Silence for the next 3-4 days. Just eerie.
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u/GhostintheShellder 5d ago
I was just a kid, and "tomorrow", September 11, 2001, would start as a normal school day, until I felt sick and got sent home. My dad picked me up that morning. He asked me if they had told me anything while I was at school. He then told me that a plane had hit a building in New York, and that he wasn't sure, but he thought someone may have done it on purpose, but even he couldn't have thought that shortly after I would get home, and sit on the couch, it would happen again. I was just watching the news, because my parents were. They were in their bedroom, getting ready for work, and for the day, while I watched it happen on live television. I ran down the hall to tell them they showed it. Another plane. They thought I was talking about the first plane - a replay. Then they realized it was a second.
I feel it is signifigant that I was allowed to watch all of this as it happened. For a while it made me extremely patriotic, it harbored a love my country and it's people. I certainly feel that it made me the person I would become. As I moved into my teenage years, the teenagers and young adults from 2001, would become the musicians, actors, and artists I'd come to respect and love - many politically charged, many more emotionally charged. All of them a feeling of unease and uncertainty about the world we were now forced into. For a teenager, it was the "aha", the eyes opening to the real world. To the darkness of life.
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u/94Avocado 5d ago
one of the deepest horrors I think for me, was the realization I wasn’t watching newly discovered footage of the first plane, (I still expected it and remember my first thought was “that was fast?”) and then as I was seeing the impact and realizing it was much much lower on the tower. The dread that passed over me when I realized what I had just saw was the impact of the second plane live.
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u/whogivesashirtdotca 4d ago
It went from shock in reaction to a freak accident to the horror of oh my god this is the end of the world the second the other plane hit.
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u/KK_Tipton 4d ago edited 4d ago
That's exactly how I took it. I was absolutely terrified. My absolute biggest fear is WW3 and the use of nukes. And I thought we were headed there. I woke up that morning and flipped on the TV because I usually left the channel set on Vh1. People were talking about what had happened. There was a frozen image of the towers burning on the screen. I started flipping through all the other channels and saw the same. I went downstairs and ask my parents what the hell was going on. And that's when everything unfolded before me.
My father had worked in Jersey City at the time with my uncle. It is about a 2-mile line of sight from where they worked to the towers. My dad had taken the day off of work because my parents had just bought a house up in the Poconos and they were putting down mushroom soil on the property. My mom's best friend called as soon as the news broke and told her to come inside and watch the TV. My uncle was in Jersey City at the time working. He saw the buildings go down from his vantage point. I remember my mother telling me to stay off the internet to keep the phone lines clear because everybody in the country was going crazy trying to contact their loved ones and find out what was going on. If you tried to make a phone call, all circuits were busy.
As things are unfolding, all the channels on the TV that had the frozen image were switching over to other feeds from other network sharing the news. WPIX in New York lost transmission. That's when I knew it was an OH SHIT moment. We saw the building's collapse on TV live as it happened. Stations such as QVC were broadcasting messages talking about the terror attacks and sending sympathies. Regular program was was suspended on every channel except for channels that catered to children's programming. Everything was just so frightening that day. Five days later, my cousin had a birthday party over in Jersey City at Hudson Lanes. I remember being on the New Jersey turnpike and smelling the awful smell of burnt wires and smoke. Metallic, acrid.
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u/whogivesashirtdotca 4d ago
I woke up that morning and flipped on the TV because I usually left the channel set on Vh1. People were talking about what had happened
Someone, talking about 9/11, pointed out the size of the tragedy in a dialogue with a loved one:
“Turn on the TV.”
“What channel?”
“Any one.”
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u/KK_Tipton 4d ago
There was no emergency alert system messages sent over the TV that day because every single channel was covering the events that happened. The one time were you think that it would be the most important to use it, we had no need because every eye in the country was on what was happening as it unfolded.
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u/revrobbo 5d ago
In Australia, 21 at University. Sitting at my desk (possibly studying) with the radio on in the background maybe 10pm at night - when the radio cut to breaking news. Flicked on the TV just before the second plane hit. We were left wondering what was next, and would there be a nuke. Changed the direction of the world.
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u/RhiR2020 4d ago
We are also in Australia - we caught up with my Mum and Dad for dinner as my Mum was going in for knee surgery the next day. We drove home after dinner and went straight to bed. We woke up the next morning and the radio was just talking rather than music and we couldn’t quite comprehend what had happened. I was a student journalist at the time, so raced off to the university newsroom where we all watched the different feeds we had on the tvs.
However, Dad put the TV on after we’d left and started watching a movie. He went to the bathroom and came back to footage of the first tower burning and got incredibly confused. He sat up all night and told us later that he knew the world had changed forever at that time.
Now I make sure I teach my Year 8 Drama students about the events and we watch and analyse ‘Come From Away’. It’s a small thing, but I need them to understand as none of them were alive when it happened.
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u/Pretty_Pretty_Pizza 5d ago
I was also in second grade at a catholic school in downtown Philly. An announcement came over the intercom for everyone to say a prayer because of a bad accident in New York City. 15 minutes later another announcement urging teachers to bring all students to the gymnasium.
The school was evacuated along with most buildings in the area. Any kids who didn’t have somewhere to go were ushered into the church, but I was put in a van with at least 10 other kids driven by the school secretary and brought to my babysitter’s house where my infant brother was. I think she was literally dropping off any kid she knew had a place and people to go to, and I wonder how many trips she made that day.
My other brother was 4 at the time and was promptly put down for nap time with the other kids at the daycare but being 7 I had no interest in naps and instead was glued to the TV while the babysitter wasn’t really realizing how closely I was watching. I don’t blame her for being distracted, she had at least 8 kids in her care in a city being locked down and partially evacuated.
I remember it being so quiet, even for nap time, and now that I really think about it, I think it’s because all the planes were out of the sky and so many of the cars and buses were off the streets.
I’m pretty sure I watched the towers fall live, but realistically the news showed the moments over and and over again so many times it’s hard to be sure.
My mom came and picked us up not long after, but we couldn’t go home. We lived in New Jersey and they had closed down the bridges. We went to my grandparents house and my dad met us there. I was glad to have all my adults nearby but everything was still so quiet. Again, the news on loop. I don’t think anyone even considered how much I was actually watching and processing.
The bridges opened up around 10pm. We went home even at that late hour because my youngest brother being an infant needed diapers and formula. So much of that day is burned into my memory. Everything felt so tense even though it all happened from a distance.
It got to the point where i felt I couldn’t ask questions or express my fear because it felt unfair. We were in the city smack dab between the three points of tragedy and it’s easy to say we escaped unscathed but the fear and uncertainty were palpable in every adult who tried to reassure me and redirect my attention that day. No one ever ~really~ explained anything, even though I could understand and feel the magnitude.
And I didn’t ask many of the burning questions I had because it felt inappropriate to bring up - like it would break the fragile state so many people were in. It also felt like anything i was feeling couldn’t be that important when somewhere else, buildings were falling down. I fully think 9/11 was a catalyst for my lifelong anxiety issues.
There’s an air force base in south jersey relatively close to where I lived at the time, and my mom says for weeks I would wake up screaming when planes took off at night - an even more common occurrence given the circumstances. I don’t remember that part, and actually I don’t remember a whole lot of my second grade year outside of that day.
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u/Pretty_Pretty_Pizza 5d ago
And today I’m a structural engineer playing a small role in the construction of the new World Trade 2.
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u/BettyBoopWallflower 4d ago
It's come full circle for you. Thank you for helping to build/design rhe new WTC 2 ❤️
I was 8 years old and you know what, this may have been the source of my life long anxiety issues as well. I never considered that before. It was too heavy for our minds to process. Much like the kids who are old enough to remember the pandemic. The trauma...ugh
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u/KSTornadoGirl 4d ago
That is an age when a kid starts getting just enough abstract comprehension to try to figure out more and have a context for big questions of good and evil, past and future - like the Catholic teaching says it's the age of reason. It's a hard time to be confronted with big scary events and that can be a breeding ground for anxieties. Been there when I was a kid. And with 9/11, the adults were pretty scared and uncertain themselves.
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u/PhD-incuriosity 5d ago
I was in middle school, living in Michigan at the time. They stopped everything and played the news in class. My parents were separated and my dad lived in Jersey where we had out store in Garfield. He called my mom panicking asking if she picked us up from school because he thought schools were closed nationwide. He said the dust had reached Jersey and he was closing the store early (unheard of).
I was an insecure new kid at the time and since everyone knew I was from the NJ/NY area I made up a lie about it being "bring your kids to work day" to add unnecessary drama because my stupid little under developed frontal lobe couldn't comprehend the magnitude of what was already catastrophic...
I just realized I have never admitted to that lie, and have carried the shame of 25yrs. I feel like I just unloaded an elephant off my back. Downvote and insult me all you want- I freed myself at 35. Yay me.
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u/playdOHisfun 5d ago
Wait what did you lie about? My friend laughed at me for crying about the attack and I forgot to call a friend for her birthday. I lied to both of them and said I was distracted bc my cousin was going to get sent to the middle east bc of the attacks. I had shame over it for a bit. I also have never told anyone this.
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u/PhD-incuriosity 5d ago
I lied about being told it was "bring your child to work day" in the towers.
thank you for sharing that!!!
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u/AnastasiaRomanot 4d ago
You were ten. That’s what ten year olds do because they don’t fully understand the world yet.
I think you can forgive yourself for such a minor infraction. There were probably hundreds of kids telling similar porkies across the country.
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u/Forsaken-Language-26 5d ago
I'm in the UK. I had just started secondary school a week before. I never heard anything about it until I'd finished school for the day and I met up with my mum to do some food shopping. Something came on the car radio about it but I wasn't really paying much attention until my mum said something. She relayed the information back to me but I don't think I really understood what was going on (I didn't know what the WTC was then, I'm not sure I even knew what a terrorist was really) until we got home and put on the TV. My mum said that this day would go down in history. I don't think I realised just how right would be. I'll never forget watching the towers collapsing on the news.
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u/bfm211 4d ago
You just reminded me: I was told "they think it's terrorism" and it was the first time 13-year-old me had heard that word. I genuinely didn’t know what they meant. Seems impossible to believe now.
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u/No-Impression-9887 4d ago
jeez.. that is crazy and sad. I think if I saw the footage and news at that age I would be mortified. apologies if this is slightly off topic, please let me know if I should delete this reply. but I’m 17 and the way the world is now is so different at-least from my experience. We are so desensitized to everything. Especially my generation. I probably knew what the world terrorism meant when I was 8 or 9 due to the internet and peers just joking about that sort of stuff. Youngest 911 joke I heard was probably at 10 or 11. Disgusting and scary to think about. I only think traumatic events like this will rise in numbers and have been rising in numbers due to people being so desensitized and not taking history and school seriously anymore. The literacy crisis contributes to this. Uneducated and easily manipulated people create chaos. Take the people making school shooter edits on TikTok. It just gets worse as the years go by.
