Remembering 9/11/2001

[tomalak301]

Today is the 11th anniversary of that fateful day and I didn't see a thread about it so I figured I would make one. To relate it to the board, I wonder what it was like on that fateful day around here, as I came to the board exactly one year later.

For me, the last few days I've been listening to this song from Bruce Springsteen, one of the most underrated 9/11 tribute songs to come out in 2002.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1IfD_47P7c[/yt]

I will never forget what happened that dreadful day. I will Never forget the victims, heroes, first responders, and our military. I was looking at a headline in the newspaper today and the headline was "Will this wound ever be healed". I'm not sure if I want it to heal. If it heals, many might forget (As people can tend to forget Pearl Harbor day as we are now a few generations removed). What happened on 9/11/2001 was my generations Pearl Harbor and I don't want that wound to heal. I want it to serve as a reminder of that day, how we were before that day and how we are after, and I hope, wish and pray for a time where our country can reach that "United States" that we saw in the weeks and months following that day.

Always Remember...

 

[Finn]

Yes, I remember that day back in DC.

Then three years later to the day, a Beagle pup was born in the hills of southeastern Indiana and has been sniffing around nonstop ever since.

 

[1001001]

Like a lot of people here I'm sure, I knew someone killed on 9/11.

Her name was Sue Hanson (Kim). She was my girlfriend's best friend. We hung out a lot Senior year, went to prom together, that kind of thing.

Anyway, her, her husband, and their two year old daughter were on Flight 175. I can't even imagine what their last few minutes were like. The little girl, Christine, was reportedly the youngest victim of the attacks.

Last year the City of South Pasadena made a nice tribute to the family.

http://pasadenanow.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/sopas1.jpg

Anway, yes this was a day I will never forget.

Peace and love.

 

[Rhaven]

No, I'll never forget. I'll remember this day for all the people lost and lives cut short.

 

[RoJoHen]

Saw this article floating around Facebook. 9/11, as seen from the space station. You can actually see the smoke from the explosion.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...erican-not-on-earth-on-september-11th/262216/

 

[thestrangequark]

^That picture is incredibly intense. It is strange, but I feel more affected by that photograph, eleven years later, than I did standing only a few blocks from the WTC when it happened.

 

[doubleohfive]

I remember September 11, 2001 very well. I was in the DC metro area at the time, and for several hours that day we panicked that my father, who had been at the National Mall conducting an interview, might have been killed when early reports said a plane had crashed on the Mall. Later, it was obviously confirmed that no such thing had happened, but in concert with cell phones not working, and the ever more horrific news of the day, it was not a fun day for my family. I remember thinking quickly to email all our family abroad - and lying to them - letting them know that we were all ok.

Fortunately for us, Dad did what all good journalists do and he followed the story and had spent the day reporting from the State Department. When he came home that night, we were so happy but I could tell he was so sad about everything that had happened. He came to America in 1969 to get away from the conflict in the Middle East, and here we were living through more stupid warfare bullshit all over again.

All that being said, I don't think saying that "I don't want this wound to heal" is a very healthy approach to this matter. It is entirely possible to remember, to honor and to memorialize the events, heroes and victims of that awful day without forgetting but still be able to move on.

I remember a year later on campus, when we had the memorial service on 9/11/2002 and how we had interlopers restrained by campus security for shouting out that 9/11 had happened because Jesus didn't love us anymore; I also vividly recall the snipers on the roofs of the surrounding buildings during said memorial.

I remember the black plumes of smoke spiraling away from the Pentagon for days after the attacks and how you could see it from just about anywhere in town.

I remember being angry.

I remember the sad rush of everyone to blame the Middle East. I remember seeing AIM away messages and profiles reading "I HOPE TOMORROW THE MIDDLE EAST IS A BURNING, SMOKING CRATER" and the overtly patriotic "THESE COLORS DON'T RUN" in pixelated red, white and blue.

I remember our film theory professor telling us we could have the afternoon free - "Somehow, I don't think watching and discussing "Battleship Potemkin" would be ideal right now."

I remember a fiction writing class the next day, where my professor declared - "There's good and evil in literature and in entertainment. We know there's good in the world. And we knew already there was evil in the world, but now we know it again."

