I’d like to take today and reflect on 9/11. I watched a TV show the other night (something I very rarely do) about the September 11 attacks on MSNBC and i
t really brought that day back into focus for me. In some places during the program I was in tears, so today I’d like to remember the victims, the heroes, and the families affected by the attacks that day.
On September 11 I was in Louisiana and when the people I was with told me about an airplane that had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New Your City I thought they were kidding. Then we watched in amazement and horror as another plane hit the other tower, then the reports of a plane hitting the Pentagon, then another plane crashing in Pennsylvania. It was chaos.
Where were you and what do you remember from your personal experience that day? How did it affect you?
-Jarhead Survivor
September 11 Memorial
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I was 4 or 5 at the time and I was in a KinderCare building in IL when it happened. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I did notice that the adults were acting strangely and when my dad came to pick me up, he couldn’t get in because they had installed security keypads on the doors that day.
i had just started a week of vacation the day before i was awoken by a phone call from a friend of mine and told to turn on the tv i turned it on just in time to see the second plane hit the tower i thought my god someone wake me up and tell me this is nightmare then i thought my god is this the end of the world? at first there was incredable disbaleaf then it slowly turned to rage and wanting REVENGE and not in a small way but i knew i was to old to join the miliatary i have a great deal of family and friends that have been or are in the military all i could do was call em and say GO GET THIS SOB AND KICK SOME ASS i had ptsd from some other stuff that had happened to earlier in my life and that got BAD i all ready had a mental illness and that got REALLY BAD i started carryin 4 knives and was really paraniod i ended up losing my job because of the illness imnow on some pysch meds and every year at this time i get down on my knees and THANK GOD FOR THE BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN THAT DEFEND THIS GREAT NATION OF OURS because of them we finallly got JUSTISE
I was a teacher at the time (Comp. Sci, associate professor), and was having a cigarette that morning before first lecture began. The sun was just barely coming up in Utah that morning. Someone ran out and told myself and the others at the smoking area that a plane had just crashed into the towers. My first response was to ask if there was fog or bad weather (there was a bomber that crashed into the Empire State building back in 1946 due to fog). Upon hearing the answer of “no, they said it was a clear morning”, I then asked of the pilot was drunk or something. We all speculated on it for about five minutes, then broke up and went to class.
First lecture of the morning began about 10 minutes later, and it was obvious that nobody was paying attention. I finally said “Okay then – let’s get a TV on in here and end this speculation, so we can all get back to work.” A couple of close-by students and I dragged out a TV cart, plugged in the cable and power, then turned it on and dialed into CNN.
Two seconds later, the whole damned lecture hall saw the second plane hit.
To my delayed embarrassment, I remember blurting out: “…that was not a fucking accident – that was intentional!”, right into the mic I always wore. It was days before I realized what I’d said to the assembled undergrads, but every last one of them had eyes as big as diesel pistons and open mouths. To a body, they were all completely awestruck… and all of them were staring dead-on at the television set.
I looked at the class, snapped them out of it (literally, with my fingers) and told them two sentences: “Class is over for the day. Go home.” Most of them literally ran for the doors. The rest of us just watched – I took a seat in the front row and none of us said anything. Eventually, questions came up. I explained what little I remembered from long-forgotten M.E. courses (I have an EE, so my mechanical and civil engineering skills are gawdawful light). We stayed there until the first tower fell. About five minutes later, an assistant superintendent poked his head in a door and said “…oh, nevermind. I was going to tell you that the dean closed the school for the day.”
We stayed until the second tower fell. I then walked up, and saying nothing at all turned off the TV, began to turn off the lights, and at that point everyone got up and quietly left.
I went home, turned on the TV, sat down (my ex wife was working day shift as a cardiac surgical nurse so I was stuck at home alone), and mentally went over what I had in the house. Began to try and analyze if there would be more, or if this was just a one-day orgy of violence. Saw reports of Palestinians dancing in the streets and silently wished the Israelis would get pissed and simply roll the bastards over. Saw the Taliban shit their collective pants. Saw Hussein get mouthy. Saw –for once in my entire life– both political parties get pissed and demand some foreign heads on blood-stained platters. It was as if the entire United States said, all at once: “Oh, it’s *on* now, bitches!”