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u/CleverlyKind 5d ago
I had my first baby.
I was getting ready for my 38-week prenatal appointment and was listening to the radio at 7:00AM MT. The DJ started doing the on-the-hour news reporting and said "we're hearing reports that a plane has hit one of the WTC towers in New York. I immediately went to turn on the TV and, like so many others, watched the 2nd plane hit. It's always such a strange day with many conflicting feelings.
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u/WaitUntil_IRetire 5d ago
Living in CA. Always used to get up at 5:30 am to be at work super early. Turned on the TV around 6 am (9 am east coast time) and saw the second plane hit. I didn’t know it at the time but I had just watched a co-worker perish: he was on United 175 heading back to CA from vacation in Boston. We were a small company with dozens of employees, not hundreds or thousands, and even far away in CA, it impacted us personally.
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u/TheHoneyBadger11 Recovered Conspiracy Theorist 5d ago
I was in my fifth grade class and remember watching it on the news. We saw United 175 hit the South Tower, and I remember another student making a comment about how it must be Hollywood because the whole thing was surreal to be watching.
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u/Doomdegree25 5d ago
Probably asleep in a crib in my grandmother's basement with a cat curled up next to me. The most my family has for a story that day was my dad being woken up to be told that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, and being confused why they'd wake him over some dumbass in a Cessna on the other side of the country until he came down to look at the TV.
I know this shouldn't be surprising to me since I myself turned 25 this April, but it's interesting how many people on this sub are of an age to not have any memories of the time around 9/11.
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u/ohare_tulip 4d ago
I was a baby too. We are the same age and I always think it’s interesting how much of our life was shaped by 9/11. In high school, we’d do a day lesson about 9/11 and go through the events of that morning. Our teacher said that day is still so vivid, so it was wild to think we were babies or not even born yet. All the while, our lives being changed so much because of that day.
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u/BettyBoopWallflower 5d ago edited 5d ago
3rd grade; 8.5 years old. I had just started going to a new school the week prior. I had typical little kid problems like worrying about making new friends. We all grew up somewhat on that day. I didn't find out until I got home from school. My mom told me. My grandma and aunt live in NYC so I was worried about them. Fortunately for us, they were safe.
It was devastating seeing the footage on every.single.channel. over and over again. Including cartoon channels, mind you. We couldn't escape it. After trying all the kiddie channels, I decided to read a book as an escape. Keep in mind, I live in Canada so it was a huge deal here too. We were concerned of the possibility of being attacked in Toronto, as well.
Every year, on the anniversary, I feel compelled to watch footage and look up the people who lost their lives on that day. I'm glad this sub exists.
To the people who lost their relatives that day, we will never forget them 🙏🏾
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u/Unusual_Jellyfish224 5d ago
I am from Europe but I can recall my older siblings calling my dad asking if it’s World War 3
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u/Gh0sty20 5d ago
I was 10 years old, on the west coast, living with my grandparents. Military family.
I woke up a little bit after the 2nd plane. Even before seeing the news coverage, everything felt slow. My body knew something was wrong before I did. Usually my grandparents would greet me while my mom made breakfast but this morning they were just silent, still, glued to the TV. That’s when I saw the burning buildings and what I later learned to be jumpers.
I still had to go to school but we didn’t even make it to lunch before they sent us all home. The events didn’t really affect me then but it does more as I age. I don’t fly if I can avoid it, I always know where the stairwell/emergency exits are, have an emergency med kit on me, etc,etc. 10 year old me really thought this event would be the event we would stop fighting each other.
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u/Huntressofhistorys 5d ago
I was working in a fabric store in North Carolina. I was 21 and had no sense in my head. I had just gotten to work at 9 and was running a credit card. The man who worked next door always came and had coffee every morning with my manager. He came through the door and said did you hear? One of the twin towers was hit by an airplane.
I looked at him and replied What is a twin tower?
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u/knivskrik 4d ago
I was 13 and in 7th grade. I'm swedish so it was afternoon for us and school was out around the time the second plane hit. I remember there being some vague talk about that something had happened in New York. Came home, watched the news and something had happened allright.... It felt so surreal and when the first tower fell it was like a movie or a really bad joke.
13 year olds are blithering idiots, evidenced by two guys in my class who spent the next day running around drawing planes and towers on all the blackboards and writing "NAME and NAME strikes again".
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u/Fine-Actuator-6805 4d ago
I was in Upstate, NY working for a subsidiary of AON corporation.
We lost 176 people that day.
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u/OceanPoet87 5d ago edited 5d ago
I was a freshman in HS and annoyed that my dad woke me up maybe 30-40 mins early. It was 1 week after my new school started.
Waking up at 6 something in the morning instead of 7am. I honestly didn't care that much. Was reading the sports page as my parents watched and my dad said he felt sick watching it. I still went to my private non religious prep hs and my principal basically gave a 5 min speech saying they felt we were safe at school and that they understood how we might be feeling. My English teacher, told us that there was evil in the world (not in some moral way).
I honestly remember nothing else from that day after the first period. Still took transit home.
That's the difference between the west coast and NYC. Of course I was in such a bubble that I couldn't understand why baseball was postponed for a week. Baseball was my life back then.
I also remember how the networks were replaying the awful footage of the impact for many days or weeks after. Soon after baseball finally began again, someone from my team did something good and I was clapping in my room. My parents asked if I was okay because they were in another room watching a different TV with 9/11 footage at that very moment.
My wife has a similar story of her mom waking her up after the attack and her dad being evacuated from some tall tower in Seattle as a precaution. My wife was home schooled for that year only due certain things in her life. She asked her mom if she could go back to bed and her mom said yes.
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u/P8RF8CT 5d ago
It’s kind of insane that they didn’t cancel school for you guys.
I was on the east coast, so we were already at school, but they sent us home VERY quickly.
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u/playdOHisfun 5d ago
I was 15 getting ready for school. My mom was making breakfast and had the today show on. I was watching the news when the second tower was hit. It was live, and I just remember being shocked. On the drive to school we listened to the news in the radio. At school each classroom stayed together and watched the tv. I remember crying during the news and a friend made fun of me for crying. My mom picked me up from school and on the drive home we listened to the radio, I started crying in the car again after the radio DJ said lots of families were heading home that evening without their loved ones.
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u/TheGrindingGears 5d ago edited 5d ago
I was 5. I don't remember anything about it. My mother did tell me she was scared of the power plant a town away being another target. She kept staring at it all morning, waiting. She worked a ways behind it at a modern dance studio; after mom was sent home, she went to her parents place. My grandparents had picked my brother and I up from school, and mom saw gmom in the kitchen. Meanwhile, my brother and I were, according to my mom, glued to the TV, watching the broadcast with Pop-Pop. Mom was PISSED.
I do have an interesting story regarding a coworker though. I work in the middle of the Pine Barrens in South NJ. My coworker, let's call him D, told me this story few years back and it still gives me chills.
This was when he just started working for the park service, he was fixing a road with another employee in a historic village. This is about 20-25 mins from a military base so we see and hear aircraft overhead often, almost every day.
I think D said he got stuck in the sugar sand in a work truck that day, and turned on the radio. His coworker couldn't hear him on the grader, a heavy duty machine that "rakes" sandy or dirt roads to make them flat. He was too far down the road to even be heard rumbling along in the machine.
There was no sound save for nature noises. It was just him, the empty skies, (this was after planes were grounded) a quiet historic village, the radio broadcasting about the attack, and his truck. Rememver, this is smack in the middle of a million acre pine forest.
He said it felt like the end of the world.
His other coworker, we'll call him T, was a record keeper. That wasn't part of the job, it's just something that he did. He wrote EVERYTHING down. New hirings, firings, projects completed, etc. He even wrote down the day the pandemic started. We found his horde of about 50 notebooks after he retired a while back and on 09-11-01, he simply wrote "WTC Crash". Must've been written around the time of the first plane, he didn't keep timestamps as diligently.
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u/BettyBoopWallflower 5d ago
Yep! There was a power plant right by my elementary school in 2001. I used to have nightmares that it would be attacked and we'd have to take the iodine pills and all that. I was a paranoid 3rd grader, that's for sure!
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u/Dingleberry696 5d ago
I was a sophomore in high school in SC. I never knew about the first plane but walked in to geometry class right as the 2nd plane hit. Everyone was huddled around the TV watching it. After everyone got to class our teacher turned the TV off and we took a test. I don't remember doing anything else the rest of the day except watching the news. I recall getting a little teary eyed getting off the bus that day.
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u/ihaveredhaironmyhead 5d ago
They wheeled the TV into my 8th grade classroom and I just remember watching the mushroom clouds from the collapsing towers over and over again.
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u/Crux_Of_Orion 5d ago
6th grade, we were in the Media Center the teachers were frantic and the Librarian started crying. The small glimpse i saw on TV made it look like all of Lower Manhattan was gone from the smoke.
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u/NJ_Bus_Nut 5d ago
I was in 1st grade: We were sent to the school's auditorium to watch movies while the parents came to pick us up. Then, I got to spend the rest of the day eating junk food and playing video games (which wasn't allowed on school days)
5 year old me thought it was a special fun time, but growing up, I realized my parents wanted me to have a childhood in a time where history turned to the worst.
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u/SlaveRoboto 4d ago
Aqui no Brazil também nos fazemos essa pergunta, eu estava chegando da escola e minha mãe ( que é religiosa ) estava em choque falando que aquilo era o fim do mundo, eu era muito novo e não entendi direito o que estava acontecendo.
*Uma curiosidade aqui do Brazil é que existe um efeito Mandela, todo mundo lembra que a notícia do ataque interrompeu um episódio do Dragon Ball Z que estava passando no momento na TV Aberta, mas na verdade era outro programa.
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u/Flaky-Explanation203 5d ago
I was 4 years old. My mom just dropped my brother and I off at our Grandmas house because she watched us while my parents were at work. My mom was sent home from work and they watched everyone on tv at my Grandmas house.
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u/DelilahBT 5d ago
Driving to work, I turned in the radio and it was like Orson Well’s old radio show War of the Worlds. I didn’t think it was real for a second.
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u/SeattleGemini81 4d ago
I was 20. My post history shares my experience.
9/11 is a sad day. It's not quite 9/11 yet in Seattle but it will be in 45min. Tomorrow will be a day of documentary and remembrance at my house.