I remember the conversation I had with my little sister in the days after September 11. She was only 12 at the time, and the look on her face when she told me - "This is my generation's disaster." When I asked her what she meant by that, she told me "You were a kid when the Challenger exploded. Mom and Dad grew up learning about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Pearl Harbor and D-Day. This is the tragedy everyone my age will remember for their entire lives." She and her friends would later walk up and down our street with candles, singing the Star-Spangled Banner with anyone who would join them.

I remember going back to work at the university admissions office and fielding calls from parents and students, everyone worried about their kids and their standing at the university 20 minutes from DC. I remember soldiers withdrawing their admission to deploy or join up. I remember international students withdrawing admission because they were afraid of how they would be treated following such a horrific attack.

I remember skipping French class because I didn't want to take an exam that day. I remember schools in Bumblefuck, Iowa were cancelling classes for the next week yet here we were, 20 minutes from where one of the attacks had happened and we were still in class.

I remember the new "News Center" in our student union, a bunch of monitors set up next to the library and across from the food court. It had been installed that summer and for the first week of classes nobody cared. It was just a big black wall with monitors set to various news stations (and at times, daytime soap operas. ) I remember getting to campus on September 11th and seeing that alcove jam packed with people watching CSPAN, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.

I remember the day of the attack, hugging my friend Emily as she cried watching the towers come down on a shitty old TV with bad reception. I remember being trained on how to field a call of a bomb threat came in. I remember meeting the Dean of admissions that day, based on how he'd introduced myself with his first name, thinking for months that he was just some other counselor I could call by his first name after he'd ordered pizzas for the office.

So no, I don't think 9/11 is something that people will ever forget about. We may move on, but we will never forget.

 

[Data Holmes]

11 years later and it is still like yesterday in my memory.

My anual posting of these youtube vids in the memorial thread. The first one, the palace guards playing the star spangled banner for the stuck americans who couldn't leave the country. That one still makes me tear up a little. The rest showing the outpouring of the worlds reactions.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQOQWAKnB1Q[/yt]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqEBHKHaPy8[/yt]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2150wkh6Oyc[/yt]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZiHN3z2o08[/yt]

 

[Candlelight]

I remember waking up the clock radio that morning, bearing in mind that NZ is in a different timezone so the towers had been down for five hours before I even woke up.

My wife and I shot out of bed, turned on the TV. We saw the plane hitting the tower over and over again. I went to work - a regional tv station - but not much work happened that day (although we did win an award for our news coverage as we broadcast international feeds that no one else bothered about).

I remember jumping on the BBS and Misc was just a flurry of threads and anger. I tried to find something on the Wayback Machine but the only archive around that time is for October, and nothing of note is mentioned of the attacks.

TNZ however...

http://web.archive.org/web/20011024...Neutral+Zone&number=21&DaysPrune=2&LastLogin=

 

[Gary7]

It's always a very somber day, although this time I avoided the TV broadcasts. The last time I watched them, I had this really deep sinking feeling inside. It's hard to let go of the feelings that hit you in a time of crisis. I was lucky to be a 1.5 hours drive from Manhattan at the time, but I knew someone who died in the south tower. And about a few weeks later, I was in Manhattan on business that took me downtown. You could still smell the debris in the air. It was a very haunting experience.


Wow... that shot from space. Talk about a real mark on the country. What those astronauts must have felt... to be told of the attack and then to be able to verify it visually like that. Incredible.

A few years back, some production company made a tribute video for 9/11 that captures the experience of it from a number of people, prior, during, and after the attacks (you can find it on YouTube). Very gripping. It brought the whole experience of that day back, as if it just happened. I saw it earlier this summer... once was enough, though.

 

[SmoothieX]

I was a senior in college in the Bronx at the time. Technically NYC but as far away from the towers as you could be.

I went out the previous night after a night class with a friend of mine and watched Monday Night Football at a Mexican restaurant in the Riverdale area of the Bronx. She and I did this regularly as we both had no classes on Tuesdays.

I got home late, and slept late. My father came in to wake me up and tell me he was going to work at some point that Tuesday morning. He worked for a large IT firm that had office in NY and NJ that he split his time at.

The NY office was at 1 World Financial Center. I blew him off and had no clue where he was going that day. I was tired and didn't care.