For awhile, I wondered what would happen if there was a one megaton thermonuclear blast 80,000 feet over Mecca less than 24 hours after the towers fell, as a simple and a to-the-point warning. Then I realized it would be a stupid thing to do (every other nation would go apeshit, and we’d lose all support), and discarded the idea.
I was at the office, when the secretary told us a plane had hit the building. All of thought it was gross pilot error (I mean c’mon, how do you not see a building?). We went to the conference room to watch a T.V. report, when the 2nd plane swooped in and hit thw other WTC. I knew within 2 seconds, we were under attack.
Pretty surreal day, we later saw one building collapse, then the other. We heard of the Pentagon attack and a plane going down in Pennsylvania, it was a news day like no other. Or since, come to think about it.
My question is, why have we not demanded the truth? Check out this video on YouTube, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZEvA8BCoBw&feature=youtube_gdata_player
There is one problem about conspiracy theories… they can never be demonstrated, explained, or disproven sufficiently to satisfy the believer.
IMHO, it’s a question of simple logic: In order for nearly every conspiracy theory out there to have been true, the logistics alone would have required tens of thousands of US citizens to not only willingly commit murder against innocent people, but to keep absolute secrecy about it.
Having once worked on F-117’s when they were considered secret, I can tell you from experience that, post 1960’s, the longest period of time you can expect to keep a complex government secret quiet is roughly seven years. The F-117 Stealth Fighter managed to remain a secret for six, from first test flight to open and persistent public rumor. It was open public knowledge by year seven.
Thanks to the Internet, *someone* would have cracked and openly admitted a 9/11 conspiracy theory involvement by now… yet out of the possible tens of thousands of people required to pull such a thing off, nobody has.
QED: There is no credibility to the whole ‘Truther’ theory set.
The logic behind a conspiracy theory is this:
1) Take random, minor facts out of context and put them together in a way to make it look like some secret plan has occurred and been covered up.
2) When people point out that these are just minor facts, explain that the lack of evidence is due to the hypothesized coverup. (Note the use of the conclusion as evidence for itself.)
3) When people present contradicting evidence, accuse it of being planted by the conspirators.
4) When uninvolved people note that no evidence has been tampered with, accuse them of being part of the conspiracy. (Note the assumption of the conclusion being valid.)
Occam’s razor anyone?
OBL amitted to planning the attack. The claims made in the videos have been disproven by other Engineers and experts from outside of the government. History Channel and Popular Mechanics have both done their own reseach that have disproven the 911 truthers cliams. So time to come back to reality.
Amen to that. Most of the so-called “engineers” in the truther groups are far too selective with facts, and quite frankly, most architects don’t know enough about engineering to be considered competent to speak on it. They design stuff to hold up to weather and more mundane disasters, not burning jet fuel and impacts.
It was my daughter’s 6th birthday & we just finished watching her open presents when grandma called & told us if the event. (It hit her particularly hard because she grew up in NYC).
I remember it was a very surreal day. I met with a client later & we had a hard time keeping focused & finally rescheduled. It was & still is a pivotal point for me.
This is my opinion & not trying to argue for conspiracy theories. Sometimes things are not as they appear & sometimes, as I call it – believing is seeing, which can work both ways.
I’ve watched several of the Twin Tower videos & they are inconclusive to me BUT, I don’t get how they fell in on each other. That’s too convenient to me. Why didn’t either tower topple over & create more collateral damage or stop part of the way down?
I was 9 when Kennedy was assassinated. A couple if years later, I read a couple of books based upon the Warren Report & things seemed packaged too neatly but what did I know, I was only 13 at that time. Of course many years later, the best marksmen in the world could not duplicate what Oswald supposedly did in 3.5 seconds with a bolt action rifle, let alone hit a target moving away from him with any accuracy.