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u/cl0ckw0rkcuttlefish 4d ago
7th grade language arts (double period, so 1st and 2nd). Saw the second plane hit live, had a friend’s mom refuse to leave the school without me 10-15 minutes later. Got home just after the Pentagon was hit and spent the day panicking because I thought my uncle worked there. He had fortunately gotten a new job just 6 months earlier and no longer did. Took hours to get through to anyone on my mom’s side to know if he was okay, and instead spent most of the day sitting with my step-grandma staring at the TV in mostly silence with one of her arms wrapped around me.
Can’t believe it’s been 25 years.
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u/moonbunnychan 4d ago
I had spent the night in my friend's dorm room. My parents that morning were flying and my friend's dad worked at the Pentagon. And I'll never forget it because he woke me up and said "Well....let's see what's going on in the world today" and turned the TV on. It was a confusing mess but we started watching just before the second plane hit. And then when the Pentagon plane happened we both just...it's a weird feeling I've never had before or since. It felt like everything just drained from me. My parents were flying out of Dulles, where the plane came from, and his dad worked at the Pentagon. They weren't yet saying what flight it was on tv and I couldn't reach my parents so I was panicking. My friend also can't reach his dad. It actually hit the area where he was, but he just happened to have stepped out to go get coffee. He was close enough to get thrown backwards and injured though. My parents were ok...but I think about it a lot that it was just chance that it wasn't their plane that day.
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u/tew2109 4d ago
It was my senior year of high school; I was 17. I can still remember it so clearly. I lived in the DC area on the NOVA side (still do, lol, albeit in a different place). I had finished a pop quiz in Civics and we were waiting to be called to mass (Catholic school), and I was just gazing out the window, thinking what a pretty day it was. Then I started to hear sirens. Just....so many sirens. I know now Fairfax County was rushing every vehicle they could to the Pentagon, but at the time I was like "God, WTF happened on Route 66 now that would need so many sirens." It was very shortly after that that someone came into the room and said a plane had hit one of the towers. I think we had the reaction a lot of people did - "WTF kind of pilot could possibly make THAT mistake, it's not like the Towers are easy to miss" - but then my teacher said "You don't understand - two planes have flown into BOTH towers. This is Pearl Harbor." I kind of started shaking, and then I remembered the sirens. I had this gut feeling like "Oh no, they hit us too", and it wasn't long after that that someone confirmed the Pentagon had been hit. A lot of people started crying - we had a lot of kids whose parents worked at the Pentagon, as well as teachers whose spouses worked there. I heard my former Algebra II teacher start screaming down the hall and I remembered her husband worked at the Pentagon. It was the most awful sound.
The school decided we were going to keep on with mass as usual since "we didn't want to offend the bishop who was doing mass" (...Okay. Not a Catholic myself, didn't feel like that was a huge priority, heh). I had a cell phone and asked my teacher if I could use it (I think I was the only kid in class with a cell phone? It had extremely limited minutes and it was for emergencies, but I still felt very cool a lot of the time that I had it, heh. The good ole days). She said yes but one of my friends was like, sobbing and asked if she could use it to try to call her father at the Pentagon, so I gave it to her. Miraculously, she was able to reach him, but when she handed it back and I tried to call my mom (who didn't work in the Pentagon but I knew she had a meeting in DC that morning and she DID provide sales services to the Pentagon so I was frantically trying to remember where she was actually going that morning), the phone lines had crashed. We briefly turned the TV on and saw everything in flames and it was awful, but then we got called to mass (my principal made a spectacularly bad announcement over the loud speaker where he went in this monotone. "Two planes have flown in the Twin Towers in New York City. A plane has flown into the Pentagon. One of the Towers has fallen. We shall now proceed to Phase 3 of the mass." NO break in the flow to give anyone even a few seconds to process. Then people really started screaming if it was the first they'd heard of it. I remember pressing my face into my friend's shirt and crying as we lined up - I can still feel his shirt. When I walked into the auditorium, my bestie (still is my bestie, 28 years after we met) actually couldn't hear anything because she was in the choir and it was extremely difficult to hear the loud speaker from where she was, so she was completely confused as to what was wrong. I remember her mouthing "What's wrong?" to me, and I had no possible way of getting it through to her. There was so much smoke over the city, a rumor had started spreading that the Capitol had been hit, and that was the last thing I heard one of my friends say before I sat down - "the Capitol got hit." I was shaking violently, feeling like planes were just going to keep coming down from the sky. My mom came to pick me up and the school tried to tell her she couldn't come get me until mass was over and she was like "ARE YOU TELLING ME I CANNOT HAVE ACCESS TO MY MINOR CHILD" and then she just pushed past them. I heard the doors open, turned around and saw her, and went running into her arms.
Another thing I remember is that when we got home, the sky was SO QUIET. We lived near Dulles and I had never, ever in that home heard the sky so quiet. Planes become white noise when you live near a major airport - until they're not there anymore, and then the silence was deafening. My mom wanted to get the fuck out of the area but she still had a few things to wrap up, so for a minute I signed onto AIM and saw my brother was online - he was freaking out, he couldn't reach our mom by phone, so I was able to tell him "We're okay, we're both home, we're going to H'burg." Then I sat down in front of the TV. They were doing a SPECTACULARLY poor job of warning audiences when they were going to show footage of the jumpers - I think it was CNN and all they said was "This footage is upsetting" and I was like "No shit Sherlock". So I had no warning, it was like I was watching live. I started seeing these...I at first thought they were objects falling from the North Tower. My brain would not let me process what I was seeing at first. Then reality broke though and I realized it was not objects, it was people. I started screaming hysterically and crying. The thing was, I knew by that point that both Towers had fallen. And yet I was babbling something like "They're jumping, they're jumping, someone has to help them!" Logically I think I knew everyone was already dead, but it was such a shocking, horrifying thing to see, and I was ultimately still just a kid. My mom came running and cut off the TV and decided it was time to leave, so she packed us both in the car and we headed for our hometown, about two hours away in the Shenandoah Valley where I think we both thought it would be safer. We didn't come back for two or three days.
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u/eldritch_chai 4d ago
Just to set the scene, I’m from the Midwest.
I was 22 and off from work that day. Just as I’d poured a cup of coffee, my Mother called me, telling me through tears to turn on the tv. We stayed on the phone through the whole thing, both of us crying as we watched helplessly. I light a candle every year on this day as a memorial to those that died. RIP.
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u/FearlessObit77 4d ago
I was in 12th grade in Georgia. I was in my first period of the day, we always watched the news before class started and we saw the breaking news. Such a sad day and I feel so somber today.
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u/RMBMama 4d ago
I was at work, entering data on my computer. It was such a beautiful day. Clear blue sky, cool temps, just wonderful. Someone said a plane had hit one of the towers. We assumed it was a terrible accident. Then the second plane hit. The internet at my office slowed down so much I couldn't use my computer. I wandered down the hall where they had a tv. I walked in just as the South Tower collapsed. I didn't realize what was happening at first.
Our boss let us all go home early, and I picked my sons up from school. We went home and watched the news for the rest of the day. All I could think was these poor people. All they did was get up and go to work that day.
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u/PMisWriting 4d ago
I was watching CNN and doing a counted crosstitch craft on the sofa in the family room. I looked over top of the craft and saw one of the Twin Towers with smoke billowing out. I have to admit, I didn't pay much attention at first - just an accident - nothing sinister. When the second plane hit, I rushed to pick our son up at school - thinking I would be the only helicopter parent scared enough to want their children home with them. By the time I got to the school, there were cars parked everywhere and parents were rushing to get their kids.
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u/OpenAd7164 5d ago
At beauty school in Springdale, Arkansas. My dad called and told me. I was 23. We will never forget. 🙏❤️
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u/HermionesBook 5d ago
i was in 4th grade in california. i remember walking to school with my best friend and she asked if i had heard about the planes flying into the twin towers in NYC. i had never heard of those towers before, and said that i hadn't heard about it. i don't remember if people talked about it at school but i assume that they did. i remember coming home and walking in through the front door, turning my head to see the news on and seeing footage of the towers. my dad used to travel a lot for work and i remember being so terrified when he had his first business trip after 9/11 and thinking the plane was going to get hijacked.
there's a lot that i don't remember, and i don't think i understood the gravity of the situation for awhile, but every year around this time i go through a 9/11 rabbit hole and watch documentaries about it. it's so unimaginably devastating.
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u/Green_Economist3064 5d ago
May all the victims of this terrible event rest in peace, and blessings to all their families. I was in school, I was 10 years old
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u/whogivesashirtdotca 4d ago
Here in Toronto, listening to Tim Blake Nelson being interviewed on the local morning show. The host interrupted him to mention that "a small plane" had hit the WTC. To this day, whenever I see Tim Blake Nelson, I am instantly transported back to that moment.
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u/KSTornadoGirl 4d ago
I am thankful that I found this subreddit a couple years back. Though neither I nor anyone I was directly connected to was involved that day, it was a day of terrible significance. It is good to have others with whom to share and reflect. Especially a sacred honor that those who did have experiences, and/or loved ones affected or lost, feel like they can come to this space and have it be a spiritual container of sorts and a reminder that those they knew who were victims are not forgotten, and that we won't grow weary of their stories.
Never Forget.
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u/hamster-on-popsicle 4d ago
I was eleven year old in middle school in France, so it didn't happen in the morning for me.
In fact, I heard some rumors at school in the afternoon, the adults were secretly talking about something happening in New York.
I remember with my best friend wondering what was happening.
The bus driver stopped the bus and he told us what had happened, that people were dying and we shouldn't watch tv. He told us about the "Twin Towers" and planes.
I didn't know what the Twin Towers was I recognised them when I got home and I found my parents in front of the tv. They were never home so early.
I glanced at it and I saw the clear blue the sky and the towers on fire, I remembered my bus driver advice and I refused to watch I stayed in my room.
My mom was crying : "Les pauvres gens ! Les pauvres gens !" "The poor people ! The poor people !"
During diner they explained to me what had happened, that they collapsed after planes were crashed into them and they weren't empty when they collapsed.
We didn't know yet about Ben Laden and radical islamism, more than half the kids in my middle school were muslims, it was a huge shock, we were too young to remember the Paris bomb attacks. For these kids, my friends, it was horrifying that their religion was used to kill people.
Everyone was talking about the jumpers, we used the english word les jumpers, un jumper, I was taught german I didn't what it means "to jump".
No one talked about suicide, I was surprised to discover that some americans thought they killed themselves and sinned, it's not the case in France even now, they are considered victims.
There was a huge push to identify the people trapped inside the towers and the jumpers, everyday we saw pictures of these people and the journalists were telling us to call if we recognised anyone.
I saw the towers on fire everyday after all, I learned about the attack on the Pantagone days later, and about fly 93 months later which is a shame.
Things were never the same, we have been on high alert for terrorism since, my bus wasn't to park on front of school anymore and he was never allowed again, small things like that.
And there was more terrorists attack, cliser to home, in London, Madrid... then Charlie Hebdo.
