September 11th memories

Here's my story

I was working third shift. Got off about seven AM, went home. Wasn't tired, and I'd gotten my new soundblaster card the night before. So I spend some time installing and configuring my new toy, pretty good morning for a techie

Thought I'd check out a little news before I went to bed. I turned on the TV just as the second tower started to come down. Called friends, watched it most of the afternoon, and got on the boards. Like many others, these boards were the most reliable, fastest source of news during the crisis.

Having that happen actually filled me with patriotism. I even lost my cynicism about politics for nearly a month

My remembrances:

It was tuesday morning. Just late yesterday, our main manufacturing computer system had just recovered from a massive crash that we had from the previous friday until that Monday. We were informed that the replacement hardware that we would need to get the system back up to full capability was going to come out of New Jersey, and it would be at least 24 hours before arriving.

I came in that morning very optimistic that the next weekend was going to turn out better than this one.

fast forward to around 8:50, when I heard that the first jet hit the WTC. We at the office were all flabbergasted, and didn't conceive of the carnage until we later that morning got to see pictures. Around 10:00 AM I logged into every news site I could find, only to find every one of them timing out - the internet and phone systems were so overworked that no news was coming to us. I then logged onto the EN Boards to see if someone was discussing it.

Discussing it we were.

Triple H, I must say that you were the most valuable person in my life that day. You provided info to me I never would have found otherwise. You kick much ass and you deserve as much praise as possible for your role that day. Triple H should have named himself after you.

My boss and I discussed implications of the attacks clear until closing time. No one was really working much that day, and no calls were getting through to our home office anyway, so the day was very uneventful as far as work went.

Our gaming group didn't even meet that week, because every one of us unilaterally didn't feel like it. It somehow felt "wrong" to game that first weekend. The next weekend, however, we all gamed like Hack & Slash madmen. We should have been playing a LAN first-person shooter, the way we were playing that day. But we had a lot to work out that first weekend. Hell, if it were out at the time, we all would have been playing d20 Afghanistan. The sentiment changed later, but it's times like that you feel a human need to take justice into your own hands and make things right again - even if it is a little childish at heart.

These boards and this little community here did much good for me that month. It was a place to come to work out frustrations and lose myself in D&D rules questions.

Not a lot I can say on the subject.

I woke up, already in a bad mood. Its my birthday, I'll cry if I want to. Seeing as the day had no promise for me, I was content to stay in bed for the day. I eventually pulled myself out and wandered to the computer and sat down, reading emails and all. I got a message from a friend reading: "...you better turn the TV on."

I did and the rest is history.

As selfish as it sounds, my birthday's forever marred by this as well. So much for the day being one of happiness and all. ^^;

i was at work when it happened. my coworker peered over my cube and told me that there was an accident and that a plane hit the WTC. i immediately thought it was a cessna or something like that.

then i heard about tower two....that's when my wife called, understandibly scared. i calmed her down.....

that was when we started to watch the happenings. some of the investment people here have bloomburg terminals, and they were watching bloomburg TV through them. before i got over there to start watching, i remember one of the guys coming over and saying "it's all gone, one of the towers just fell".

my heart was kind of in my throat, so i went over and watched an listened. there were so many replays and such, that i think i was the only one who realized that tower 2 fell. when i asked out loud if that was indeed tower 2, people said "no, it's just a replay". of course i knew it wasn't, and in a matter of seconds, so did they.

the rest of the day was spent going on and off of ENWORLD, an invaluable resource. i remember feeling awful, because many members are from NYC. i was glad when they started reporting in, safe and sound.

a day never to forget, to be sure. i have our local newspaper from the day after, which i'll always keep for my sake and my kids sake.

it was only later that i realized that the father of one of my players worked in the pentagon....he was out of the building at the time, though.

It feels a little strange relating what was such a relatively uneventful experience. I knew no one in New York or DC, and never worried about anyone's safety except in the most abstract terms. But what the heck? It still wakes me up in the middle of the night at least once a month and I still can't look at a plane in flight the same way. So here's my story...

