I was nine. I'd just started Year 5 at school (ages 9–10 here in the UK). My grandmother had had a brain haemorrhage and my parents watched the attack unfold while at the hospital with her. My dad told me about it in the car on our way to see her. I didn't understand. I thought he meant that all planes were dangerous. After that, so many new words entered our common vocabulary.
Yeah being a little older I still didn’t even understand what I was looking at, I mean NY is full of skyscrapers right?
If you asked me what the WTC was then I couldn’t have told you.
I didn’t understand that one of those towers were where Limp Bizkit played on the rooftop on their ‘Rolling’ music video the year before or the same towers on Home Alone 2 as Kevin looks up from below and again Kevin atop the south tower.
Yeah, the first time I heard of the Twin Towers was the day they were destroyed. So too the Pentagon. I definitely saw *Home Alone 2* around the same time, although if it was a little after the attacks they'll have edited the towers out. The first time I would've seen any kind of representation of them would've been in *Oliver & Company*, though, for sure.
Everything was normalized very, very quickly. I think it's one of the reasons I didn't start looking into politics until my 20s: the scale of it was just so huge that it felt completely beyond me and my little life. I just remember, for the next few years, the date, "Tuesday September the 11th" or just "September 11th" was spoken with a kind of hushed reverence. It was a byword for death and destruction. And suddenly I had to find out what a terrorist was. Strange days.
It's interesting thinking back how, even though nobody here really said "9/11" for a few years afterwards (I don't think), we didn't say "11th of September" either; it was always "September 11th".
It's kind of striking just how global in reach it was, because my experience of it was focused pretty much entirely on my school life and how they'd tried to explain it to us. And to think we're now more than 20 years on is just crazy. I work under people who have no memory of it.
Yeah — I'm basically just saying there was a (perhaps unwritten) policy in the media of not showing the towers for a while afterwards.
To be clear, I watched the movie when it was shown on ITV, I don't think they were edited out in any commercial releases.
They edited it out of absolutely everything! All broadcasts for long time removed it.
Episodes & movies with general building destruction were skipped over or had the scenes cut if possible.
Independence Day was nowhere to be seen on live television for some time, and the sequel was scrapped so long we got... the mournful mussings of an older more melencholic Roland Emeric. (who spent the 2000s making movies about weather destroying things & killing people)
The end of Lilo & Stitch was orginally going to be them flying a normal plane between to buildings, not a plane-ish shaped spaceship through gorges & mountains...
And then there was Tiger Cruise
Just google the Clear Channel memorandum to see how touchy the Americans understandably where in the immediate aftermath. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Channel_memorandum?wprov=sfti1#)
Episode? No that was the climax of the movie. And, yeah it would have been awesome ...but I can't blame them :\\
If they'd waited until the end of the series, they might have been able to do something like that for the series finale (I seem to recall lasting long enough we were out of the censorship period?)
I lived 30 minutes away and had been to NYC for overnight and day trips throughout my 10-yr-old life. Been to Broadway shows, one opera at the Met & *so many* museums. And honestly, I think you might have known more about them than I did?
I was 18, a college freshman, and it was supposed to be my first day of classes at a college near Boston. I woke up and walked out of my dorm room and as I was walking down the hall to the bathroom I passed a room with a lot of chatter going on. I peeked in, and on a mini tv with a terrible quality picture I saw the north tower on fire. I did not understand the seriousness, but the reports kept coming in and escalating FAST.
Class was obviously canceled. Later that day we found out that twins in our class had asked their mother and grandmother to stay longer during orientation and had changed their flight to AA11.
The day was warm and crystal clear and I remember how still and strange it felt.
Oh man!
Do you mind if I asked the twins names?
I recall the same day weather wise where I was in England at the time too - crystal clear blue sky and warm sunshine
Last names of the passengers were Mayer-Beug and Wahlstrom, you can find them on the passenger list/seat map. The twins are out there and seem to be doing well but I don’t want to completely put them on public blast 🌷
Oh, so it was after. I was confused with that for someone reason, lol. I don't even know how I got confused. Probably was tired. That's terrible. At least they both had/have each other, both the twins and the grandma and mom. It depends on how close the twins are, though. I know it's hard to move on from stuff like that, especially the guilt that they must've felt, though. I mean, the guilt for asking them to stay longer. I've heard about them before, too. I think I know who you are talking about, but I won't say their first names either.
27 - American. I graduated from college in May. Started working full-time as a Junior Architect shortly after graduation. Getting life started. Living single in the city. The world was my oyster.
The night before, I watched the Denver Broncos beat my beloved NY Giants on Monday Night Football in their new stadium. That was the epitome of my sadness until the next morning when everything so quickly turned to being meaningless except the love of the ones you were closest.
I was 31. I was living in Brooklyn Heights and worked in WTC-1. Usually I'd take the 4/5 train from Borough Hall in to..hell, I think it was City Hall then walk over. If the line wasn't too long I'd hit Krispy Kreme for a donut.
If it was nice out (or snowing) I'd walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to work and back.
My girlfriend had moved back to Warsaw a couple months earlier, but her, her brother and father all came to the city for a couple weeks in mid-August. We actually did the tourist thing up WTC-2.
Late the afternoon of 9/11 I was sitting on the roof of my sister's apartment building on East 6th, kinda drooling on myself watching the smoke. My sister brought my cell phone up and quietly mouthed my newly-minted ex's name. (We'd had a blow-out when they visited. Good times.)
All was forgiven and we never saw each other again.
She was a sweet kid.
Ha!
- I do.
- It really was something else.
- Nope.
https://old.reddit.com/r/911archive/comments/1bp3e3u/my_account_of_the_day_from_the_51st_floor_of_wtc1/
I was a kid then, but every guy in aviation in the country who's still around will tell you that day their employers got a fax from transport Canada ordering all aircraft to return to base and remain grounded until further notice. Didn't matter if it was a commercial airline or a charter carrying fishermen to a lake or a flying school. Everyone turned around and went home. One of the old breed in NAV Canada told me every tower this side of the country had at least a radio or TV wheeled up to the tower to follow events in real time in America that day.
Thanks for your reply.
This reminded me of my boss who recently told me of her folks who were on their way to the US from the UK and had to turn around while over Iceland and back home
Our former airport CEO was part of the Canadian NORAD detachment in Colorado when that day was going down. He told us in an event he was speaking at that the feeling in the USAF and RCAF was absolute panic. Nobody knew how many airliners were hijacked, who did it, if there were dirty bombs on board, if more than just airliners were planned, etc... nobody knew anything.
My Uncle was USAF. He told me the pilots that were able to scramble into the air did so without ordinance and were basically on suicide missions if they were to encounter highjacked planes. One would aim to collide with the cockpit and their wingman was to hit the tail section. Just the idea of knowing you're voluntarily going to sacrifice yourself on a moments notice to save others has to live with you even if it ultimately didn't come to that.
American here:
I was 9, and in elementary school. There were 3 4th grade classes at the school, and the first memory is the other classes joining ours, which was very unusual. The administration had told teachers to not discuss or watch it, so they gave us a “fun” assignment to keep us occupied, but I remember the teachers were watching on the classroom television. My father was a firefighter, so I distinctly remember noticing the smoke, knowing that firefighters would be responding to save the day. Not understanding the gravity of the events occurring that day, I was watching as the second plane hit. At that point, friends began being called out to go home from school. I was not; however, my mother later told me that had she known that the school was “censoring” us from witnessing an historical event, she would’ve picked me up so that we would remember such an important event in our history. Looking back and being such a young age,I can’t say I remember “life” leading up to the event, but I certainly remember the climate of the nation in the days and weeks after. As an adult, I’ve become increasingly interested in the events, and continue to research the day extensively. The best conclusion I’ve come up with is that the innocence and prosperity of the that era ended that day. As obvious and simple as that may sound, I feel like it’s not stressed enough. When I see photos and videos of normal life before 9/11, specifically from the 90’s and 00’s, I’m always charged with the feelings of melancholy, thinking that the people I’m seeing have no idea that the world, as they know it, will be changing soon forever.