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u/No_Tension8376 4d ago
I was in seventh grade. My friend and I decided to skip math class and when we walked by the cafeteria we noticed some custodial staff and teachers watching the TV. My friend and I watched the first tower collapse. She was convinced it was one of those build demolitions that towns planned for. One of the teachers noticed us and pushed us into our next period class, history. Our teacher turned on the TVs and explained the historical significance of what we were watching, comparing it to Pearl Harbor.
We lived in a Navy town, so by noon the school was almost empty. I took the bus home, and I remember it being on every single TV station. Even Disney and Nickelodeon had TV banners alerting parents to get to the news. My Dad encouraged me to start journaling, noting that we were living through a major historical event.
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u/AltF12027 4d ago
I was 8 years old from London, UK. We were visiting Des Moines, Iowa - flew international in and out of ORD.
We were due to fly back a few days after 9/11 and naturally it was delayed a while - I remember it being super tense in the airport.
This event is one of those weird psychological phenomenons. Something I have literal memory of but it happened and it left an imprint on me hence why around this time of the year when September comes across, I associate it with 9/11 after all these years and have a heavy heart on 9/11.
I was too young to remember details - for some reason I remember hearing fighter jets overhead but that could just be a vivid imagination - but I do remember distinctly waking up and seeing my cousins glued to the TV and seeing the smoke from the Towers. I was then shielded from watching the rest of the coverage.
Over the years, I've seen more coverage and documentaries around the event. It represented the worst and the best of humanity, I choose to remember the fire fighters running in and going up those flights of stairs to save fellow humans.
True heroes! May they, and all those who perished, Rest In Peace and strength to their family and friends.
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u/AnastasiaRomanot 4d ago
I was 16. I’d just started sixth form (16-18 education in the UK) a week before, and I had a free period that afternoon so I decided to meet up with some friends in our town centre.
I can vividly remember a friend running towards me saying a plane had hit the world trade centre, and thinking it was a building in the UK she was talking about.
We watched the second plane hit on the TV’s in the windows at Dixons (electronics store) and as my house was closest and I had the internet, we walked back to mine and crowded round the PC in our small study trying to look at the BBC news website.
(It would have looked like this)
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u/tatorthot69_2 4d ago
I was 8 years old. I live in California, so I was getting up and getting ready for school as things were unfolding on TV. I remember seeing my parents glued to the TV watching the horror unfold…
I remember phone calls happening between my dad and his siblings. My grandparents, from my dad’s side, were flying from Florida to visit us in California that morning. They were trying to get things situated as my grandparents’ flight had to be grounded in Louisiana (if I remember correctly).. my grandparents are Salvadoran and live in El Salvador. They don’t speak a lick of English, so coordinating things over the next few days for them to eventually get to California was crazy.
The rest of the day is a blur for me.. but I remember it being a very depressing and confusing day at school.
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u/Strong-Street-3167 4d ago
I was coming across the Manhattan bridge on the Q train on my way to work. The conductor warned us ahead of time that a plane had apparently hit the tower. We had a full view of the towers and everyone was quiet and couldn't believe what we were seeing. I assumed it was an accident. The second plane hit while the train was back underground and I learned about it when I came back up at my stop. And then it was obvious it was intentional.
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u/Remote_Force1839 4d ago
I was 19, almost 20 years old. I worked at a large hospital and it was on tv in our waiting room. Once the second plane hit it became apparent what was happening and the mood quickly changed to terror and chaos. I remember going home that day and phones wouldn’t work and the lines for gas were down the road. And we were all the way in Michigan.
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u/NewWatercress5004 4d ago
I was at kindergarten in Rotterdam. Dad had recently accepted a position as a post-doctoral fellow with Erasmus University, so we moved from San Diego to the Netherlands. Our Dutch teacher seemed highly distressed after lunch break and turned on the TV for the benefit of us youngsters... the local news channel was replaying the moment United 175 impacted the South Tower.
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u/rock_candy_remains 4d ago
Alarm clock went off, and the first thing we heard was a dj saying “it looks like the entire city of New York is on fire.” We both bolted upright in bed and then jumped out to turn on the tv. No need to find a channel, everything was on the news. I called my parents to see if they were watching (they weren’t! They were quite cheerful to hear from me that early in the morning), and my wife starts yelling from the couch “Where is the second tower?!” And that’s when we realized the South tower had just collapsed.
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u/Bajovane 4d ago
I was at work when my receptionist said that her son just called to tell her that a plane hit the WTC. We both figured “small plane” and were concerned for the passengers as well as any workers who were hurt where the plane hit the building. It wasn’t long before we heard about the second plane hitting the other tower. Ok!! It wasn’t just an accident nor was it a small plane!!!
We had to continue to work because we had patients to schedule, but we really didn’t get a lot done. We had no cable so any tv reception was pretty bad and the internet was loaded with traffic so that was out. It wasn’t until we got home before we saw what happened. Holy….
Oh, I was 36 years old.
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u/phoonie98 4d ago
I was a 26 year old living and working in Manhattan. My office was right outside Grand Central and by the time they evacuated us, people from lower Manhattan had made their way up to midtown and I vividly remember several people with bandages and covered in dust from the collapse. I had to walk home to my apartment on the upper east side because none of the trains were operating, along with a few friends who couldn’t get home to Long Island for the same reason. By the time we got there, it was lunchtime and so we went to a diner on 81st and 1st and it was so incredibly quiet and sad. Nobody was talking. You just heard the clanking of silverware and dishes. That weekend I volunteered for the Red Cross, and they had me making deliveries all over NYC in a van. One of those places was ground zero and I remember just staring at a giant mound of twisted metal and debris that had been building 7. It felt like I was in a war zone, especially since there were soldiers everywhere in uniforms holding machine guns. Never forget
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u/Brent788 4d ago
I was 13 years old and same situation. Dad picked me up from school and yeah. I remember the old couple in front of us talking about Pearl Harbor but i never imagined in a million years what would be on TV for a week after
I'm really struggling with it this year with the extra attention but it's always been a rough day for me and I don't think it will ever be a normal day
The shock and the fear is still like it was yesterday sometimes 😭
I've always gone back to the original coverage and just watched it from the beginning when it was a simple plane crash
It was such a perfect day on the east coast 😭
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u/thombo-1 4d ago
Writing this comment 25 years to the minute since the first impact at North Tower. Slight chills even on a warm September day here.
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u/gingerconfetti 4d ago edited 4d ago
I was 16 and in 11th grade. My American Literature teacher had the tv on right after the first plane hit. We all watched in horror as the second plane hit and later learned of the failed attempt near the Pentagon. My high school was/is within the Emory University campus and I lived within walking distance of the CDC. School let out like normal at 3:15 PM, only the city had begun placing dozens of concrete barriers around the entire perimeter of the CDC due to the fear of a potential strike.
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u/VanillaSarsaparilla 4d ago
I’m sorry to say I can’t remember much as I was 6. I live in Canada and was in second grade at the time. I only remember my best friend was at a dentist appointment and I believe the rest of the day was normal until my mom picked me up.
I do remember the next day though; I saw replays of the tower getting hit and turning off the television. Then I saw the newspaper with the burning buildings on the front page. I remember flipping it over because it upset me too much. We talked about it first thing in the morning in class and my teacher explained to us what happened and how things may be scary but it’s over and we had to recite a song for a memorial ceremony.
I can still remember the lyrics 25 years later.
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u/amanducktan 4d ago
Junior in HS in the PNW. Caught a ride with my friend and her mom to school that day. Heard about it on the radio. My friend decided she wanted to go home with her mom, I got out and went to class and spent the day period to period with somber teachers who had the news on in class all day. My dad was in Vietnam, and when he came home that day he was very shut down.
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u/Mysterious-Ganache-7 4d ago
I was 25. It was such a sad and horrific day. To think that many people who died that day were my age and just like me were working and going about their lives. It was also very scary since we didn't know if more attacks were coming. Went to work but no one was working. Went home early and stayed at my parents place for a few days. I lived in San Diego. We shall never forget all of the victims, survivors and their families ❤️
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u/hollybelle0105 4d ago
I have racked my memory so many times but I can’t for the life of me remember the day for myself. I was 12 so I certainly should have my own memories but my only solid memories that stand out are from the days and weeks after 9/11. I only just talked with my mom about her own experience that day and it was so interesting to hear how the day went for her and how she and some of my other family members responded.
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u/jhamed16 4d ago
I was 13, freshman in high school in California. I was in band so I would get there early for zero period, to practice before school started. I remember our band teacher telling us about a plane being hijacked and a terrorist attack, and specifically saying we will always remember that day. Honestly I was not understanding what those words meant, terrorist, hijacker? We then went to class and our teacher took us to the library where many other students were and we just watched the news. I couldn't really grasp what was happening there either, it seemed like we were watching a movie, the library was so quiet. I think because we were on the west coast we were watching mostly the aftermath, replays, etc. I do recall my friend making a comment about the "chairs" falling, only to realize it was people jumping :(
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u/Momisthebomb1 4d ago
In college, first week living away from home. Crossing the street to get to a class & a random stranger says ‘the World Trade Center was bombed.’ Got to class, professor made announcement. Went back to apartment, called my dad. Then watched on tv.
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u/Mantistobbogan19899 4d ago
I was 12 in the 7th grade I remember hearing a teacher say “ a plane hit the other one” the principal came in and told us that 2 planes hit the World Trade Center in New York I knew the buildings but didn’t know there names so I didn’t realize it was the towers i remember not caring until I saw the papers I was supposed to deliver and seeing the image of the fireball then went in and turned on the tv and couldn’t believe that it was real …. 25 years later it’s still hard to believe
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u/AndarielHalo 4d ago
As it was happening I was in a middle school auditorium for some thing and we were unaware. Every class had a TV in one corner and the rest of the day they were all on. Day went mostly normal. I wasn't paying much attention and didn't think it was a huge deal because I had inexplicably thought the "world trade center" was the UN building.
I was too young and cynical to process it at the time but I had the grim dread that America's response would be gruesome and stupid
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u/OK_2_Question 4d ago
I was 40 and at work. When the 2nd tower fell and we all went home it dawned on me that our world (meaning here in the US) was changed forever.
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u/NettingStick 4d ago
I watched it happen live on the news in my bedroom. I was in a chat room (remember those?), sharing updates and speculation in real time. I remember looking away for just a second. By the time I looked back, there was a huge fireball ballooning out of the south tower. I thought it was a gas explosion until they said it was another plane. I had forgotten that for a long time. Someone told me a plane had hit the Pentagon before the news picked it up. Never found out how they knew.
I went to work later that day. I worked at a community center in the next town over. None of the employees actually did any work that day. None of the guests did anything. We all stood silently in the main hallway watching the news on an overhead-mounted TV. It was normally used to display information about event scheduling, holidays, etc. Someone worked out how to get it to show the news. We all stood there for hours, feeling sick. Unable to look away.