It was a pretty normal day thus far. I'd gotten up, gotten myself and the kid dressed, dropped him off at day care, and was checking my e-mail before going off to work myself. Then the wife called from her office.

"Turn on the TV, some idiot flew a plane into the World Trade Center". So I did...and saw the gaping hole from the first impact. And another plane flying into the picture and straight into the other tower. There was a millisecond of "What the hell is wrong with the air traffic control system?" as my mind tried to come up with a rational explanation of what I'd just seen. Then the realization hit me. I called my wife and told her, "That was no accident and it's worse than you can imagine".

I watched for as long as I could before heading to the office. At that point, both towers were still standing. I stopped for gas and heard on the radio that the Pentagon had been hit. Just before I got to the office, the NPR announcer interrupted himself to say, "One of the towers has collapsed". How I managed to keep from wrecking the car right then and there, I'll never know. But I drove the rest of the way with tears in my eyes.

When I got to work (a medical clinic), we had the TV on in the waiting area and everyone was watching. My boss decided to keep us open, since she felt the last thing we should do is deprive indigent people of medical care at a time like that.

For the rest of the day, the horror stories poured in. Meanwhile, my wife was sent home from work because her office is in a tall building and Houston is at the heart of the petroleum industry. Downtown was a ghost town withiin a matter of hours.

When I drove home that night, everything seemed eerily calm, like the entire city was holding its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I got home and held my kid, and had another long cry (which probably confused him, since he wasn't even two at the time), wondering what sort of world I'd brought him into.

That night, I called my folks. Being one of the "senior set" as gamers go (I'll be 39 in a couple of months), my folks lived through WWII and remember Pearl Harbor from their childhood. For the first time, my dad and I could discuss something like that with some degree of a common frame of reference. Somehow, talking about something that happened sixty years ago made me feel a bit better about the future.

I am a born and bred New Yorker who now lives in DC. I work mainly in the District of Columbia courthouse about 4 blocks from the U.S. Capitol building and right across the street from the District Federal Courthouse.

Word got to us very late about what was going on. I was already at the court. By then word had apparently been circulating in whispers that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I was told this about 9:30AM. Apparently no official word had as yet came down from the Chief Judge or the Clerk of the Court as to what to do.

Within minutes we heard additional whispers that planes had hit the other WTC tower and the Pentagon right across the river from us. Confusion was turning to near panic in the building as no word had come to us as to what exactly was going on or what we should do. We heard all sorts of panicked rumors about a plane coming to the Capitol building (4 blocks from us) and at that point people started leaving the building.

The next word we received (at almost 10AM) was from the court marshals. They were going through the buildings telling us to E-V-A-C-U-A-T-E NOW! NOW! NOW! OUT! OUT! OUT!

By now all of the government buildings around us had had evacuated into the streets. There were crowds in the streets and on the sidewalk. The buses and the metro had all stopped running. Traffic was jammed all over and people just opened their car doors and played the radio loudly so passers by could hear the news. I remember thinking it looked like scenes you see in disaster movies.

Pretty much all of us had to walk home that day. I live very close to work so the walk wasn't bad, but with all the rumors of planes heading for the Capitol (my apartment is only 8 blocks from the Capitol) I was starting to regret being so close.

Once I got home I looked out on my balcony and realized that I had a view of the Pentagon (it is about a mile from me across the Potomac). I could tell because of the flames and dense columns of smoke trailing up into the sky and the helicopters that continued to circle the building with their searchlights trained on the wreckage. It occured to me then that if I had left for work ten minutes later, I could've seen and heard it hit the Pentagon.

From home I spent 2 hours trying to call home to find out if my mother and cousin were ok (both worked about 2 blocks from the World Trade Center and my mother regularly took the subway to work and exited at the WTC subway station. ) As it turned out, my mother was in New Jersey that day, and my cousin had opted to work from home that day.

The sheer panic in Washington, the worry about my family, the sight of the WTC collapsing, and the firsthand sight and smell of the Pentagon burning are things I will never forget. (BTW I still remember exactly what I was doing when I heard of the Challenger disaster too.)