I woke up around quarter to 9, and went over to my computer in my bedroom to download my homework assignment. I saw on Yahoo!, my homepage, that a plane had hit one of the towers. That was weird, so I turned on the TV. Saw the second one got hit, realized this is for real. Some of the NY stations at the time had antennae on one of the towers, so there was a frozen image and you didn't really know what was going on.

I tried to call my dad, but the cell phone system was overloaded. Eventually, I got through, he was fine, went to the NJ office that day. He came home and we split a bottle of nice scotch.

About 6 months later, I went to the WFC and have some good pictures of the pit. Old 35 mm camera, so not easy to post or I would now.

School was cancelled that day and Wednesday following it. Thursday I had a night class, drove in and parked. The only thing I remember is the smell. I was 15 miles away from the site, but it smelled awful. This acrid, burning, foul smell. We didn't get a lot done that semester, it just cast a funk over us that lasted a few weeks.

I was a senior, and the speaker at my graduation was an alum (obviously) who did a lot of the structural evaluation of things at the disaster site.

The shorter building with the trapezoidal roof is the one I am referring to. Ended up on fire.

 

[thestrangequark]

^The smell was terrible, and I remember it well too.

I was a teen at the time, and living downtown. It happened while I was walking to school, I was walking north, to NYU, so I didn't see the smoke or fire behind me. There were tons of sirens heading in the opposite direction, but I didn't turn to look until I'd reached Washington Square Park, where hundreds of people were watching. I finally turned and saw through the Arch, and that is when the second plane hit.

What I remember most, aside from the smell, was walking back home after we were told classes were cancelled. I had to walk southeast from the university, and in crossing Broadway, where all traffic was stopped, I passed through the crowd of business men and women walking north, all in their suits, and all covered from head to toe in white ashes. As I walked home the white ashes caked up on my shoes. Since NYU is below 14th street, and everything below 14th was closed for a couple weeks after, we had no classes. It was eerily like a ghost town down there in those following weeks.

A couple summers ago my mom and I were driving in Seattle (I was visiting her), and we passed the scene of a huge apartment fire. The smoke and ashes were floating in the air all around us, and they fell onto the car, and the smell was horrid. On September 11th I didn't have an emotional response. As odd and cold as it sounds, the only feeling I felt was interest. I think growing up as I did, with one dire life-threatening emergency after another, detachment had become my natural response to trauma. But when we drove through that fire almost ten years later, and the car was covered in ash, and I smelled that smell, I cried...it just put me right back there, and this time I felt it.

 

[gturner]

Irritatingly, Arabs chanting Bin Laden's name marked the anniversary by storming our Egyptian embassy, trashing it, pulling down our flag and waving the black Al Qaeda flag, in a protest organized by the brother of the 9/11 planner. In neighboring Libya, they also murdered our ambassador and three or four of his staffers. Our government, of course, denounced Egyptian Christians in America for making a movie.

 

[cooleddie74]

Way to miss the point of this thead, gturner. There are two other threads on the Cairo and Benghazi attacks over in TNZ if you'd like to ruminate and talk about those incidents. Let's...please...try to keep this thread free of current Middle Eastern politics and violence if that's cool.

As per the smell of the burning Twin Towers and the piles of debris that followed their collapse, I've heard many stories from people who'd been in the New York area that day and they all said pretty much the same thing. To imagine burning rubber, plastic, paper, concrete and even human flesh all happening at one and the same time...then multiply it by several thousand fold and have it last for days on end.

Just looking at the footage of the Towers burning uncontrollably for ninety long minutes before they fell almost makes me smell a horrific, acrid odor wafting in the air. I can only imagine how terrible and choking the stench must have been for people like tsq who lived in that area and had to watch the attacks and mass slaughter unfold right before their own eyes.

 

[gturner]

Having Al Qaeda murder a US ambassador and drag his body through the streets on the anniversary of 9/11 is somewhat related, in that it reminds us of the other elements going on that day, that it was an attack, not just an out of control fire.

 

[Data Holmes]

^The smell was terrible, and I remember it well too.

I was a teen at the time, and living downtown. It happened while I was walking to school, I was walking north, to NYU, so I didn't see the smoke or fire behind me. There were tons of sirens heading in the opposite direction, but I didn't turn to look until I'd reached Washington Square Park, where hundreds of people were watching. I finally turned and saw through the Arch, and that is when the second plane hit.