Bottom line, by the time we get to the truth – if ever, the agenda will have already been served & accomplished and any accountable ones are off somewhere else.
A friend referred me a book called The Creature Fron Jekyll Island & just started reading it for the first time. I understand the banking world pretty well & am amazed how well put together & documented this book is. It could be called a conspiracy but based upon my knowledge & experience, I doubt it.
Try to wire any money to anywhere WITHOUT it going through the Federal Reserve – it can’t be done, even the biggest corporations in the world must do the same proceedure. If the sender is in downtown Chicago & the receiver is just 6 blocks away, it WILL pass through & park for 2 hours minimum in the Federal Reserve. Now imagine trillions of dollars consistantly parked there 24/7/365, benefit is being realized somewhere & it isn’t to the Federal Government as one would think.
Sometimes if we climb out of the different boxes & see things in their raw state sans personal opinion, the remaining reality or truth can be too weird to comprehend.
It would appear to me that we want to hang onto some things to keep, what we have come believe is sanity. Pretty crazy eh? Ha, ha.
I was raelly confused, and this answered all my questions.
I worked on a helpdesk for a company which had 326 employees in the south tower. many of them had been there in 93 when terrorists had tried to destroy them from the basement parking area, and had been reluctant to work in the building, feeling it was a target. i was at work, when we heard the news, and someone brought in a tv to the helpdesk area. we watched the second plane hit, and company managers had us try to contact all our employees in the building. fortunately, all of our employees were safely evacuated and by about 10:00 pm central time, we had been able to contact each one, to know they were safe. we were getting calls from people who’s relatives worked for other companies, since our helpdesk number was published, and it was difficult not having an answer for them, as to the safe whereabouts of their family, friends, loved ones. it was a very traumatic day, and it still exists for me as one of those “days of infamy”. i have lost all faith in our political leaders (the current administration), treating christians like terrorists and treating terrorists like misunderstood people that if you “only talk to them” they’ll see the error of their ways, or if you appease them enough, they’ll stop being terrorists. this is another reason to be fore-armed and forewarned… and prepared…
Like many on a typical Monday morning, I was at work (furniture/mattress store) and just sitting and waiting for customers. I had the radio on and I guess it was about 9:150 before the wacky dj’s made a comment that there was a massive fire in one of the twin towers. As the minutes went on, the dj’s turned the station over to the real news guy (who was more serious) and the reports of the insanity began.
After the 2nd plane was confirmed to have crashed I locked up my store and told them I did not want to be alone, I went to our main location. We were located at a downtown location, very close to all sorts of government bulidings and city hall, and to be honest, after the Pentagon crash I started to wonder if this was going to keep happening all over the world. (and yes I am in Canada, but I am an American first and was freaking out).
We have all been affected by the actions of the horrible people who did this. I cried so much as all the stories started coming in and reading about all the people who lost loved ones.
Rather than be filled with hate, I have wanted to understand what would make people do this. And my only feeling now is that it simply comes down to “my God is better than your God”. Once again, a religion is being used as a weapon to control and to spread senseless death. It never ceases to amaze me the lengths people will go to in the name of their religion.
It made me sick, what little I did watch, all the lies, the 19 hijackers, the jet fuel fires bringing down the buildings. That was a military hijacking of our country and the friggin lap dog press just spews the crap out!!
You want me to tell you how I really feel?!!!
I was in college then when the first plane hit I was tying my shoes to leave for school. I thought it was a bad crash and went ot school. Shortly before lunch a fellow student from the local army post told us they had kicked her off post along with everyone else. When I asked why she explained and said when she left that they were putting up barbed wire and machiegun nests in front of the General residence. IT was then I decided to go home early and watch news, so I went home, checked my gear, loaded my AK and flopped in the recliner to gather news and info.
I was sleeping in that morning, as I didn’t have classes Scheduled until that afternoon. Dad woke me up at about 8:50 telling me that “someone blew up the twin towers.”. Needless to say, I was wide awake. I turned on the tv and didn’t step away from it until almost 11. It’s a day you never forget. It IS THE defining moment of our generation.