Tzarevitch

I was at work when it happened. I work on a military base. I remember Chris, the engineer in the office next door, mentioning that a plane had hit the WTC tower.

Then I remember the sheer shock when the second hit. It took me mere minutes before I had posted something on Nutkinland expressing my outrage.

How little I knew then the depth of outrage I would feel, and the sorrow at the loss of life.

And anger at those who dared to dismiss this as just deserts.

I remember the deeper horror when we heard word or some kind of exposion at the pentagon.

I remember the news sites where clogged, and we all gathered and posted news here.

I remember hearing something about planes headed to the west coast... and a brief bit of confusion not understanding that those were the planes that had already crashed, not planes on their way to new targets.

I remember hearing about the fourth plane that went down in PA.

I remember some idiot -- an imigrant -- not understanding why everyone was in shock and no one was getting anything done.

I remember how empty the roads were on the way home from work that day.

I remember the base being locked down like a fortress.

I remember sadness, sorrow, confusion, and anger.

And I remember friendship and love. I remember recieving calls from family wondering how I was.

I remember getting emails from people that I only know through email -- Mike Johnstone (my volunteer editor and all-around good guy) and the members of the dndtech mailing list emailing because they knew I worked near DC and wondering if I was okay.

I remember hearing the story of Todd Beamer and his last words:

Let's Roll.

I was teaching a class when the first plane hit ... then we turned on the tv. We all thought it was some sort of accident. Then the second one slammed into the other tower. Even at this point I was just stunned.

When the pentagon report came in with visuals I remember saying in front of my students, "Oh st" ...

Then got lots of questions because many had relatives in the area or in the military ... "Mr. Rodriguez my cousin is in the Navy ..", I remember answering lots of "will I be drafted questions".

The school district's, where I was student teaching, superintendent lost both his son and son-in-law.

Well the day sure affected all of us quite a bit. I do not know anyone is DC,NY,PA. Only in CA. I have no parents alive. Basically I have no family left. The posting thing I did was automatic. I just felt the need, the desire to do it. Another poster had the same feeling. We couldnt do a whole lot where we were so we posted news. It made us feel better. We never were looking for praise. in fact it was not until around 5 pacific that I actually started to read the posts on the enboards. Between reading,listening and relaying news I became lost and unemotional.

On that day Angelboi called me heroic. It made me tear up. I respect him a whole lot and to "hear" him call me heroic made me feel better on such a dark day. On that same day while I was relaying news and news broadcasts I got an IM. I always turn it on even then. It was from one of my friends who is in the navy. He was scared,he had no news outlet and the base was onf ull alert. He called me heroic.

This may sound like a HUGE pat on the back to myself, in actuality it is conveying how each of you made me feel that day. You made me feel like I really could do something in a hopeless situation. That even though I could not stop riots,board the planes,help clean up and rescue people I COULD still do something. You gave me self worth(tearing up now) and I can find no way to completly thank you. You are a great group and I am proud to be a part of it.

A definign uote of how I feel from of all people Supergirl:

"We don't do it for the glory. We don't do it for the recognition. We do it because it needs to be done. Because if we don't, no one else will. And we do it even if no one knows what we've done. Even if no one knows we exist. Even if no one remembers that we ever existed."

THAT is exactly how I felt that day.

I was two blocks away when the first plane struck...saw it all. I blew out my knee dodging flaming debris and bodies. Walked all the way from southern Manhattan to the Bronx where I actually live (never mind the profile) on a blown knee, as all subways were shutdown.

I remember very little from the moment of the first impact to the explosion caused by the second. I remember a child holding his mother's hand and realizing the rest of her was under a pile of rubble. I remember wishing the whole world would burn.

I've calmed down some...my knee has had two surgeries since, but I will always have to wear a brace. My wife doesn't cling to me the way she did immediately after anymore. I don't see people jumping 100 stories to their deaths whenever I close my eyes anymore. The building where I work is back up and running and it no longer resembles an armed camp...

Things would appear to be getting back to normal...

except that every time my knee twinges I truly understand what it feels like to hate...and maybe a little part of me still wants the world to burn.