September 11 - 5 years ago (my story)

Probably the thing I have found most interesting about September 11 is reading/hearing the various recounts of where everyone else was. For those of you on the east coast, you likely were awake if you were in college or at work. I also have a fascination with hearing the 911 calls, and am, to a certain degree, disappointed both sides of the phone conversation aren't publicly available. Nevertheless, I thought I would take five minutes and share what I was doing September 11, 2001.

I won't forget it because I distinctly remember going bowling the night of September 10, and afterwards going home and thinking that that was just an ordinary Monday. I woke up as I had for the past two months and got ready for work. By this time five years ago (8:15), I'm sure I was sitting at my desk, checking my email and doing my normal start up routine before settling into the day. More than likely, I was getting ready for some meeting that afternoon or working on letters (which was part of my job).

At not quite 9:00, I heard the secretary next door (Kim) come in and announce that a plane had just hit the world trade center. I'm not sure if she was announcing it to our secretaries or in general but we could hear her from upstairs and one of my bosses (Sam) asked for her to come up and repeat it. In the interim between then and her walking up the stairs, I'm sure I checked Yahoo real quick to see if anything had come across the AP wire, but saw nothing. I followed Kim into Sam's office with the rest of the office right behind us.

Sam had a tv in his office, and while we didn't have cable, we could pick up the local NBC affiliate. Sure enough, Tom Brokaw was reporting live and a plane had just hit the first tower. I remember them announcing it was a terrorist hijacking, and the six of us watched in horror as the smoke billowed out. Although I'm not sure if I started to say it or not, I distinctly remember speculating whether or not this attack was another Oklahoma City when the second plane hit and abruptly stopped my thought. In my mind, when that second plane hit, I knew it wasn't an American terrorist attack since nobody in America hates America that much. Although perhaps shallowly optimistic, the fact that only 3000 died all together rather than the 20000 who worked in the two buildings alone is a small victory in itself. The economy took the expected hit, but it was coming anyway; September 11 was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

Much like this stream of consciousness recount, the rest of the mid-morning was a whirlwind of media and dealing with phone calls. Of course, the phone lines and cell lines were pretty much offline or busy much of the day. Eventually, I was able to get through to my parents and family to make sure they were okay (even though I knew they were nowhere near NYC that day). I recall watching a reporter broadcasting from the Pentagon, and I remember he was talking and all of a sudden, he said he saw smoke and people were running and they cut to somewhere else, and the next reporter announced the third attack. There was a lot of speculation at that point as to who knew which planes were where, and I was impressed how every flight was grounded within an hour or 90 minutes of the first tower being hit.

Around the time of the fourth plane going down, we were all speculating whether the towers would fall. The inevitability was that the towers would have to be destroyed anyway; the thing that concerned me was whether the people above the strike zone even realized what was going on (hence my fascination with the 911 calls). Later that day, I did hear from one of my good college friends (who I had originally thought worked in the WTC) who said that she was on the subway and they announced for everyone to get off, and when she came to ground level, she saw the first tower fall.

Another one of my friends told me later that his dad was working in an office in the second tower when the first plane hit and they made an announcement to evacuate the building. He was on the observation deck when they announced that it was okay for everyone to go back to work. His dad remembered how much of a pain it was to get out of there in '91, my friend told me, and after seeing a distraught co-worker too nerve-racked to go back to work, he said that the two of them took the express elevator down and walked out the building right as the second plane hit the tower. They didn't know he had gotten out until he walked into their front door in Jersey since he managed to catch the last ferry off the island.

Fortunately for me, I didn't lose any family or friends that day, and only knew by a separation of one or two degrees people who did. I do remember being a little disappointed by the President not immediately addressing the nation by just saying something to the effect of "I'm still working on it, and will be back on later tonight to address more fully the attacks," but hey, he had a lot on his plate and very little time to digest it. And he did come on and speak briefly, which is what people needed to see. I commend President Bush for his actions that day, and how the entire city worked to save as many as they could have. Up until then, President Bush's legacy probably would have been for his stem cell position he had stated less than a month earlier. And for the Monday morning quarterbacking critics that appeared about two months later, VP Gore would have done the exact same thing and much of the actions that immediately followed would have been identical (and the paths may or may not have diverged almost exactly where you think they would have).

It's now 8:47, which is about the time the first plane hit. Five years ago, I was sitting at my computer just like this, working on something (probably just as unimportant as this) when Kim came over and announced what she didn't realize at the time was a world changing event. Since that time, September 11 has come to exist in our generation's life much as the day of President Kennedy's assassination lives for our parents or the Pearl Harbor attack lives for our grandparents. Everyone can remember where they were when the planes hit or when they first heard about it. The day still comes up in conversations, as it no doubt will continue to do so for years. I can only hope that the continuing dialog will serve in some greater purpose as a catalyst for change, but at the very least serve to remind us that in an instant, the perspective of the world as we know it can be turned on its head.

Tags: september 11, 9/11, 911, sept. 11, september 11 retrospective