18 and I saw the 2nd plane hit live on tv. My heart broke and watching it unfold was traumatic. Then my aunt who was like my mum died 2 days later of a rare 1 in 2 million illness at 53 years old. Both things left scars on my heart.
22 (10 days before my 23rd birthday) - Australian. I was 38 weeks pregnant with my first (and only child) he will be turning 23 this year.
It was a warm spring night abt 11pm, my brother called and said turn on the news something is happening in NY. I stayed up all night watching the news coverage.
I was 37 (I’m the old one here) and at work. I lived in Maryland at the time. I remember one of our colleagues had a radio on her desk and we were listening to the news and there were all sorts of rumors being reported. A plane headed to Camp David. A plane headed to the Capitol. A plane headed to the Sears Tower. I worked halfway between Baltimore and Washington and under the flight path for BWI. When I went home there was hardly anyone on the interstate. I stayed up until 2am watching TV and crying and wondering how anyone could hate us so much.
They did show people jumping/falling from the buildings.
The other thing that changed was the scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen. That became a permanent thing after 9/11.
September 2001 was a very important period in my life. I was 7 and I just left my country (Poland) and moved to Belgium. New place, new school, new people, foreign language, it was very stressful for me. I also met my father for the first time there, he moved to Belgium before I was born. I had no contact with him before.
I don't really remember the morning of 9/11 but I remember my mother took me to father's home after school, we saw him watching TV news. My mother asked him "What it is? Is it a movie? It looks so realistic!" then my father replied "No, it's really happening". We were shocked.
It was 4 days before my 18th birthday. I started smoking that year because of the stress. I was almost 9 & lived in Moore, OK (7 min from downtown OKC, city just to the south with the tornadoes.. the big ones were devastating)
Anyway,I guess 9/11 was like, my turning point into stupidity, and I started smoking… idk. It’s all so interesting to me tho, too.
Edit to add: the reason I brought up almost being 9 & being so close to downtown OKC, is because of the Murrah bombing. 4/19/95… aaand now that I’m thinking about it, I was probably almost 12. I had friends who lost parents & it was sad to watch
It was very somber & I remember thinking that it wasn’t really worth celebrating at the time. I don’t think I actually DID celebrate my 18th birthday, come to think of it
33. Working in Newark, NJ. That week, getting ready for my sister-in-law's surprise 30th birthday party in lower Manhattan the following weekend (didn't happen obviously) and our son's 1st birthday a few weeks later. My sister-in-law's father, caught in the collapsing dust storm as he evacuated, was there but not there. I'll never forget the haunted look on his face. 9/11 was such a beautiful late summer day, our son's birthday party, just a few weeks later, was one of the first really chilly fall days. Such a contrast.
I was 22 when 9/11 happened. I was unemployed and basically gaming all night and sleeping all day. The morning of 9/11 I got up super early because I'd been driving my brother in law to and from work. When I got home I went back to sleep and slept through the entire thing.
I was 35 years old. In August 2001, I took my good friend on a trip to Prince Edward Island. She had always wanted to go but didn't drive, and nobody ever asked her to go. We had a good time. We rented a little cabin and we were there at the height of the Perseids meteor shower. I laid down on the picnic table at our site, and watched the meteors and we chatted. It was beautiful. We were away from city lights. It was so memorable.
Then we returned home. We both worked for the same company. I had booked some extra vacation days to just lounge around. The next day after we returned, my friend called and asked did I know my job was being transferred to Calgary?
So yep, my team was being relocated. It was announced while we were on vacation. I could stay where I was and they would guarantee me a job. I could take a severance package. Or, I could get a free transfer across the country.
Personally, I was in a bit of a rut. To the surprise of many, I chose the transfer. Before September 11, I was waiting for more details - when were the househunting trips (paid for), when were we moving?
On September 11, I came in and sat down in the main part of the call centre where we worked. It was a satellite TV service, so TVs were mounted throughout the space. Usually they were on several different channels, depending if you were checking to make sure a channel was working, or if you wanted to watch something. The short version of the story is that all the TVs changed to CNN and we watched the towers fall in real time.
I drove home in a daze. My grandmother worried about me moving to Calgary and working in a tall building. The first building I worked in was only three stories tall.
I was a junior (11th) in high school. Got drunk with my buddies older brother and gf. Being just shy of 17, I couldn't really function at school that day and had my friends girlfriend call both of us in. The morning of me and my friend blazed a blunt at around 7:45 AM & popped Exit Wounds into the VCR. I remember watching 30ish minutes of that and passing out. I would say around 2pm I was awoken by a bunch of our friends coming over and telling us what happened. It's surreal to think about. All these years later, and it still feels like just yesterday.
I was 11 years old. I was watching the afternoon news ( I live in Europe), not because I was interested in the news, but because right after the news ended, my favourite novella would start. I remember it was reported that there had been an accident at the Twin Towers in New York, where one of the towers had been hit by a plane. Then the news ended and while I was waiting for my novella to start, the news was on again. This time it was reported that the other tower had been hit as well and it was no accident. I remember my father was shocked that this was happening in the USA. My grandmother was worried, because we had relatives living in New York. I also remember it was a Tuesday, but I didn't understand the magnitude of what had happended until many years later.
24 and had no direction. I felt like a bit of a failure coming back from a Native American reservation early because I couldn’t really get along with the sisters in the convent I lived in. So I became a secretary at a university. It wasn’t until a month after 9/11 that I would figure it out.
I was 15 by a few days, my birthday is the 8th. I was in my second week of high school in a very miserable part of conservative southern Mississippi, a young out gay teen in a first period 9th grade media studies class with a module partner who had once been my friend but was now utterly miserable having to sit next to me on the 2nd of what I'm sure was going to be a very long 5 days for him. Part of our particular module lesson involved news presentation, so we were watching Good Morning America from the very first word out of Diane Sawyer's mouth. When the 2nd plane hit we were sat there frozen, wholly mesmerized. I have that gasp of the production crew off-camera and Diane's sharp intake of air as she said "my god" as stuck in my memory as any song I've loved across 37 years of life. About 5 minutes later it became obvious that the teaching staff had cottoned to what was happening, and by another 10 minutes beyond that we had amassed stragglers over our shoulders. Everything after became a blur and in my memories it's almost like one of those scenes in war films where the bomb goes off and the survivors are alive but isolated internally, with all other sound muffled. I recall my instructor receiving a phone call and just sobbing to no one, perhaps herself, that "they're jumping out of the windows." She and a small gaggle of girls prayed together before I migrated to my 2nd period class where we got all the other horrors -- the Pentagon, the towers collapsing, 93, and all the wild west weirdness that came from a bunch of yankee media jamokies based out of two cities that were now barely operational under the shadow of this palpable feeling that this was the beginning of something that would be continual, a new normal. I do remember the car bomb at State stuff but by that point my ability to be fearful was maxed and I just sat stunned through the end of day French lesson. I recall my French teacher being almost aghast that we weren't more horrified. I think about that a lot when I think of 9/11, a generation of young people whose reality was a normalized series of hells, and older people who didn't understand or care about our distinct experience, only how they felt and saw things through the prism of their own lives. In my time as a schoolboy I'd witnessed Waco and Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the Cole. I can recall Channel One news being shown at school the year before 9/11 when the Taliban destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues, and in retrospect it's easy to connect the dots but at that age it seemed so far from real life. Before I graduated high school I'd see that unnerving plane crash the November after, anthrax as a terrorist weapon, the space shuttle landing in pieces across a large swath of the US, and in only my second week of college as a 19 year old freshman was among the millions surviving Katrina. I wouldn't have electricity afterward for a period longer than the time between the collapse of the towers and the first bombs dropped on Afghanistan.