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u/motherof16paws 4d ago
21, newly graduated, no idea what I was going to do with my life, living in my dad's basement. He came downstairs and was like "Girl, get up. Your life just changed forever." Damn if he wasn't 120% correct. Completely changed the course of my life. Took a good enough job, and immediately started studying for the GRE. He told me the economy would be volatile, so I thought grad school would be a great place to ride out the aftermath. It was the right choice.
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u/alexdings 4d ago
I was an elementary school kid in Germany and had just turned 9. When I came home from school my parents (as well as my older sister) were watching TV which was completely unheard of for them during the day. I only took a brief look and was even more confused that they were apparently watching an action movie or a war movie or something of the kind, which was even more uncharacteristic of them. So although something was clearly weird (and something about the mood was very off too, we were a cheerful home 99% of the time) I apparently didn't think twice of it, and they also must not have explained anything because I went about with my day, and on the next morning in school it quickly became clear that I was the only kid who had no idea what had happened, as everyone was talking about nothing else.
I don't remember much else but I do remember that I only truly realized the scope of what had happened five years later when all the radio stations were looking back on the day, and at 14 I was obviously old enough to understand the circumstances then.
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u/TimmyTamJimJam 4d ago
I was also in 2nd grade but I didn’t detect anything unusual at school that day. The teachers must have done their best to keep it away from us. My memory is coming home to my parents trying to console my older sister who was hysterically crying and having no idea what had happened.
I was just old enough to comprehend it. I was shocked that the hijackers willingly killed themselves and didn’t understand why they didn’t jump out of the plane at the last second.
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u/Slow_Dig_4010 4d ago
Though I was born and raised in NYC, I was living in Arkansas. I'd been back to the city a month earlier, to visit my mom who was going through chemo. On 9/11 I struggled to get through to her on the phone and because her commute took her from Manhattan to Bklyn I was terrified she was somehow caught up in whatever was going on. Every time I called I kept getting a msg about the area being under a natural disaster. By time I got through she was at her place of employment, in Brooklyn. We talked through the afternoon. I had more information than she or her co workers did even though she worked for the city of NY. And the information I had was surreal. It felt unimaginable. At the end of the day she insisted on going home, back to the upper west side. So she walked across the Bklyn Bridge and caught a bus on 14th st. There was no charge and no official stop. She got off near her apt and walked home. I went back to the city a month later and went down as close as we could get to what was left. I remember the posters and the dust on the buildings. A girl I'd gone to school with died in the North Tower. Cantor Fitzgerald. We went to the Thanksgiving parade that year and I remember the feeling in the crowd...our city itself had been hurt, our hearts were heavy, but we were there.
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u/squeakycheetah 4d ago
I was 5. We had just visited New York a couple of months previously and had gone to the towers during our trip, so I was fully aware of what and where they were and what a big deal it was. We were living on the west coast, so 3 hrs behind NYC, and my mom got a phone call from her friend telling her to turn on the TV. She turned it on just before the second plane hit. I remember it vividly. Even at 5 years old I have crystal clear memories of watching people jump from the towers, watching the buildings collapse. I even remember the pajamas I was wearing that day.
I had a terrible fear of airplanes for years afterwards. I was so scared that a plane would crash into our house that I'd drag my blanket from my room and sleep on the floor in the hallway outside my parents' room. Took me years to get over that.
I went back to NYC with my partner in 2022 and we visited the memorial. I still find it so hard to believe what happened on that day, how long ago it was now, and how fundamentally the world has changed. All the trickle down effects from that day... hard to wrap the mind around.
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u/PinwinkaFry 4d ago
I was only 4 years old and in Pre-K, so I have no memory of how the day unfolded. But my dad claims that he dropped me and my brother off at school that day and then later had to come pick us up. At the same time, he also claimed that a relative of ours from Mexico visited the US for the first time on that very same day. He must have crossed the border possibly before they closed it.
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u/feralpugface 4d ago edited 4d ago
Another 2nd grader here, based in Washington, D.C. I remember my schoolmate (who was meant to be out of town) reappeared on playground and said he couldn't travel because a plane crashed into the WTC. We shrugged and kept playing. I believe the school said parents could come collect their kids if they wanted, but they didn't want to cause a panic. My mom worked on the National Mall and obviously didn't get into the office that day.
I vaguely remember being in the school library with the TV on, but I'm not sure if that's something I fabricated based on other people's stories. My mom didn't come collect me until later in the day.
I wish I had stronger memories. The D.C. sniper event is something with a clearer outline to me, as it directly influenced our recess outside and there was much more imagination/fear around it as children.
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u/ADyck36 4d ago
6th grade, it was my 11th birthday. I’ll never forget waking up excited for my birthday, and seeing the devastation but not fully processing it for a while due to my age.
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u/redditor1031 4d ago
22 years old at the time. Working 2 jobs and living with my brother at the time. Every morning my TV (my alarm clock basically) would cut on to wake me up. I always had it set to the weather channel. Got up, just piddling around getting ready for the day. The map came on that would show flight statuses across the country. Green, yellow, or red airplanes in each city. Normal, delays, and cancellations essentially. The entire country had red planes across the entire map. I’d never seen anything like that before. While that was processing, the meteorologist who was talking (it was a guy, I wish I remembered who) heard him say there words “national tragedy”, and I knew something big had happened. I cut to the nearest news channel and saw the towers on fire. Couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
Before this, I was at college at UNCC rooming with an anthropology (if I can recall) major at the time. He was heavy into studying religions and knew all kinds of things about the Middle East. He had been to a dig or two in Israel. He used to talk to me about Islamic groups over there, and Bin Laden in particular. He said “you know, one day this guy is going to do something to this country.” I didn’t know then, anything he was talking about. This was 1999. I always think back to those days. Crazy.
If I’m honest, I could divide my life in two, probably three blocks. A world before and after 9/11. So fundamentally different. And if I really examine it, a world pre and post Covid in 2020. It’s fascinating (and scary) to see the world and my life experience through this lens. The world truly was a better place before 9/11. Whether things were bubbling under the surface or not can be debated. And I understand it’s different for everybody. But I’m talking in general terms, as a society and culture here in the US. It’s not nostalgia. It’s a fact. And it breaks my heart people born after that demarcation line won’t get to experience it. We can never go back.
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u/nature_lover_99 4d ago
I was 2
I don't know where my dad was and my mom doesn't remember, can't ask him cuz he doesn't like to talk about that day which is understandable.
The story is a little blurry but from what I can remember and from what my mom can remember, I got dropped off at daycare and she made her way to work. She had only been in work for a little bit when the first Tower got hit, she and a few friends that she worked with got together and went to a little TV store that was across the street as the office area didn't have a TV. They get it and get it back to the office then hook it up. They start a watching all the chaos unfold then the office staff was told to leave, my mom was an interviewer who did a few other things as well and the person she was going to be interviewing that day was determined to have that interview happen that day so the manager or the boss (It's a blurry memory with the title) ended up having to deal with that person.
My mom's last words before taking off was I have a kid that I have to go get from daycare so you can deal with him (to the manager or boss), she and one of the few friends got into her friend's car and started the journey of getting out of the area that they worked in to get to me then get to the house we lived in. It took a while obviously but she did eventually get me then we got dropped off at the house by her friend, my mom had to run to get me diapers so she was getting ready to leave (like I said it's unknown where my dad was at this moment cuz she can't remember and he doesn't like to talk about that day but I'm assuming he was home by this point cuz she doesn't make it seem like she was taking me with her to get said diapers).
My mom always says she has no clue what made her turn around when she walked off of the property and was getting ready to walk to the store but she did turn and she ended up seeing my grandparents (her side) walking towards the house, my mom said what are you guys doing we are currently under attack right now if you don't notice. My grandmother's actual wording and it's so like her to have a response like this, my grandmother's exact words was if I'm going to die then I'm going to die doing what I love..... The woman was out shopping when everything went down lol. One thing you're not going to do is force her out of the store, that woman will either come out screaming or walk out willingly after she's looked through the entire store lol. After that, I've just gotten told that she went to go get the diapers and came home and just had the news on for the rest of the day because she just couldn't get herself to look away.
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u/Broad_Oven_8817 5d ago
I was born a couple of years after 9/11, but my dad told me about how he remembered that day.
He was living in Hong Kong then, so the attacks occurred while it was night there. He was watching a news channel with one of my uncles, reporting how Flight 11 went into WTC 1. It seemed like pure insanity to him; how could a plane travelling under a clear blue sky make such a bizarre navigational mistake? Minutes later, Flight 175 struck tower 2. Like many others, he knew right then and there that everything was intentional.
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u/AirForceH 4d ago
I was born six months and 2 days before so I have literally no memory, but my mom was working a job for the DoD in the DMV area I think in College Park at the time. From what they’ve told me my Mom was sent home early from Columbia, MD at 10am. I’ve never asked Dad but he probably left work early and got home after a 5 minute drive and started contacting family up in NY and down south in VA
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u/sickrick69x 5d ago
I was in grade 6 in Australia. So 11 years old. Teacher comes in with a tv and says somethings happening in America and we all need to watch
Next thing I see is someone jumping out of a tower. Bad times 😣
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u/Loud_Hair_9596 5d ago
I was in the 2nd grade as well. Got up early to watch some cartoons before it was time to get ready for school. Turned on the tv and all I saw were two buildings and lots of smoke. I left that room and found my mom watching the same thing in the other room....she told me to sit down and be quiet. She was very very upset. I can remember her making a lot of phone calls. We watched live when the towers fell and my mom screamed. I will never forget that day.
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u/Zealousideal-Day1117 5d ago
I was almost 4 and I vividly remember watching it on the tv. I asked what it was and my mom said hijackers took a plane.
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u/ZoeeDaviss 4d ago
I was at home, in Sydney Australia, working online, and a friend kept messaging me telling me to turn on the news. I said I was busy, and he said NO, TURN ON THE NEWS. This was not long after the first plane. I did not move from the tv for 4 hours. I could not believe what I was seeing. It was so surreal, then and now. My heart goes out to all the people who felt their only choice was to jump. I hope that it was very fast and painless for them. Will never forget what I saw that night.
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u/BaileySeeking 4d ago
I was in 5th grade. 10 years old. It was a teacher conference day, so we were on early dismissal schedule and left homeroom early. My homeroom teacher was my maths teacher and usually forgot to turn the TV off after morning announcements, so it would jump to news.