I had flown into Tampa Airport a few days earlier from Dulles, so I could take care of my grandmother who was having some extremely compicated eye surgery (she couldn’t see for 3 days after the procedure… and I got to drive her CRAZY FAST ’99 Civic LX v6 [my cousin put a turbo on ‘er] I loved that car… sorry, off topic!). Anyway, it was 2 days after my grandmother’s surgery, she was starting to get her sight back, but everything was “fuzzy” (in her words). I was out back getting my fishing gear together, and my grandmother’s beach-gear; I was gonna take her the 5 miles to the beach, she could relax and enjoy the beautiful weather we had been having down there, and I was gonna do a little surf-fishing. I had just packed up the car, when my grandmother walks to the screen-door and asks me to hurry and look at the T.V., she wanted to know if the Doc’s screwed up her ears to or if she was hearing and somewhat seeing it correctly.
Unfortunately the news report was correct. I imediately called my father when I saw the footage of the destruction at the Pentagon. I noticed right away that my fathers office was maybe 10yards, on the 3rd floor, from where the nose of the plane impacted… He had retired 1 year earlier almost to the day. He told me that he was trying to get hold of his old co-workers, and had only heard from 1, a Lt. Colonel who worked with him providing logistical support to special forces teams/operations around the world for JSOC. He told my father that everyone except my fathers former Admin. Ass. had made it out with relatively minor injuries (cuts, bruises, minor burns, one broken leg), but her left arm had been nearly severed by a piece of re-bar from the concreate walls and was in critical condition.
I asked Dad if they would be OK until I got there, asked if my little brother Chris was OK and home, and what the plan was for Norna (my grandmother). My plans were origionally to have a friend drive down from Atlanta to pick me up, so we could meet up with the rest of our buddies to attend the NOPI car show in Georgia. I told them that I might not be coming (after paying $150 for tickets… I was not happy, but family is priority!). Dad called me back and said that Ma had made plans with some of my grandparents good friends, so if anything else happened they would come get her and take care of her until we could get back down and bring her to VA.
I ended up going to the car show when my friend came to get me 2 days later. Before he came down, because it seemed there was nothing else I could do to help, I gave blood 4 times (at different locations)… Only regret from doing that is that I felt like “walking death” for the next week! Luckily I didn’t drive to Atlanta… The car show was OK, but I was expecting A LOT more from it! There was also the constant concern for what was going on in D.C. and NYC, I think that more than anything else made it difficult to have a good time. I couldn’t understand why everyone at the car show was acting like nothing had happened days earlier… I actually got in a fist-fight over some a-holes comment of “Thise pilots were stupid, they should have hit more planes and got targets across the U.S.!”… Fortunately my friends pulled me off his dumb ass just before the cops showed up (but not before I broke his nose, knocked out 2 teeth, and pretty sure I fractured his jaw!)… Ma would have been FURIOUS if she had to drive down to GA to bail my stupid butt out of jail!
When I got home to Central VA, my father, mother and brother were all near D.C. running a shelter for volunteers who had come in to help with SAR and cleanup. Dad and I went around on golf carts giving home-made box lunches and drinks to all the volunteers, it was hard to keep them hydrated, we had several who had to be hospitalized for dehydration; They would work themselves until they just dropped. Several women from my mother’s church, and her friends from the Officer’s Wives Club at Ft. Belvoir started baking-up-a-storm at the shelter (which was in a closed school, so they had a bunch of ovens). While they were baking, Chris (my brother) and I started throwing together care-packages for the volunteers- things like containers of gatorade mix, wet-wipes, shampoo, soap, razors, shaving cream, toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, extra socks, leather gloves, small am/fm radios -w- earbuds, and each got a DVD to watch at the shelter when they finished their shift. My brother and I also did most of the lunchbox-packing… making 400 sandwiches 2x a day, then a large sit-down meal for the same is by no means a small feat! A lot of what we had to give them was donated by cirizens, church’s, and a few fire and police departments from the region. The funny thing was, that no matter how much those women baked… there was NEVER enough cookies, cupcakes, pies, etc. Ma even made home-made dog-buiscuts for the SAR dogs. Dogs East, had probably the most successful dog-teams; We had worked with them several times over the years through Civil Air Patrol and SAR, their handlers are awesome, their dogs are incredibly talented, and if it wasn’t for their keen trained noses several lives would have been lost!