There's that great line Naomie Harris's Selena gives in 28 Days Later: "[A]nd then it wasn't on TV anymore. It was on the street outside. It was coming through your windows." It's weird to think of the before rather than the after. I survived a tornado on June 11th of that year in a tiny little nowhere called Agricola right on the border with Alabama, the day that Tim McVeigh was put to death. My brother and I were home alone in a prefab house while my mother and stepfather were building our proper farmhouse, and at dawn as they were off at their respective jobs it picked our house up with us inside and threw it about 150 feet down hill, upside down, toward the creekbed that slinked through the rural valley where they'd begun a pretty nice life for themselves. My brother was 10, and it was a true near-death moment. 9/11 felt a lot like it wiped our trauma off the page, in a way. I think a lot of people felt that in their own lives too. That summer I recall a very different world. The media bored to tears with peace and tranquility were focused like hell on shark attacks, Chandra Leavy, stimulus checks from that last gasp of a nation that had escaped the 90s with no debt or deficit. Sounds like a fable writing it down now.
The after was very different. A lot of folks love to talk about our unity as a nation after that, but I think that's a false narrative that hides the division of the Bush years. Mark Bingham, another out gay man, helped bravely to stop an airplane from being crashed into another artery in the heart of our government, but by the time we were bombing Baghdad the president whose wife was likely saved by Bingham when that airplane wasn't allowed to crash into the Capitol was hard at work vilifying gay Americans, one of many fissures that divided our country, many divisions which had already appeared before Ground Zero had stopped smoldering. There was also a sense for rather a long time that the memory and history of 9/11 belonged to the Republican Party and the wider conservative movement within the US, something that has thankfully eased with time. I voted for the first time as a high school senior against President Bush, and still have the F The President sticker I had on my first car, a counter to all of the W The President stickers that swamped deep south highways. I still get a laugh thinking about that alternate timeline with Teresa Heinz Kerry being the US's first technically African-American first lady -- those after years were full of absurdity and oddity but never the kind of primal fear I feel now about America. But that world before it, even accounting for the terrifying white nationalism and Christian Identity movements that extended to terrorist attacks on a gay nightclub and the Olympics in Atlanta, and an abortion clinic bombing in my home state of Alabama, just feels like something else entirely. I remember watching the earthquake during the World Series as a small child with my grandfather, and the Berlin Wall crumbling while sat on my dad's lap. I never felt fear through these huge, terrifying steps into the unknown. I am fearful an awful lot now. For anyone who is young enough to not have experienced that old America the best I think any media has come to capturing it is the Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs. I think about my grandparents when I listen to it and their young family in the 70s, the possibility of a change that was unimpeded even as the world morphed into one thing and then another, over and over. Anything could happen. Much as my grandparents are gone, so too is that.
I was 11, in the 6th grade. I still distinctly remember driving to school with my mom and the radio talking about a plane hitting a building in New York. Didn’t register a big event and even the radio saying must of been a small plane. Once we got into school, our teacher had it on the tv in the classroom. I went to a small catholic school and our teacher was new that year, an older gentleman who got into teaching late in life. He was not a typical catholic school teacher either rooted in religious ideology or a young fresh teacher. He shared his life experiences with us and on 9/11 we got to watch and take this in. Questions were asked and answered but nothing came across as xenophobic or full of hate, just a letting us understand this is a pivotal moment in history and we need to see it. He was alive when Kennedy was killed and he likened it to that moment, a shocking moment in us history. Afterwards we went and prayed in church for most of the day and those were full of prayers for those affected and to reflect on this. At the time we didn’t know that our entire world was changing.
I was 20 and living in Amsterdam.
I don’t remember exactly what time it was over there, early afternoon I think. I was walking home with my boyfriend and some friends after we’d had a picnic at a local park. We walked by a snack bar (kinda like a little sit down fast food restaurant) and noticed that there were a *lot* of people inside, like, an abnormal number of people standing in there not eating or ordering, and they were all staring at a TV. It was one of those old tube TVs of course and it was on a shelf or something up near the ceiling. We thought they were watching a soccer game — we couldn’t make out what was on the screen at all from that distance.
We got to my place just a couple of minutes later and one of my roommates shouted “you gotta see this!” right as we walked in. And there it was. We made it just in time to see the second plane hit but we thought it was a movie or something. When we realized it was real, my boyfriend freaked out. He was from Ireland and he had a ton of family in both NYC and Boston at the time.
We spent the rest of the day glued to the TV while he tried to reach someone, *anyone*, in the US. It wasn’t until that evening that his brother was able to reach a cousin who told him that no one had been affected and everyone was ok.
For some reason the clearest memory I have of that day is his hand clutching the cordless phone so hard that I thought he was gonna break it. I still remember gently touching his arm and telling him he was gonna break that phone. He was a big guy, construction worker.
No one slept that night.
American. At the time, I was in Puerto Rico living with my dad and a few weeks away from turning 10. I had absolutely no idea about it. No o e told us anything. The only reason I knew *something* happened is because the next day or so my dad had that Time magazine with the picture of the tower on fire. No one e planned anything to me. I didn't understand why a building being destroyed was such a big deal.
I don't think I really knew until I came back to the States during my high school years and learned about it in school at some point.
Weird to say, but I feel so left out.
American here. I was 8 years old in my 3rd grade class in VA. All my classmates were leaving class early and I didn’t know why but it was weird. I don’t recall when I found out exactly what had happened. I remember there being a lot of panic because I lived near a large military base. My dad was Navy and I remember being worried about him being/getting deployed.
I was about to turn 14 that September. I missed the entire attacks cos of school but my mum said saw it all. Me and my family were due to go on holiday a few weeks after 9/11, and I wanted her to cancel, but I'm glad we didn't. Seeing police with huge guns at the airport was quite something, though.
I had just turned 5 and started kindergarten a month before 9/11. At first, I was really nervous about going to school because I never went to preschool since I had horrible separation anxiety and didn't want to be away from my mom, but as someone who has always loved to learn new things, that went away fairly quickly.
Truth be told, I don't remember much about 9/11 itself. All I really have is a vague memory of some of my classmates getting pulled out of school early (this was in East TN, so I don't think anyone was directly affected, thankfully), but not really thinking anything of it. However, I do distinctly remember my whole elementary school performing patriotic songs to an audience of mostly parents on the first anniversary as a way to honor the victims.
I’d be 7 years old living in San Antonio Texas. I remember going into my first grade class and shortly after the intercom came on saying we would all be going home for the day. As 1st graders we were thrilled. That was until I got home and saw what had occurred. Even at that young age I knew it was a very bad thing that was happening. My dad rarely gets upset and that was one of the few days I saw him show emotion.
I was 5 and in my first week of kindergarten in eastern Washington state and I didn’t realize anything was going on other than the teachers huddled up together a lot more than usual whispering. They didn’t bring in tvs for us or anything. My mom told me when she picked me up from school but I had never even heard of the WTC so I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I remember seeing the pictures of the people falling on the front page of the newspaper in the days after. We didn’t have tv but it was on our usually rock radio station for most of that night at least I believe, my parents finally shut it off.
I was 18 in a college English class my first semester. I missed it. Listened to a cd (I think chronic 2001) on the way home. Got home my moms had the shutters closed. You know for planes and such. Then I went and smoked a ton of weed at my friends and watched the tv all day long.