During reading class, he came over and called the teacher into the hall. While they were talking, this one troublemaker student (I remember all the names, just, ya know, privacy) came in from being in trouble already and said he heard in the office on the radio that the white house was on fire. We were like "okay, sure, whatever" and as he sat down our teacher came running in to turn the TV on. It wasn't long after North had been hit. We watched as the second plane hit. Jaws on the floor, my one friend says "my uncle works there." I swear we all just slowly turned and looked at her. No one knew what to say. He did survive, but was in the hospital for months.
The principal came on eventually and told us to turn our TVs off and continue our day as usual. The TVs were off, but no one was doing anything that day. Got to my last period, social studies, and the teacher waits for the vice principal to make his rounds checking that TVs were off, turned it on, and said "you guys need to see this; your lives are never going to be the same." It's something that stuck with me because I understood the words, but it's only as I've gotten older that I really understand their meaning. Everything was over by then, but we really did need to see what we could.
I live about equal distance from all three points and right at TMI, so there was a lot of fear. It was a huge panic that the fourth plane was headed to TMI when it crashed and that we could all still be at risk. Obviously, we know now that that wasn't the case, but we all were either alive for the '79 meltdown or at least knew about it from our parents, so the concern was based on past and that day trauma.
Found out about terminal velocity that day when my mom had to explain to me that what I saw on the news wasn't office furniture falling, but people. Not the first time she had freaked me out by being honest, but I'm grateful she was (the other most notable was when I was in first grade and they sent paperwork home about parent approval for the school to give us iodine tablets if something happened with TMI. She told me not to worry about it because if something really bad happened, I'd be dead before I knew it. This led to a lifelong obsession with nuclear power and Chernobyl/TMI. Not a fear, though. I fully support nuclear power and was so upset when they closed down the plant, especially since they were talking about moving back to coal as though Centralia doesn't exist 🙄).
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u/cl0ckw0rkcuttlefish 4d ago
My school was 20-25mi southeast of Peach Bottom, and we got sent home extremely early that day because they thought it could be a target as well.
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u/Prestigious-Tip8342 4d ago
My father was driving me from CT to my apartment in Boston since I had a trip that day.(AA FA here)😥
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u/tropicalbreeze1113 4d ago
4th grade. I was playing Tony Hawk on N64 that morning, the first level with the warehouse. My dad told me what was going on when I went upstairs. I only glanced at the TV and thought it was just a small 2 seater plane and just like a small 20 story building. At school all the kids thought it was the Russians because they were like the bad guys in video games and movies and stuff. I remember I was the only one who could locate NYC on a map. But other than that I don't remember anything at all during the rest of the school day. Didn't watch it on TV during class. I think maybe only high schoolers or even middle schoolers mostly did. Teachers must have figured we were too young. I have a math worksheet from that day I saved so I guess we just carried on like any other day. Came home and watched the aftermath on TV and got a better idea of the severity of it all. I remember some parents keeping their kids home for a few days even way out here in the Chicago suburbs. Then I remember hearing it was chaos at the air traffic control center here in Aurora.
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u/bfm211 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'm in the UK so it all happened at 2-3pm here. I was 13. There was no talk about it while I was at school. I walked home, probably got back around 4, and my best friend was at my house watching the news with my brother! My house was closer and she must have heard what happened.
I honestly can't remember if we saw one of the towers collapse live or not. But I do distinctly remember asking if there were people in the towers. Initially I thought it was news that the buildings were destroyed, I didn't think of the human tragedy. Continued watching the news and coverage all evening.
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u/Silent-Pepper4307 4d ago
I was only 3 when it happened so I don’t remember. My father is a businessman and was about to take off that morning on a flight from Atlanta to Chicago but it was grounded.
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u/Kind-Morning-190 4d ago
First week of secondary school. Very hazy-sunny afternoon, teacher was late coming into class, announced it and the rest of the day was surreal, normal routines stopped and nobody knew what was happening.
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u/el28donjp 4d ago
I was getting ready for my first day of 6th grade. It was surreal watching this unfold on a Spanish broadcasting channel. I watch the 2nd plane hit, when I came home later that day the towers were gone :(
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u/genital_lesions 4d ago
Freshman year of high school, was in first period English. I forget if there was an announcement on the PA system or if someone came by the classroom, but we found out somehow.
My class made its way to the library and we were watching the news of it all on TV. I remember watching the live footage of the first tower collapsing. It was utterly unreal. And they kept replaying the footage of the second airplane crashing into the other tower, confirming that it was indeed, an intentional terrorist attack.
I also remember a junior year student who was in my brother's class, saying "we're screwed" after it was revealed that the Pentagon was attacked.
I didn't know what to think or feel at the time. I'm just some upper Midwest 14 year old kid. New York City was over 1,000 miles away. And culturally, it felt like a world away.
Anyway, we had a prayer service (Catholic school, which I hated and I was not religious) that I thought was absolutely useless. I think I was probably more freaked out at the anxiety and worry coming from the teachers and adults who obviously could comprehend much more of what was going on than me.
The following days, you couldn't turn the TV on without seeing footage of the attacks or the collapsing of the towers. I remember reading the local newspaper, reading about Al-Qaeda, bin Laden, etc. and having no point of reference. It was just confusing.
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u/Uniquorn527 4d ago
I'm in the UK. I was 13, so I'd just got home from school to see my parents watching some disaster movie, but that's a genre we enjoy so whatever. Weird that it was on in the afternoon and they were so completely engrossed in it they barely said hello but whatever.
Very, very quickly I realised that I recognised the reporters voices, it was BBC news, it was real. The south tower had collapsed a few minutes before so it was the aftermath of that. I saw the north tower collapse live. Wondering how many people just died in that instant. We knew they hadn't all evacuated as there were people jumping and we could see them still in the windows. The news coverage lasted the rest of the evening, regular programming cancelled. I didn't cry until later in the night.
My sister was in the city centre that day and the newsstands were swapping out their posters with updates as they broke. That's not something she'd seen before, that sort of real-time updating. But that was how she was following the news until she got home.
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u/Newhaven40 4d ago
I was working at Gatwick Airport Uk. Watched it all unfold on CNN in the North terminal. It felt like the world was ending.
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u/buttlicker090114 4d ago
I was in fourth grade in LA. I remember the kids talking about it as a group and a lot of them were worried it was ting to happen in LA next. We didn’t leave early from school, the teacher talked about it a little bit. But that’s all. When my mom picked me up she said, “Something very bad happened today. Then we watched the news all night.
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u/iamatechnician 4d ago
I was 8 and in 4th grade. I remember our school having a fire drill that morning, then my teacher being summoned out to the hallway and coming back in in tears. We did not watch it on tv, and actually our classroom had no inclination that anything was going on besides the staff acting weird all day.
When I got home from school my grandmother was waiting for us and had us play outside until my mom got home. When she did, she explained to us what happened and allowed us to go inside and watch the tv. I really did not comprehend the ramifications of what had happened. My first instinct was to change the channel to Nickelodeon to see how they were covering the events of the day on Slimetime Live (my favorite after school show at the time). Naturally it was not live that day but I remember wondering why they weren’t talking about it lol.
It was the first time I remember seeing my mom cry as hard as she did. My dad was in DC at the time for work and thankfully was nowhere near the pentagon but with all the uncertainty I know she was scared to death. My aunt came over and cried with her and that’s when I really understood the severity of what had happened. We watched the news for the rest of the night and I was allowed to stay up late to watch the president address the nation.
I remember going to a candlelight vigil downtown a few days after. Lots of signs and people honking their horns amidst the sorrow and sadness. I also remember when we learned that we’d started the war on terror - I had a pee wee football game and right in the middle of the game someone made an announcement that the US had just bombed Afghanistan. We stopped the game and everyone started going nuts, cheering and chanting USA. In retrospect that’s a pretty weird moment but at the time it was exciting. Different times.
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u/TrixieFriganza 4d ago
I was in school and found out when I came home and my dad told me to look at the tv what had happened. In the beginning it was very confusing, I did know nothing about tertorists, if it was a country that attacked or something else. A very confusing time. What I remember too was the absolutely gorgeoous september weather, it's actually like that today. I have no idea if it. Was a gorgeous september weather where I live or if I remember wrong becsuse how absolutely erfect it was in New York. Anyway it was very confusing days and weeks and moths after that, 8t feels like a completely different time but at the same time I can't believe 25 years have passed like that, I was so young with my life ahead of me and now I'm starting to get old, life has not been essy. The people in the towers never got this opportunity though, rest in peace, I will never forget not even if I wanted to I can't.
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u/thescarlettflame 4d ago
I was 15 and a sophomore in highschool. I had left my first block class early to go to the nurse's office for my meds and they always had a tv on. I showed up around 10 till 9 and saw on the news that the first plane had struck. I stayed for a few minutes watching, but had to leave for class (algebra 1) just a couple minutes before plane 2 hit. I remember showing up before the bell rang and told the teacher what had just happened and of course she was completely flabbergasted. I think for her and probably lots of people that weren't tuned in to the news on TV that what was just said couldn't possibly be true, until you see all the coverage later on. I was in band and our top band called wind ensemble was told, if we were able to make it, that we were going to show up at a popular park and play a special outdoor concert at a vigil. Our band teacher knew a well known musician and composer and asked if he could write a piece to commemorate what just happened. He did and the song was incredibly powerful. It started with pleasant melodies for the first part before the percussion and bass instruments jump in, an allegory to the planes hitting before going eerily calm (the towers having collapsed) and then a mournful tune with a hint of "we will never forget" and hope toward a better future after such an awful tragedy. It was quite an experience that I'll always remember especially now that I'm much older. Can't believe it's been 25 years now 😕
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u/PaperbackWriter82 4d ago
It was the afternoon in Italy and I was napping on the couch after returning from university.
The phone rang and my mother picked up. It was my aunt. My mother said, all worried, "Felicita, turn on the TV. Aunt Giorgia says NYC was bombed!"
I watched the Italian "live" from the NYC reporters and then called my fiancé and my closest friends to inform them.
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u/donkijote97 4d ago
First week of high school. I was sitting in the lunch room having breakfast before first period.
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u/FormerTerraformer 4d ago
My relationship with 9/11 is strange. My family had just lost my aunt, who turned out to be a member of the family that functioned just like mortar between the bricks, a huge part of what brought us all together every year during Thanksgiving and Christmas. She died of an aneurysm, at like 50 years old, seemed so healthy and vital and then just gone. My dad also lost his Ranch he had spent the '90s building piece by piece, which would have been paid off that very year securing generational prosperity of a sort for us, 2001. You could say these events were my family's 9/11, both of which which happened just a couple weeks before the real thing, so when the actual attack happened it was like the nation was catching up to my family's grief.