Hi ChefBear58, What you & your family did was very commendable. ps-that smart ass deserved the broken nose, etc. I’m glad that you didn’t get in trouble for it.
I had just got off a 12 hour investigation at a security firm I was working for. I cracked open a Sam Adams sitting down watching CNN and listening to some music to unwind after a long night.
I remember it clearly the breaking news of a possible airplane had crashed into the first tower. I was watching intently as I saw live the second plane slamming into the second tower. I knew it was terrorist attack. I then recalled 1993 when I was stationed in Okinawa Japan how a bunch of said one day they will slam a plane into a building like a kamikaze attack.
I was in the restroom when I heard the Pentagon had been hit and then the flight that was forced down.
I had to call my nephew and explained to him what happened on that his 7th birthday. I pounded a few more drinks, showered off, sobered up and went to the Marine Recruiter and begged to get back in the fight. I had been out of the Marines shy of four years and with a medical board that sealed my fate and ended my career in 97 I went as far as a meeting with the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps to get back in through several former commanders and Sergeant Majors I had served with.
My knee injury was deemed unqualified for duty and I then worked with local recruiters to help future Marines in the Delayed Entry Program get fit, get mentally ready and it helped me emotionally get into the fight through these young warriors that now outrank me and lead Marines in combat. As a gulf and Somalia vet I am honored to see the young warriors of the last decade who I think have surpassed or at last equaled (no disrespect the men, women and my 3 uncles that served in WW II) the service to country and to defend and fight.
I had to deal with a fake bomb at our work (a rail system on the west coast) where someone had called in a bomb threat on Saturday. They had to evacuate a two block area and call in the bomb squad and they detonated it in place. I will tell you it was a tense moment and all of those evacuated standing out in the cool air with no jackets or blankets made me think how I’m glad I have my BOB and a smaller GO bag ready at all times and to include in my car.
It makes me thankful for everything I have, the friends I’ve made and what experience has taught me.
I was a Mormon missionary in Hickory, NC. Mormon missionaries aren’t supposed to watch tv or browse the internet, so it took a few hours before we got a phone call notifying us of what was going on.
Same feelings of surrealness. We spent the day praying with people at Lenoir-Rhyne Lutheran College. It was cool to see how during a time like that, people were happy to just hang out and talk with total strangers.
In the days that followed, I can remember driving around town and seeing the marquees with ‘God Bless America’ messages.
As I watched the specials on Sunday, I think I was most touched by the accounts of people who survived and made changes in their lives in their relationships with loved ones.
It’s a big wake up call to me right now to love the ones I have TODAY. If you are lucky enough to have parents, siblings, or a significant other, you truly are a lucky person. You never know when they could be gone.
You gotta love them today.
God Bless
I was at work ,and as soon as I heard about the first tower being hit I got royally pissed off I knew from that moment that we were at war.I mean really how often does a large passenger jet,while in flight,strike a building of any kind,let alone an iconic tower known to the world.
I remember Watching the news reports of secondary explosions; and BBC reporting building seven being pulled 20 minutes before it was brought down… I was in the Coast Guard at the time and on duty, and from the moment they started to explode, I’ve never believed the ‘official story’. It’s not the ‘true story’. Even if it was conducted from a secrecy cave base, where did the funding come from? Flight school isn’t cheap… Who was in charge of the security of the trade center and the airport? One of the Bush’s clan…. Who’s making money from it, ten years and counting? Follow the money trail…. To many things don’t make sense, the laws of physics were not changed on that day, a steel framed 110 story building does not completely collapse into it’s own foot print at free fall speed. 2 planes; 3 buildings…doesn’t add up…