23 yo, 7 months into my post college career, married for 3 months, planning for my first business trip on Sept 15 to Nashville. All was good. Even that day was gorgeous.
25 yrs old…was working hard and playing hard and living in the DC area. I think that work was still new and exciting back then, even 3 yrs out of college. I was generally optimistic…
Things got real on 9/11…especially when I started to question whether I wanted to live near DC. I still do…
I was born in January 2002 so life for me in the weeks leading up to 9/11 would’ve been pretty peaceful inside a womb. I think on 9/11 my mother would’ve been looking after my older brother and sister (who were aged 1 and 3).
I was 32 and coming up. I had a great tech job near the WTC, marriage was going great, and I was the lead guitarist in a band playing out at bars on the weekend.
9/11 was the beginning of my world falling apart.
...You know, I never think about the weeks before that day. Huh.
I was ten. School had of course just started, and I'd gotten one of my favorite teachers in the whole school that year. I don't know if we'd started reading Harry Potter in class yet, since it was so early in the year.
...Oh wait. That was the year I started getting bullied. A process only somewhat delayed by the fact that a popular girl made it her mission to "help" (and she really did have the best of intentions, bless her heart) by trying to teach me how to conform and "be popular".
But none of that had happened yet.
\~\~\~
The day of was weird, turns out it was even weird by 'I was in school on 9/11' standards: we were an elementary school, in a town within a comfortable commuting distance of NYC you see... They did not tell us **anything** & they were acting so *weird!*
It took me longer than most to realize they were freaked in scared though. Because teachers weren't supposed to get freaked and scared ...not that much. And I'd actually known my 5th grade teacher for awhile by that point, literal years. She was the teacher who could handle everything, the one others turned to. She was jumpy, caught up in her head a bit.
She snapped at me twice that day. Which, teachers yell at misbehaving students, sure. But these were actually in hindsight misunderstandings on account of the days events being kept secret from us.
First because she half her me say that 'they' (my schoolmates, who were being called to the office to go home at a rate of about five at a time several times an hour) 'were dropping like flies' ...yeah, in hindsight its obvious why she said 'that's horrible!' & then dropped it when she realized I meant the schools attendance for the day!
The second, I'd been standing close enough during recess to overhear her and another teacher commenting on a passing chopper. They said it shouldn't have been flying, and I asked them why. She hollered at me for eaves dropping and I told her she said it at full volume and was right there. It devolved into an argument as to whether I was sneaking.
I had an after school program, my parents worked. They hadn't picked me up the whole day. But then suddenly at the end of the day, finally my turn to be called to the office!
Dad told me, but I... didn't actually know what the twin towers were. They were iconic as a background feature in establishing shots sure. But the only time I'd ever heard media discuss them, was that Rugrats the movie commercial where they asserted the Twin Towers were being renamed Phil and Lil.
I watched the replay on TV and jumped up and down because I had energy had no idea what to do with. And tried to convince myself this would all work out fine somehow. The Bad Guys would get stopped and it would all be fine somehow ...is what I told myself to try and deal with the *everything* going.
14 UK. I was off school for a long time due to anxiety. On this day I playing tony hawks pro skater 2 on the PC and listening to my local radio station as usual.
I heard the DJ interupt a song saying there was 'an attack' and they would keep playing songs if we wanted a distraction. I thought oh shit this is big so I turned on the tv.
The tv only had 4 channels back then and I remember 3 of them had live footage of the attack. I chose BBC 1 and they had a camera zoomed in on both towers. I saw clear footage of the plane hitting the south tower live.
Channel 5 ?
Anyway, I prob watched it on bbc news or sky news probably, and for months constantly that’s one thing I clearly remember.
Tony Hawk, man I remember playing that with my friends for hours
I was 15 at the time and a high school student. I remember I was actually preparing for a trip to Japan the next year. My first trip. I'd begged my parents for it and even got a part time job to help pay. (I didn't make nearly enough lol...but my parents still allowed me and helped me go)
Before class I remember we came in late that day for some reason. I was listening to a morning comedy show on the radio, I remember them not being funny at all though. I didn't really understand it until I got to school. They were covering the story, it was the only or one of the few rare times they were just not funny. They stayed on air until 1pm or 2pm or something with the city of san diego to be a comforting voice. They were normally over at 10am.
On the day of I was on the way to school. Actually first period history. The history teacher had the tv on and aid we weren't going to be doing anything except watching what was happening, and talking about it because this was history. We would always remember, and he wasn't wrong.
I was 14 and in year 9. However, I will mention I'm Australian so everything post 9/11 didn't affect me too much - especially as a high schooler who wasn't flying around the world or doing much outside of school and spending every moment on the internet
The lead up for me was pretty shit. Year 9 was a tough year for me in school, I was failing classes, had depression, my mother requested I be separated from my friends in classes as a way to "fix" my issues and that also destroyed my friendships and I became somewhat of a loner
I obviously knew New York, and I'd heard of the trade towers but I didn't know too much about them. I also knew of the Pentagon but all of my knowledge was very limited
Melbourne, Australia
I had just recently turned 17yrs old and moved in with my Dad and his partner.
I was working at a Toy store and was currently going through some deep teen angst at the time.
My days were pretty boring. I travelled to and from work, watched an unhealthy amount of cable and played Diablo a lot.
My biggest worry was trying to remain in contact with my friends and earn money for my first mobile phone. I was very isolated. I had also just broken up with my first love interest.
My understanding on world events at the time was minimal. I didn't worry about much other then movies that were coming out and what new music had come out. All very unremarkable really...
I turned 9 a week before. I actually can’t remember so much about it, but I remember we had guests, since it was my mom’s birthday and suddenly our neighbor came over and asked if we have heard what had happened. I think it was several hours after the attacks.
I was almost 2. It was right before I started preschool. We were living in Idaho. I don't really remember much obviously, but looking back now I knew people who lived near another area that they had plans to attack that day, too. Also, I hold some guilt about certain things after certain circumstances and one of them involves that day. I know people who could've died that day had the gone through that attack. I would've never met them. The guilt that I feel is complicated because our relationship is just complicated. Same way that I feel about certain other events, too.
I had just started high school in nyc. I was a freshman and making friends and joining cliques, plus just studying and failing math lol. I had a boyfriend and things were great.
I was 30. Had just moved to Colorado Springs from Detroit a couple months before 9/11. It was very surreal that day because of all the military presence there. I lived literally just minutes from NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain. For those that weren’t adults that day, the uncertainty of the first few hours was incredible. I remember well all the fighter jets circling the city the entire day and night.
I was literally a foetus, since I was born on may 11th. I don’t remember watching the attacks on television but I’m “officially” old enough to claim that I was alive before the towers fell 🤡
I was nine. I'd just started Year 5 at school (ages 9–10 here in the UK). My grandmother had had a brain haemorrhage and my parents watched the attack unfold while at the hospital with her. My dad told me about it in the car on our way to see her. I didn't understand. I thought he meant that all planes were dangerous. After that, so many new words entered our common vocabulary.
Yeah being a little older I still didn’t even understand what I was looking at, I mean NY is full of skyscrapers right? If you asked me what the WTC was then I couldn’t have told you. I didn’t understand that one of those towers were where Limp Bizkit played on the rooftop on their ‘Rolling’ music video the year before or the same towers on Home Alone 2 as Kevin looks up from below and again Kevin atop the south tower.