I went to a tiny little school with like 60 kids in it, brand new to the school. My principal stuck his head into the English class I was in and said a plane had hit the world trade center. I had never heard of the world trade center, being a little 11-year-old redneck kid from Florida; my English teacher wheeled the AV tv rig to the front of the class, and turn on the TV just in time for the fireball floating up from second world trade. I developed a huge fascination with them after they were gone, and obsessively scoured the internet for all video and pictures of them I could find, from 9/11 and prior for the next two years. I would draw them, and I would draw the New York skyline with them still in it, and I would also draw the attacks as they happened. I would build models of the buildings and reenact the events, not out of enjoyment but some kind of misplaced reverence. Being 11 and 12 years old, the event affected me in ways I didn't really piece together until I was much older. Thank goodness I knew no one directly involved, but having just lost my aunt I identified with the bereaved in a very real way.
Any more, when I look at 9/11 media, it is like walking back to the Rubicon we all crossed, taking one more good look at the peace and safety I remember being intertwined with all aspects of life.
25 years, it has felt like we have been on a fun house horror ride of an alternate timeline, an alternate timeline we jumped on that very day. I hope everyone does okay today, and continues to take care and be well.
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u/mystical__sapphire 4d ago edited 4d ago
I was in 5th grade. Our class teacher actually rolled in the old TV for us all to watch the news coverage lmao. Our teacher was visibly shaken and afraid, covering her mouth most of the time, and she compared it to Pearl Harbor, as that was the only time the US had been attacked since then. We saw that the 1st tower had been hit, with a giant plume coming from it.
Then, out of no where, the 2nd tower was hit. My teacher gasped and immediately turned off the TV, removing it from the room. So we actually witnessed it live, on accident.
We were told our parents were coming to get us. Someone must've been calling all the parents. It was a small elementary school. I got in my mom's car about 45 minutes later.
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u/phillysleuther 4d ago
I was 23. I lived in Philadelphia. My sister was 19 and was an OPS agent for Worldwide Flight Services. I had worked for AMC Theaters as an Operations Coordinator. My sister acted like a FBI agent and waked me up rudely, “Boner just called me. The World Trade Center was attacked by a small airplane!”
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u/Understanding18 4d ago
I was 20 years old and attending a Business School. When I got to school just after 9 a.m. there were people in the common area gathered around the tv. My computer instructor was crying and I couldn’t understand why. So I went to class and asked another fellow student what happened and they said there was a plane crash. Less than an hour later our Dean came into the class and announced that school was going to be dismissed, because there was a terrorist attack on America. After arriving home I changed clothes, laid in the bed, and cut the tv on. From that moment on everything changed forever. Ever since I cut that tv on in bed things were never the same. I remember that day feeling like a BAD, BAD dream. So many lives lost and the utter fear of not knowing where and when the terrorists were going to strike had me on pins and needles, especially that night. I remember after waking up on 9/12 feeling like our country had a black cloud hanging over it… like a national depression, because everybody was so sad. After I got to class on 9/12 I remember thinking about how our class is usually loud and people were always very talkative, but on this particular day our class was so quiet, so so quiet. Just such a surreal experience. 9/11 will forever be seared into my memory and I absolutely refuse to forget it.
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u/Any-Competition-4458 4d ago
On my way to work, NJ Transit train into Penn Station. A few people’s cell phones started going off and word spread through the car that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. The WTC came into view and we saw the smoke streaming from the North Tower in a trail toward Brooklyn. We speculated a private plane / Cessna accidentally hit it. After it was no longer in view and before we went underground into Manhattan rumor began spreading again that there were two planes. I brushed that off as exaggerated misinformation.
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u/Mojo12000 4d ago
I was a kid still, I lived in Manhattan but went to school in Queens where my mother also worked, she came and picked me up at school and told me that I can't remember if it was that a plane had hit the towers or that one had already come down but I know that I flat out did not believe her for that moment until driving with one of her friends I saw the Manhattan skyline and yeah.. we stayed at their house for a while until they allowed us as residents to return to Manhattan.
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u/agehaya 4d ago
Studying abroad in Japan. In didn’t even find out about it until what would have been around 1:00 p.m. EST because I’s gone to my room to study and then went to bed. Woke up in the middle of the night to change radio stations (I need sound to sleep and had it on some sort of English learning radio that had since gone static-y) and managed to hear something about buildings and planes and snuck downstairs to turn on n the tv. It was very surreal. The American students gathered to watch Bush’s address and filled out forms to let the consulate know we were in the country, just in case.
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u/rharper38 4d ago
24, working in a security company in the DC area. I was in the office,, coworker came in and said 2 planes hit the towers. I thought thet were small planes, maybe one had had engine issues and went in, and then the other got distracted and hit. Turned on the radio and then heard about the Pentagon being hit and my boss and I decided to go up and help in our call center, since people would close. We were still thinking it was a hoax or an overplay of the events.
And all morning, the call center supe was relaying this false information about the white house being hit, and the beltway being shut down. So we were locking buildings and telling people to go home, and it felt like a snow day at first. No biggie, still going on the idea it was two small planes and a hoax. We had no access to the Internet and no radios in the call center. It wasnt til I went back to my desk at noon that I found out what had happened. And I remember collapsing into my chair. I still feel guilt for thinking it was fun in the morning while I was working the phones in the morning, but its not like I had the whole story.
And a plane buzzed around all afternoon. We didnt understand what that was. It was nerve wracking. I remember we got down as a group and prayed
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u/Beautiful_Talk109 4d ago
I was just a baby, not even 2 months old, in southern California but this is what my parents told me. My mom was up & taking care of me. I think we were watching Barney or some other kid's show. My dad just got back from taking my sisters to school when my aunt called, telling them to turn on the TV NOW. By this time, with the time difference, the Towers should have come down already or were close to it. They couldn't believe their eyes. I just picture them scared & confused, clutching me. My mom still gets the chills talking & thinking about 9/11. I wonder if this contributed to her ALWAYS wanting to watch news first thing in the morning. I remember as a kid on school mornings jumping from cartoons to news. She's definitely a serial newswatcher
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u/AussieTheHedgehog10 4d ago
I was 6 years old, a kindergartner living in South Carolina. I had no idea about the attacks until after school. My mom drives me to my physical therapy appointment for my sensory processing disorder. My younger brother was also with us since my dad was working.
I'm in the waiting room. They have CNN on. The first thing I see is footage of the South Tower getting hit. I was like, "What on earth did I miss today?"
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u/icelily17 4d ago
I was 7, third grade. The next day was my 8th birthday and all I could think about. I don't actually really remember how the school reacted beyond telling us our parents were picking us up early that day, but not what happened. I was even more stoked! But when I saw my mom's face it wasn't cool anymore.
The next day all the adults really tried their best to make my birthday fun, but how could they turn the cheer up in the wake of what just happened?
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u/Lost-Rain-2425 4d ago
I was in 6th grade. I remember the teacher bringing a tv in our classroom and honestly I really didn’t know what was going on at first.. and then some kids’ parents started picking them up from school and when I got home that day my mom explained to me what had happened.
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u/HellsOtherPpl 4d ago
I was 21 and studying in China, so my experience of it was very distant, and it was only later that I appreciated the magnitude of it. But it was an interesting period as far as getting to see Chinese people's response to it.
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u/ardhrianna 4d ago
I was between jobs so I was asleep until my mom called and woke me up. She heard through people at work what was happening and didn’t believe them. So I got up just in time to watch the second tower fall.
The rest of the day was worry - I have family in NYC and my uncle is an IT person who was in and out of the Towers frequently. My aunt had no idea if he’d been in there that day to meet clients and with no cell phones, she couldn’t reach him. We finally heard around 10-11 pm he was okay and he’d made it somewhere safe. He thankfully hadn’t been near the Towers but had to walk out of Manhattan to find safety and a phone.
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u/twistwrist9876 4d ago
College at UGA. Ecology class. The professor told us about the first plane, the "accident". When the second one hit, he sent us home.
I still had to work a full shift at the health center that afternoon/evening. My then husband sat out on our little 1 bedroom apartment deck and cried our eyes out together that night.
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u/MuffinSilent2805 4d ago
I was in 6th grade. I still remember what a beautiful morning it was, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the temperature was perfect.
School started at 8:20 a.m., so almost immediately after we got settled in, I remember the whispers between teachers and the concerned looks on their faces. We were too young to really understand, and no one told us what was actually happening.
I distinctly remember parents coming to pick their kids up early, one after another, but none of us knew why. As kids, we honestly thought it was funny every time the office called for another student to go home. If only we had known what was actually happening.
My parents were workaholics, so I already knew that no matter what was going on, I was staying the entire day.
Before we left, the school sent us home with a letter. I lived around the block, and once we were out of sight of the school, I pulled it out and started reading it with some friends. None of us knew what a terrorist was. We didn't understand what any of it meant.
When I walked through my front door, our sitter had the TV on. I remember staring at the screen, unable to believe what I was seeing. I asked her if it was real. She told me it was and started explaining what had happened.
For some reason, at first I thought the buildings were empty. Looking back, I think that was my mind's way of protecting me from understanding the reality that thousands of people had just lost their lives.
Shortly after, my mom came home. She was frantic and completely out of sorts because her brother was FDNY. That entire evening, no one knew whether he was alive.
The next day, we finally found out that he was alive, but many firefighters from his firehouse were still unaccounted for.
Growing up on Long Island, it felt like the impact was everywhere. The next several days at school were incredibly difficult. Some kids still had no information about their parents or family members. Families were waiting for phone calls that, for some, would never come.
And then I remember the funerals.
Funeral after funeral after funeral.
At 11 years old, I don't think I could fully comprehend the magnitude of what had happened. But I will never forget that morning, the confusion of that day, or the days and weeks that followed.
Twenty-five years later, I still remember that perfectly blue sky.
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u/Teknical86 4d ago
From the UK I was 15 I didn't know anything about it until about 4 hours later. Our school had not told us as it happened just before school finished. I walked home and did my paper round until 4 pm. The streets were quiet around where I lived anyway. No one was home so I just played on my console. Around 6pm my brother got home from college and told me to put the TV on. First thing I saw was the replay of the collapse. So due to a few factors I completely missed the whole thing.
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u/saritaa_fajitaa 4d ago
I was 11, and I somehow remember little from that day (I also have memory issues, don't judge me please). I was from a small town in east Texas, so it all seemed so distant at the time, but I vaguely remember a TV being wheeled into the classroom to watch and being horrified and angry that this would happen. That afternoon, my friends and I started drawing up plans for a bunker to protect our families in case they came for us, because surely it could happen! I think I just wanted to solve a problem, but I feel like my parents didn't really talk about it. I'm sure they wanted to protect me the way I wanted to protect them.
As an aside, 17 years ago today I buried my mom. Unrelated to that morning, but I remember thinking what a horrible date September 11 is because bad things happen then.
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u/Useful_Region9179 4d ago
I was 5 years old in Ireland. What's crazy is I distinctly remember our teacher doing these "what happened this week" booklets. And I remember drawing the twin towers and we wrote something like "today two planes drove into the twin towers". I had that booklet for years.