What I remember most, aside from the smell, was walking back home after we were told classes were cancelled. I had to walk southeast from the university, and in crossing Broadway, where all traffic was stopped, I passed through the crowd of business men and women walking north, all in their suits, and all covered from head to toe in white ashes. As I walked home the white ashes caked up on my shoes. Since NYU is below 14th street, and everything below 14th was closed for a couple weeks after, we had no classes. It was eerily like a ghost town down there in those following weeks.

A couple summers ago my mom and I were driving in Seattle (I was visiting her), and we passed the scene of a huge apartment fire. The smoke and ashes were floating in the air all around us, and they fell onto the car, and the smell was horrid. On September 11th I didn't have an emotional response. As odd and cold as it sounds, the only feeling I felt was interest. I think growing up as I did, with one dire life-threatening emergency after another, detachment had become my natural response to trauma. But when we drove through that fire almost ten years later, and the car was covered in ash, and I smelled that smell, I cried...it just put me right back there, and this time I felt it.

You could smell it faintly over here in northern Jersey. You could see the "cloud" in the distance from high spots in my area when you looked east, but the two or three days following, you would catch that burning smell in the breeze.


THe one thing that messed with my head was the lack of aircraft over head. I've lived in this area for my whole life. You have some form of aircraft flying overhead every few seconds, at all levels. The week following, the sky was so silent, so still... I never realized just how many flew over head till there wasn't any.

 

[T'Preea]

I was a Freshman in high school when it happened. I remember we were all doing our work when suddenly, my teacher let out this blood curdling shriek. Her mom had called her and told her what she'd seen on the news. Right then and there, our teacher told us what happened and had us stop doing what we were doing to hold a moment of silence for those poor people and their families.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

You could see the "cloud" in the distance from high spots in my area when you looked east, but the two or three days following, you would catch that burning smell in the breeze.

Parts of that cloud passed over where I lived in Brooklyn at the time (Sheepshead Bay). They found debris from the WTC and planes in my neighborhood (mostly paper items, including a boarding pass).

I actually saw the impacts and collapse of the towers from the classroom where I was teaching 7th Grade in Queens. I wasn't exposed to the smell, but it took me years to come to terms with the reality that I had been an eye-witness to mass murder.

THe one thing that messed with my head was the lack of aircraft over head. I've lived in this area for my whole life. You have some form of aircraft flying overhead every few seconds, at all levels. The week following, the sky was so silent, so still... I never realized just how many flew over head till there wasn't any.

I grew up within a mile or so of the airport in Albany, NY - my house was literally in the flight plan, so the sounds of commercial jets was always part of my life - to this day, they remind me of summer barbeques. So I've always had a nostalgic joy from the planes buzzing around the neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens where I've lived since 1999. But not only were the days after 9/11in NYC notable for their lack of commercial air traffic - they were punctuated by the incredibly ominous sounds of military jets. I could hear (and occasionally see) them from my 5th floor classroom in Queens as they patrolled Manhattan. And that was very eerie.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Irritatingly, Arabs chanting Bin Laden's name marked the anniversary by storming our Egyptian embassy, trashing it, pulling down our flag and waving the black Al Qaeda flag, in a protest organized by the brother of the 9/11 planner. In neighboring Libya, they also murdered our ambassador and three or four of his staffers. Our government, of course, denounced Egyptian Christians in America for making a movie.

Having Al Qaeda murder a US ambassador and drag his body through the streets on the anniversary of 9/11 is somewhat related, in that it reminds us of the other elements going on that day, that it was an attack, not just an out of control fire.

If you want to talk about this, start a new thread.

 

[SmoothieX]

The smell was terrible, and I remember it well too.

I was a teen at the time, and living downtown. It happened while I was walking to school, I was walking north, to NYU

I think I have a few years on you. I'm now 32 and was 21 and a senior at Manhattan College at the time. There were places on the Deegan (I-87) and on campus where you could see the skyline. For a while, it was just hazy, and then didn't look right when it cleared.

I'm just glad I was off that day and a good distance away. I knew folks driving in for 9 AM classes that saw things as it happened.

The smell was indeed awful. I had a hydrology class from 6:30-9:30 PM in an un-air conditioned building in late summer. We opened the windows, but it was a rough go as far as learning anything the next few weeks of classes. I honestly don't remember a whole lot about that semester. I'm sure I learned stuff, but it's all a blur.