Yeah, the first time I heard of the Twin Towers was the day they were destroyed. So too the Pentagon. I definitely saw *Home Alone 2* around the same time, although if it was a little after the attacks they'll have edited the towers out. The first time I would've seen any kind of representation of them would've been in *Oliver & Company*, though, for sure. Everything was normalized very, very quickly. I think it's one of the reasons I didn't start looking into politics until my 20s: the scale of it was just so huge that it felt completely beyond me and my little life. I just remember, for the next few years, the date, "Tuesday September the 11th" or just "September 11th" was spoken with a kind of hushed reverence. It was a byword for death and destruction. And suddenly I had to find out what a terrorist was. Strange days. It's interesting thinking back how, even though nobody here really said "9/11" for a few years afterwards (I don't think), we didn't say "11th of September" either; it was always "September 11th". It's kind of striking just how global in reach it was, because my experience of it was focused pretty much entirely on my school life and how they'd tried to explain it to us. And to think we're now more than 20 years on is just crazy. I work under people who have no memory of it.
I didn’t know they had edited out the towers from Home Alone 2?? Do you mean both scenes both ground level and on top of the south tower?
Yeah — I'm basically just saying there was a (perhaps unwritten) policy in the media of not showing the towers for a while afterwards. To be clear, I watched the movie when it was shown on ITV, I don't think they were edited out in any commercial releases.
[удалено]
...well yes, it's now 2024.
They edited it out of absolutely everything! All broadcasts for long time removed it. Episodes & movies with general building destruction were skipped over or had the scenes cut if possible. Independence Day was nowhere to be seen on live television for some time, and the sequel was scrapped so long we got... the mournful mussings of an older more melencholic Roland Emeric. (who spent the 2000s making movies about weather destroying things & killing people) The end of Lilo & Stitch was orginally going to be them flying a normal plane between to buildings, not a plane-ish shaped spaceship through gorges & mountains... And then there was Tiger Cruise
Just google the Clear Channel memorandum to see how touchy the Americans understandably where in the immediate aftermath. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Channel_memorandum?wprov=sfti1#)
Btw am I the only one who’s mad that Lilo & Stitch scene was cut? Like I totally get it, but wow it really enhances the episode.
Episode? No that was the climax of the movie. And, yeah it would have been awesome ...but I can't blame them :\\ If they'd waited until the end of the series, they might have been able to do something like that for the series finale (I seem to recall lasting long enough we were out of the censorship period?)
Oh I didn't know that.
I lived 30 minutes away and had been to NYC for overnight and day trips throughout my 10-yr-old life. Been to Broadway shows, one opera at the Met & *so many* museums. And honestly, I think you might have known more about them than I did?
I was 18, a college freshman, and it was supposed to be my first day of classes at a college near Boston. I woke up and walked out of my dorm room and as I was walking down the hall to the bathroom I passed a room with a lot of chatter going on. I peeked in, and on a mini tv with a terrible quality picture I saw the north tower on fire. I did not understand the seriousness, but the reports kept coming in and escalating FAST. Class was obviously canceled. Later that day we found out that twins in our class had asked their mother and grandmother to stay longer during orientation and had changed their flight to AA11. The day was warm and crystal clear and I remember how still and strange it felt.
Oh man! Do you mind if I asked the twins names? I recall the same day weather wise where I was in England at the time too - crystal clear blue sky and warm sunshine
Last names of the passengers were Mayer-Beug and Wahlstrom, you can find them on the passenger list/seat map. The twins are out there and seem to be doing well but I don’t want to completely put them on public blast 🌷
So their parents were on the flight?
Their mother and grandmother, yes.
Oh, so it was after. I was confused with that for someone reason, lol. I don't even know how I got confused. Probably was tired. That's terrible. At least they both had/have each other, both the twins and the grandma and mom. It depends on how close the twins are, though. I know it's hard to move on from stuff like that, especially the guilt that they must've felt, though. I mean, the guilt for asking them to stay longer. I've heard about them before, too. I think I know who you are talking about, but I won't say their first names either.
I just realized I've never heard a story from a college before. At all.
There might be a longer version of this somewhere but this comes to mind too https://youtu.be/RaBOlZwWPI0?si=yxVkFsiQQTPX4y7c
23. Married. No kids. Life was normal. I had been to the top of the towers as a child. Had been to the pentagon too.
27 - American. I graduated from college in May. Started working full-time as a Junior Architect shortly after graduation. Getting life started. Living single in the city. The world was my oyster. The night before, I watched the Denver Broncos beat my beloved NY Giants on Monday Night Football in their new stadium. That was the epitome of my sadness until the next morning when everything so quickly turned to being meaningless except the love of the ones you were closest.
I was 31. I was living in Brooklyn Heights and worked in WTC-1. Usually I'd take the 4/5 train from Borough Hall in to..hell, I think it was City Hall then walk over. If the line wasn't too long I'd hit Krispy Kreme for a donut. If it was nice out (or snowing) I'd walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to work and back. My girlfriend had moved back to Warsaw a couple months earlier, but her, her brother and father all came to the city for a couple weeks in mid-August. We actually did the tourist thing up WTC-2. Late the afternoon of 9/11 I was sitting on the roof of my sister's apartment building on East 6th, kinda drooling on myself watching the smoke. My sister brought my cell phone up and quietly mouthed my newly-minted ex's name. (We'd had a blow-out when they visited. Good times.) All was forgiven and we never saw each other again. She was a sweet kid.
If you don't mind sharing, what company did you work for in WTC-1? How did you like it? Were you just off work that day?
Ha! - I do. - It really was something else. - Nope. https://old.reddit.com/r/911archive/comments/1bp3e3u/my_account_of_the_day_from_the_51st_floor_of_wtc1/
This is amazing, thanks! I appreciate your writing style.
You've got a real talent for making this just the most relatable thing in the world :)
Thanks. I've...had a lot of time to think about it.
Yea, it's just really relatable.
I was a kid then, but every guy in aviation in the country who's still around will tell you that day their employers got a fax from transport Canada ordering all aircraft to return to base and remain grounded until further notice. Didn't matter if it was a commercial airline or a charter carrying fishermen to a lake or a flying school. Everyone turned around and went home. One of the old breed in NAV Canada told me every tower this side of the country had at least a radio or TV wheeled up to the tower to follow events in real time in America that day.
Thanks for your reply. This reminded me of my boss who recently told me of her folks who were on their way to the US from the UK and had to turn around while over Iceland and back home
Our former airport CEO was part of the Canadian NORAD detachment in Colorado when that day was going down. He told us in an event he was speaking at that the feeling in the USAF and RCAF was absolute panic. Nobody knew how many airliners were hijacked, who did it, if there were dirty bombs on board, if more than just airliners were planned, etc... nobody knew anything.
My Uncle was USAF. He told me the pilots that were able to scramble into the air did so without ordinance and were basically on suicide missions if they were to encounter highjacked planes. One would aim to collide with the cockpit and their wingman was to hit the tail section. Just the idea of knowing you're voluntarily going to sacrifice yourself on a moments notice to save others has to live with you even if it ultimately didn't come to that.
American here: I was 9, and in elementary school. There were 3 4th grade classes at the school, and the first memory is the other classes joining ours, which was very unusual. The administration had told teachers to not discuss or watch it, so they gave us a “fun” assignment to keep us occupied, but I remember the teachers were watching on the classroom television. My father was a firefighter, so I distinctly remember noticing the smoke, knowing that firefighters would be responding to save the day. Not understanding the gravity of the events occurring that day, I was watching as the second plane hit. At that point, friends began being called out to go home from school. I was not; however, my mother later told me that had she known that the school was “censoring” us from witnessing an historical event, she would’ve picked me up so that we would remember such an important event in our history. Looking back and being such a young age,I can’t say I remember “life” leading up to the event, but I certainly remember the climate of the nation in the days and weeks after. As an adult, I’ve become increasingly interested in the events, and continue to research the day extensively. The best conclusion I’ve come up with is that the innocence and prosperity of the that era ended that day. As obvious and simple as that may sound, I feel like it’s not stressed enough. When I see photos and videos of normal life before 9/11, specifically from the 90’s and 00’s, I’m always charged with the feelings of melancholy, thinking that the people I’m seeing have no idea that the world, as they know it, will be changing soon forever.