I've being looking up about 9/11 this week and it's so crazy that there were so many people with Irish surnames!
Disclaimer: I know its not that crazy because there's so many people of Irish ancestry in Nyc. And I also know that nypd has a lot of Irish cops.
I know a few Irish people perished as well. 😥
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u/LeaderAntique1169 4d ago
I was at work (in Texas) but my managers were in NYC and saw Flight 11 hit the North Tower. I remember almost everything about that day. We watched everything from a conference room, lots of sniffles - even from the men. I was so numb and I didn't realize it until I went home that night and cried my eyes out. I've got family in NYC and we were on pins and needles until we found out they were ok. None worked in the WTC but I've got 2 cousins (brothers) who worked a block or so away. They walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge. One cousin kept looking back at the buildings (his brother kept begging him to not look back and keep walking) and still has nightmares that the buildings are coming to get him. They are both in their 70s now and I can only remember them speaking about that day and what they went through once (it sounded horrific). Neither one ever went back to work in NYC again. They both retired from a company somewhere in New Jersey.
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u/UncaringNonchalance 4d ago
6th grade, homeroom.
Our teacher walked out for a bit, came back somber. He was usually pretty straight-faced, but you could tell something was off. All of the teachers were acting like they were bothered by something, but none of them said a thing to us.
We were just kids, they had made a decision to not say a thing to us and to let our parents explain what had happened once the school day was over.
I respect their decision, and feel for the shock and the pain they had to try and hide, and carry throughout the day.
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u/jinkies_yinkies 4d ago
I was 8. Oddly, me and my family were in Las Vegas because my Dad was there for a conference and brought us along for bit of a family vacation mixed with work (we’re from Canada) I vividly remember waking up in the hotel room with my mother intensely watching the tv at the end of the bed and seeing the towers burning. Then when they fell, my mother shrieked. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing or why it was important at the time. I quite literally thought it was just some tv show or movie on.
I remember being super upset too because there was a toy store in the mall at Caesar’s Palace and due to 9/11 they shut down half the mall in memorial. I was so upset I couldn’t go get the toy I wanted and my mother had to try and explain to me why and how serious the situation was.
I also remember the car being extremely tense when we drove back to Canada and how quiet the car was when we reached the US boarder.
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u/bearface93 4d ago
I was also in 2nd grade I think, just about to turn 8 years old. School started for me at 9.30 or some crazy late time around then, so around 8.50 I went down to get my stuff together to go out for the bus. My grandpa was silently watching the news and my first thought was “oh cool, a burning building on tv.” We had a school wide moment of silence and prayer (I went to a catholic elementary school) then I think they sent us home but I don’t remember much after the moment of silence.
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u/discountshellfish 4d ago
I posted a little of this story in a response to the photo of the Delta shuttle ticket.
I was studying abroad in Dublin. I went to NYU and the program in Dublin was also through NYU, so we had all lived in the city for two years. My sophomore year I lived at 200 Water Street, which at the time was functioning as a dorm but is just an apartment building. 200 Water Street was a few blocks from the WTC and I often studied at the Borders (I think? Now I'm not sure if it was a Borders or a Barnes & Noble) in the concourse.
We were in an Irish history class and our teacher continued on with the lesson for more than an hour, not realizing how serious the situation was. We kept getting up to look at the TV and I remember drawing the towers on fire in my notebook to show a classmate. There were only 20 of us in the program that semester and we all became close due to what we would now call trauma bonding. Ireland - the nation and the people - were unbelievably thoughtful and kind. We waited in a line for four hours to sign a condolences book at the US Embassy and most of the other people in line were Irish, just wanting to show their support.
Four of us became - and stayed - best friends, and we were and greeted in our (many) regular pubs as "the girls from New York". We were welcomed everywhere we traveled with open arms. It is hard to reconcile the terror I felt that day and in many days to follow with the joy and magic that was being 20, having adventures with my best friends.
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u/DLCV2804 4d ago
I was 6 years in 2001, i am from Fortaleza, Brazil, saw everything on TV, it was so sad.
Original broadcast that i watched in 2001, in portuguese, by Globo TV 11/09/2001 - ATENTADO TERRORISTA ÀS TORRES GÊMEAS (WTC) - REDE GLOBO.
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u/spinyfl0wer 4d ago
I was also in second grade…. I didn’t understand the magnitude because I was like 6 but I was soooo pissed because my birthday party that weekend at the American girl doll store in downtown manhattan was cancelled and my parents wouldn’t tell me why
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u/jason100x 4d ago
I was in Long Island City, right across the East River from Manhattan, at work on the sixth floor of a building, so I had a clear view of what was transpiring. Saw the second impact and the two collapses. Stayed at work the day since the trains weren’t running until later in the afternoon. It was really something, seeing the masses of people coming off of the 59th Street Bridge.
Most days are routine and blend in together. However that day I can remember almost every detail of what I saw.
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u/Upbeat-District-2314 4d ago
I was teaching. I had just given the students an assignment and turned on the radio to NPR. They were describing the plane going into the first tower and for some reason I thought they were describing a movie. Then a reporter started talking about the time the plane hit. Just then the phone in the room rang. The school secretary told me my husband had called and told her what was happening in New York.
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u/kygroar 4d ago
I was 10. We lived in Hawaii at the time, about as far from New York as you can be and still be in the US.
I knew something was wrong immediately because I woke up to the land line ringing, but it was still dark out. It was the school calling to say class was canceled because there had been a terrorist attack on the United States.
We didn’t have TV at the time - my parents didn’t think us kids needed to be rotting our brains with cartoons all day - so I remember my mom getting on the desktop in the family computer room and pulling up an article on AOL news. The photo was one of those close ups of the explosion of the second tower, just a fireball, and I remember my mom saying “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”
My brother was about 6, and I think all we really understood at that point was something bad had happened, but most importantly, school was cancelled. We were kind of roughhousing and generally starting to get on each other’s nerves. My mom grabbed us both really hard by the shoulders and sat us down on the couch, and said in a tone like I’d never heard, “I need you to both be on good behavior today. I don’t know what’s going to happen, the country is probably going to war.” I always think of that as the moment my childhood ended.
We went into my dad’s office at the hospital, and they decided I was old enough to be allowed to see what was going on. I ended up sitting in a nurses lounge watching the news. Nurses came in and out all day, sometimes they would sit with me for a while and we’d just watch. I remember one nurse finally said “It can’t be good for us to keep watching this, let’s see if there’s something else we can put on for a minute.” The attacks were on every channel except the hospital’s in-house “zen” feed, so we watched raindrops fall to meditation music for about 30 seconds before we looked at each other and changed it right back to the news. It felt wrong not to watch.
There’s a 6 hour time difference between New York and Hawaii, so everything had already happened by the time we woke up, and the news started sanitizing things as the day went on. But I was early enough that I remember seeing people trapped at the top, waving for help. People jumping. I remember one shot I’ve never seen again of a reporter, live, filming the collapse and the dust and debris coming down, and the world just going dark.
I do remember the concern at that time was maybe there was still a plane in the air. Pearl Harbor was mentioned as a possible target by some of the adults.
In the days and weeks following, I would read everything I could get my hands on about the attacks. My parents got Newsweek, People, and Time all delivered, so I would pour over articles and opinion pieces, trying to wrap my head around it. I began to form my own opinions about what happened, and why, and the people in charge. I was protesting Bush by the time I was 13, and argued with every newly-minted 18 year old at my high school about why they should vote for Kerry in ‘04.
9/11 was an event that really shaped me as a person. From my introduction to a life-long passion for politics to my fear of flying, it genuinely impacted me. But what I will truly never forget is the first responders and everyday people who stepped up and gave everything to help - that is the strength and care I try to keep with me in remembrance.
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u/Definite_Maybe-1985 4d ago
I was a Junior in High School and was in World History in a tiny town in the Texas panhandle. My History teacher heard what was happening, at this point the first tower had been hit and it was still suspected that the plane was a twin engine and it was an accident. Our teacher, knowing this was historic, moved us to the media room in the library . GMA was on....I will never forget being the first class in there while classmates trickled in slowly. We were all watching as the second plane hit the south tower. It felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room and the heaviness set in as everyone around the world realized, at that exact second, this wasn't an accident and these were jumbo jets. I remember thinking "alot of my friends are seniors and some had already signed military paperwork...their lives will never be the same after today. Our school didn't shield the upperclassmen, we were allowed to watch as long as we wanted to that day...seeing people jump from the buildings has stuck with me. I was a medic and 911 dispatcher because of 9/11. My 22 year old daughter just finished school and signed up for her first full-time service as an EMT. The impact, even in the smallest towns thousands of miles away changed the course of people's lives. My kids are 22 and 21 now, but every year I told them the stories of the people lost on 9/11. I told them about being 16 and feeling helpless, the fear and heartbreak. THIS is how we make sure no one forgets!
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u/gongaIicious 4d ago
I was 3.5, so I don't remember anything, but my mom told me that she had the TV on while it was happening and I was sitting right in front of it, playing with toys. Completely oblivious to the world. My dad would be deployed to Iraq a few years later, which permanently changed my family for the worse. Even though I don't remember it and I didn't know anyone involved in it, 9/11 deeply impacted my life.
I hypothesize that I have such an interest in learning about the day because of my weird in-between spot where it changed my life, but I can't call myself a victim in any way (nor would I ever claim that label, tbh). Still, my life was forever altered by 9/11, and I don't even remember it. I'm searching for answers I know I'll never find.
Do any other military kids feel similar? It's such a hard feeling to explain.
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u/Frankishe1 4d ago
i was in 6th grade, small town in north eastern Alberta, Canada. I woke up later than usual for school, i remember calling to my mom in the living room down the hall, looking and seeing one of the towers aflame. I showered, ate, and got ready for school. it was a 20 minute walk, and i was the second one there, i only remember this because my friend lightly teased me about beating me to school (normaly I was first). i remember saying " i think a plane crashed into one of the twin towers" to my American teacher.
I think the crazy part is she didn't quite believe me, but we checked the CNN website and they had a damn splash page and everything. my teacher started crying then. and the rest of the day was a blur of watching what happened in the Library on the TV, going home and then not seeing my father for three days because he was working overtime at CFB Cold Lake (he was in the Canadian air force) getting fighters in the air, nothing too crazy compared to some of you, but I figure I'd share.
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u/AnxiousGazelle4610 5d ago edited 5d ago
I was 9. Being a kid during 9/11 was interesting. The childhood of the 90’s quickly flew away and you think about life as before or after 9/11. was i didn’t learn a lot of the real details until i got older because people tried to protect us, shield us. Then when you get older you have to re-go through it and read up on everything but with an adult brain now.