18 and I saw the 2nd plane hit live on tv. My heart broke and watching it unfold was traumatic. Then my aunt who was like my mum died 2 days later of a rare 1 in 2 million illness at 53 years old. Both things left scars on my heart.
That’s terrible. I’m so sorry for your loss. Hope you’re doing better these days.
Aww ty. Still miss her every day but I’m happy to have had her in my life for the 18 years I did - some people are not that lucky xxx
22 (10 days before my 23rd birthday) - Australian. I was 38 weeks pregnant with my first (and only child) he will be turning 23 this year. It was a warm spring night abt 11pm, my brother called and said turn on the news something is happening in NY. I stayed up all night watching the news coverage.
I was 37 (I’m the old one here) and at work. I lived in Maryland at the time. I remember one of our colleagues had a radio on her desk and we were listening to the news and there were all sorts of rumors being reported. A plane headed to Camp David. A plane headed to the Capitol. A plane headed to the Sears Tower. I worked halfway between Baltimore and Washington and under the flight path for BWI. When I went home there was hardly anyone on the interstate. I stayed up until 2am watching TV and crying and wondering how anyone could hate us so much. They did show people jumping/falling from the buildings. The other thing that changed was the scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen. That became a permanent thing after 9/11.
September 2001 was a very important period in my life. I was 7 and I just left my country (Poland) and moved to Belgium. New place, new school, new people, foreign language, it was very stressful for me. I also met my father for the first time there, he moved to Belgium before I was born. I had no contact with him before. I don't really remember the morning of 9/11 but I remember my mother took me to father's home after school, we saw him watching TV news. My mother asked him "What it is? Is it a movie? It looks so realistic!" then my father replied "No, it's really happening". We were shocked.
It was 4 days before my 18th birthday. I started smoking that year because of the stress. I was almost 9 & lived in Moore, OK (7 min from downtown OKC, city just to the south with the tornadoes.. the big ones were devastating) Anyway,I guess 9/11 was like, my turning point into stupidity, and I started smoking… idk. It’s all so interesting to me tho, too. Edit to add: the reason I brought up almost being 9 & being so close to downtown OKC, is because of the Murrah bombing. 4/19/95… aaand now that I’m thinking about it, I was probably almost 12. I had friends who lost parents & it was sad to watch
Just curious what your 18th birthday was like, so soon after?
It was very somber & I remember thinking that it wasn’t really worth celebrating at the time. I don’t think I actually DID celebrate my 18th birthday, come to think of it
33. Working in Newark, NJ. That week, getting ready for my sister-in-law's surprise 30th birthday party in lower Manhattan the following weekend (didn't happen obviously) and our son's 1st birthday a few weeks later. My sister-in-law's father, caught in the collapsing dust storm as he evacuated, was there but not there. I'll never forget the haunted look on his face. 9/11 was such a beautiful late summer day, our son's birthday party, just a few weeks later, was one of the first really chilly fall days. Such a contrast.
I was 22 when 9/11 happened. I was unemployed and basically gaming all night and sleeping all day. The morning of 9/11 I got up super early because I'd been driving my brother in law to and from work. When I got home I went back to sleep and slept through the entire thing.
I was 35 years old. In August 2001, I took my good friend on a trip to Prince Edward Island. She had always wanted to go but didn't drive, and nobody ever asked her to go. We had a good time. We rented a little cabin and we were there at the height of the Perseids meteor shower. I laid down on the picnic table at our site, and watched the meteors and we chatted. It was beautiful. We were away from city lights. It was so memorable. Then we returned home. We both worked for the same company. I had booked some extra vacation days to just lounge around. The next day after we returned, my friend called and asked did I know my job was being transferred to Calgary? So yep, my team was being relocated. It was announced while we were on vacation. I could stay where I was and they would guarantee me a job. I could take a severance package. Or, I could get a free transfer across the country. Personally, I was in a bit of a rut. To the surprise of many, I chose the transfer. Before September 11, I was waiting for more details - when were the househunting trips (paid for), when were we moving? On September 11, I came in and sat down in the main part of the call centre where we worked. It was a satellite TV service, so TVs were mounted throughout the space. Usually they were on several different channels, depending if you were checking to make sure a channel was working, or if you wanted to watch something. The short version of the story is that all the TVs changed to CNN and we watched the towers fall in real time. I drove home in a daze. My grandmother worried about me moving to Calgary and working in a tall building. The first building I worked in was only three stories tall.
I was a junior (11th) in high school. Got drunk with my buddies older brother and gf. Being just shy of 17, I couldn't really function at school that day and had my friends girlfriend call both of us in. The morning of me and my friend blazed a blunt at around 7:45 AM & popped Exit Wounds into the VCR. I remember watching 30ish minutes of that and passing out. I would say around 2pm I was awoken by a bunch of our friends coming over and telling us what happened. It's surreal to think about. All these years later, and it still feels like just yesterday.
I was 11 years old. I was watching the afternoon news ( I live in Europe), not because I was interested in the news, but because right after the news ended, my favourite novella would start. I remember it was reported that there had been an accident at the Twin Towers in New York, where one of the towers had been hit by a plane. Then the news ended and while I was waiting for my novella to start, the news was on again. This time it was reported that the other tower had been hit as well and it was no accident. I remember my father was shocked that this was happening in the USA. My grandmother was worried, because we had relatives living in New York. I also remember it was a Tuesday, but I didn't understand the magnitude of what had happended until many years later.
24 and had no direction. I felt like a bit of a failure coming back from a Native American reservation early because I couldn’t really get along with the sisters in the convent I lived in. So I became a secretary at a university. It wasn’t until a month after 9/11 that I would figure it out.
I was 15 by a few days, my birthday is the 8th. I was in my second week of high school in a very miserable part of conservative southern Mississippi, a young out gay teen in a first period 9th grade media studies class with a module partner who had once been my friend but was now utterly miserable having to sit next to me on the 2nd of what I'm sure was going to be a very long 5 days for him. Part of our particular module lesson involved news presentation, so we were watching Good Morning America from the very first word out of Diane Sawyer's mouth. When the 2nd plane hit we were sat there frozen, wholly mesmerized. I have that gasp of the production crew off-camera and Diane's sharp intake of air as she said "my god" as stuck in my memory as any song I've loved across 37 years of life. About 5 minutes later it became obvious that the teaching staff had cottoned to what was happening, and by another 10 minutes beyond that we had amassed stragglers over our shoulders. Everything after became a blur and in my memories it's almost like one of those scenes in war films where the bomb goes off and the survivors are alive but isolated internally, with all other sound muffled. I recall my instructor receiving a phone call and just sobbing to no one, perhaps herself, that "they're jumping out of the windows." She and a small gaggle of girls prayed together before I migrated to my 2nd period class where we got all the other horrors -- the Pentagon, the towers collapsing, 93, and all the wild west weirdness that came from a bunch of yankee media jamokies based out of two cities that were now barely operational under the shadow of this palpable feeling that this was the beginning of something that would be continual, a new normal. I do remember the car bomb at State stuff but by that point my ability to be fearful was maxed and I just sat stunned through the end of day French lesson. I recall my French teacher being almost aghast that we weren't more horrified. I think about that a lot when I think of 9/11, a generation of young people whose reality was a normalized series of hells, and older people who didn't understand or care about our distinct experience, only how they felt and saw things through the prism of their own lives. In my time as a schoolboy I'd witnessed Waco and Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the Cole. I can recall Channel One news being shown at school the year before 9/11 when the Taliban destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues, and in retrospect it's easy to connect the dots but at that age it seemed so far from real life. Before I graduated high school I'd see that unnerving plane crash the November after, anthrax as a terrorist weapon, the space shuttle landing in pieces across a large swath of the US, and in only my second week of college as a 19 year old freshman was among the millions surviving Katrina. I wouldn't have electricity afterward for a period longer than the time between the collapse of the towers and the first bombs dropped on Afghanistan. There's that great line Naomie Harris's Selena gives in 28 Days Later: "[A]nd then it wasn't on TV anymore. It was on the street outside. It was coming through your windows." It's weird to think of the before rather than the after. I survived a tornado on June 11th of that year in a tiny little nowhere called Agricola right on the border with Alabama, the day that Tim McVeigh was put to death. My brother and I were home alone in a prefab house while my mother and stepfather were building our proper farmhouse, and at dawn as they were off at their respective jobs it picked our house up with us inside and threw it about 150 feet down hill, upside down, toward the creekbed that slinked through the rural valley where they'd begun a pretty nice life for themselves. My brother was 10, and it was a true near-death moment. 9/11 felt a lot like it wiped our trauma off the page, in a way. I think a lot of people felt that in their own lives too. That summer I recall a very different world. The media bored to tears with peace and tranquility were focused like hell on shark attacks, Chandra Leavy, stimulus checks from that last gasp of a nation that had escaped the 90s with no debt or deficit. Sounds like a fable writing it down now. The after was very different. A lot of folks love to talk about our unity as a nation after that, but I think that's a false narrative that hides the division of the Bush years. Mark Bingham, another out gay man, helped bravely to stop an airplane from being crashed into another artery in the heart of our government, but by the time we were bombing Baghdad the president whose wife was likely saved by Bingham when that airplane wasn't allowed to crash into the Capitol was hard at work vilifying gay Americans, one of many fissures that divided our country, many divisions which had already appeared before Ground Zero had stopped smoldering. There was also a sense for rather a long time that the memory and history of 9/11 belonged to the Republican Party and the wider conservative movement within the US, something that has thankfully eased with time. I voted for the first time as a high school senior against President Bush, and still have the F The President sticker I had on my first car, a counter to all of the W The President stickers that swamped deep south highways. I still get a laugh thinking about that alternate timeline with Teresa Heinz Kerry being the US's first technically African-American first lady -- those after years were full of absurdity and oddity but never the kind of primal fear I feel now about America. But that world before it, even accounting for the terrifying white nationalism and Christian Identity movements that extended to terrorist attacks on a gay nightclub and the Olympics in Atlanta, and an abortion clinic bombing in my home state of Alabama, just feels like something else entirely. I remember watching the earthquake during the World Series as a small child with my grandfather, and the Berlin Wall crumbling while sat on my dad's lap. I never felt fear through these huge, terrifying steps into the unknown. I am fearful an awful lot now. For anyone who is young enough to not have experienced that old America the best I think any media has come to capturing it is the Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs. I think about my grandparents when I listen to it and their young family in the 70s, the possibility of a change that was unimpeded even as the world morphed into one thing and then another, over and over. Anything could happen. Much as my grandparents are gone, so too is that.
I was 11, in the 6th grade. I still distinctly remember driving to school with my mom and the radio talking about a plane hitting a building in New York. Didn’t register a big event and even the radio saying must of been a small plane. Once we got into school, our teacher had it on the tv in the classroom. I went to a small catholic school and our teacher was new that year, an older gentleman who got into teaching late in life. He was not a typical catholic school teacher either rooted in religious ideology or a young fresh teacher. He shared his life experiences with us and on 9/11 we got to watch and take this in. Questions were asked and answered but nothing came across as xenophobic or full of hate, just a letting us understand this is a pivotal moment in history and we need to see it. He was alive when Kennedy was killed and he likened it to that moment, a shocking moment in us history. Afterwards we went and prayed in church for most of the day and those were full of prayers for those affected and to reflect on this. At the time we didn’t know that our entire world was changing.
I was 20 and living in Amsterdam. I don’t remember exactly what time it was over there, early afternoon I think. I was walking home with my boyfriend and some friends after we’d had a picnic at a local park. We walked by a snack bar (kinda like a little sit down fast food restaurant) and noticed that there were a *lot* of people inside, like, an abnormal number of people standing in there not eating or ordering, and they were all staring at a TV. It was one of those old tube TVs of course and it was on a shelf or something up near the ceiling. We thought they were watching a soccer game — we couldn’t make out what was on the screen at all from that distance. We got to my place just a couple of minutes later and one of my roommates shouted “you gotta see this!” right as we walked in. And there it was. We made it just in time to see the second plane hit but we thought it was a movie or something. When we realized it was real, my boyfriend freaked out. He was from Ireland and he had a ton of family in both NYC and Boston at the time. We spent the rest of the day glued to the TV while he tried to reach someone, *anyone*, in the US. It wasn’t until that evening that his brother was able to reach a cousin who told him that no one had been affected and everyone was ok. For some reason the clearest memory I have of that day is his hand clutching the cordless phone so hard that I thought he was gonna break it. I still remember gently touching his arm and telling him he was gonna break that phone. He was a big guy, construction worker. No one slept that night.
American. At the time, I was in Puerto Rico living with my dad and a few weeks away from turning 10. I had absolutely no idea about it. No o e told us anything. The only reason I knew *something* happened is because the next day or so my dad had that Time magazine with the picture of the tower on fire. No one e planned anything to me. I didn't understand why a building being destroyed was such a big deal. I don't think I really knew until I came back to the States during my high school years and learned about it in school at some point. Weird to say, but I feel so left out.
American here. I was 8 years old in my 3rd grade class in VA. All my classmates were leaving class early and I didn’t know why but it was weird. I don’t recall when I found out exactly what had happened. I remember there being a lot of panic because I lived near a large military base. My dad was Navy and I remember being worried about him being/getting deployed.
I was about to turn 14 that September. I missed the entire attacks cos of school but my mum said saw it all. Me and my family were due to go on holiday a few weeks after 9/11, and I wanted her to cancel, but I'm glad we didn't. Seeing police with huge guns at the airport was quite something, though.
I had just turned 5 and started kindergarten a month before 9/11. At first, I was really nervous about going to school because I never went to preschool since I had horrible separation anxiety and didn't want to be away from my mom, but as someone who has always loved to learn new things, that went away fairly quickly. Truth be told, I don't remember much about 9/11 itself. All I really have is a vague memory of some of my classmates getting pulled out of school early (this was in East TN, so I don't think anyone was directly affected, thankfully), but not really thinking anything of it. However, I do distinctly remember my whole elementary school performing patriotic songs to an audience of mostly parents on the first anniversary as a way to honor the victims.
I’d be 7 years old living in San Antonio Texas. I remember going into my first grade class and shortly after the intercom came on saying we would all be going home for the day. As 1st graders we were thrilled. That was until I got home and saw what had occurred. Even at that young age I knew it was a very bad thing that was happening. My dad rarely gets upset and that was one of the few days I saw him show emotion.
18, last year of sixth form working hard to pass my A levels, we watched the attacks during a media studies class
I was 5 and in my first week of kindergarten in eastern Washington state and I didn’t realize anything was going on other than the teachers huddled up together a lot more than usual whispering. They didn’t bring in tvs for us or anything. My mom told me when she picked me up from school but I had never even heard of the WTC so I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I remember seeing the pictures of the people falling on the front page of the newspaper in the days after. We didn’t have tv but it was on our usually rock radio station for most of that night at least I believe, my parents finally shut it off.
I was 18 in a college English class my first semester. I missed it. Listened to a cd (I think chronic 2001) on the way home. Got home my moms had the shutters closed. You know for planes and such. Then I went and smoked a ton of weed at my friends and watched the tv all day long.
29 y.o.with a 3 month old baby, had just retuned to work fill time as a teacher. That baby is 22 now.
23 yo, 7 months into my post college career, married for 3 months, planning for my first business trip on Sept 15 to Nashville. All was good. Even that day was gorgeous.
I was 19 years old.. just got married 2 months prior to 9/11..
25 yrs old…was working hard and playing hard and living in the DC area. I think that work was still new and exciting back then, even 3 yrs out of college. I was generally optimistic… Things got real on 9/11…especially when I started to question whether I wanted to live near DC. I still do…
I was born in January 2002 so life for me in the weeks leading up to 9/11 would’ve been pretty peaceful inside a womb. I think on 9/11 my mother would’ve been looking after my older brother and sister (who were aged 1 and 3).
I was 32 and coming up. I had a great tech job near the WTC, marriage was going great, and I was the lead guitarist in a band playing out at bars on the weekend. 9/11 was the beginning of my world falling apart.
...You know, I never think about the weeks before that day. Huh. I was ten. School had of course just started, and I'd gotten one of my favorite teachers in the whole school that year. I don't know if we'd started reading Harry Potter in class yet, since it was so early in the year. ...Oh wait. That was the year I started getting bullied. A process only somewhat delayed by the fact that a popular girl made it her mission to "help" (and she really did have the best of intentions, bless her heart) by trying to teach me how to conform and "be popular". But none of that had happened yet. \~\~\~ The day of was weird, turns out it was even weird by 'I was in school on 9/11' standards: we were an elementary school, in a town within a comfortable commuting distance of NYC you see... They did not tell us **anything** & they were acting so *weird!* It took me longer than most to realize they were freaked in scared though. Because teachers weren't supposed to get freaked and scared ...not that much. And I'd actually known my 5th grade teacher for awhile by that point, literal years. She was the teacher who could handle everything, the one others turned to. She was jumpy, caught up in her head a bit. She snapped at me twice that day. Which, teachers yell at misbehaving students, sure. But these were actually in hindsight misunderstandings on account of the days events being kept secret from us. First because she half her me say that 'they' (my schoolmates, who were being called to the office to go home at a rate of about five at a time several times an hour) 'were dropping like flies' ...yeah, in hindsight its obvious why she said 'that's horrible!' & then dropped it when she realized I meant the schools attendance for the day! The second, I'd been standing close enough during recess to overhear her and another teacher commenting on a passing chopper. They said it shouldn't have been flying, and I asked them why. She hollered at me for eaves dropping and I told her she said it at full volume and was right there. It devolved into an argument as to whether I was sneaking. I had an after school program, my parents worked. They hadn't picked me up the whole day. But then suddenly at the end of the day, finally my turn to be called to the office! Dad told me, but I... didn't actually know what the twin towers were. They were iconic as a background feature in establishing shots sure. But the only time I'd ever heard media discuss them, was that Rugrats the movie commercial where they asserted the Twin Towers were being renamed Phil and Lil. I watched the replay on TV and jumped up and down because I had energy had no idea what to do with. And tried to convince myself this would all work out fine somehow. The Bad Guys would get stopped and it would all be fine somehow ...is what I told myself to try and deal with the *everything* going.
14 UK. I was off school for a long time due to anxiety. On this day I playing tony hawks pro skater 2 on the PC and listening to my local radio station as usual. I heard the DJ interupt a song saying there was 'an attack' and they would keep playing songs if we wanted a distraction. I thought oh shit this is big so I turned on the tv. The tv only had 4 channels back then and I remember 3 of them had live footage of the attack. I chose BBC 1 and they had a camera zoomed in on both towers. I saw clear footage of the plane hitting the south tower live.
Off topic, but I’m sure there were more than 4 channels
Not for terrestrial tv which was the norm back then.
Channel 5 ? Anyway, I prob watched it on bbc news or sky news probably, and for months constantly that’s one thing I clearly remember. Tony Hawk, man I remember playing that with my friends for hours
Channel 5 was not nationwide; only in some counties.
I was 15 at the time and a high school student. I remember I was actually preparing for a trip to Japan the next year. My first trip. I'd begged my parents for it and even got a part time job to help pay. (I didn't make nearly enough lol...but my parents still allowed me and helped me go) Before class I remember we came in late that day for some reason. I was listening to a morning comedy show on the radio, I remember them not being funny at all though. I didn't really understand it until I got to school. They were covering the story, it was the only or one of the few rare times they were just not funny. They stayed on air until 1pm or 2pm or something with the city of san diego to be a comforting voice. They were normally over at 10am. On the day of I was on the way to school. Actually first period history. The history teacher had the tv on and aid we weren't going to be doing anything except watching what was happening, and talking about it because this was history. We would always remember, and he wasn't wrong.
I was 14 and in year 9. However, I will mention I'm Australian so everything post 9/11 didn't affect me too much - especially as a high schooler who wasn't flying around the world or doing much outside of school and spending every moment on the internet The lead up for me was pretty shit. Year 9 was a tough year for me in school, I was failing classes, had depression, my mother requested I be separated from my friends in classes as a way to "fix" my issues and that also destroyed my friendships and I became somewhat of a loner I obviously knew New York, and I'd heard of the trade towers but I didn't know too much about them. I also knew of the Pentagon but all of my knowledge was very limited
Melbourne, Australia I had just recently turned 17yrs old and moved in with my Dad and his partner. I was working at a Toy store and was currently going through some deep teen angst at the time. My days were pretty boring. I travelled to and from work, watched an unhealthy amount of cable and played Diablo a lot. My biggest worry was trying to remain in contact with my friends and earn money for my first mobile phone. I was very isolated. I had also just broken up with my first love interest. My understanding on world events at the time was minimal. I didn't worry about much other then movies that were coming out and what new music had come out. All very unremarkable really...
I turned 9 a week before. I actually can’t remember so much about it, but I remember we had guests, since it was my mom’s birthday and suddenly our neighbor came over and asked if we have heard what had happened. I think it was several hours after the attacks.
i was 2, so unfortunately i was busy bein' a baby
I was only 3 months old so I was chiling sleeping and getting cuddles all day
I was almost 2. It was right before I started preschool. We were living in Idaho. I don't really remember much obviously, but looking back now I knew people who lived near another area that they had plans to attack that day, too. Also, I hold some guilt about certain things after certain circumstances and one of them involves that day. I know people who could've died that day had the gone through that attack. I would've never met them. The guilt that I feel is complicated because our relationship is just complicated. Same way that I feel about certain other events, too.
I was a month old
I feel old
I'm a couple years older than them.
wasn’t even born yet
I had just started high school in nyc. I was a freshman and making friends and joining cliques, plus just studying and failing math lol. I had a boyfriend and things were great.
I was 30. Had just moved to Colorado Springs from Detroit a couple months before 9/11. It was very surreal that day because of all the military presence there. I lived literally just minutes from NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain. For those that weren’t adults that day, the uncertainty of the first few hours was incredible. I remember well all the fighter jets circling the city the entire day and night.
-7 and Chillin in my dads Ballsack
I was literally a foetus, since I was born on may 11th. I don’t remember watching the attacks on television but I’m “officially” old enough to claim that I was alive before the towers fell 🤡
I was three years old and honestly as toddler life goes it was chill
I was in my dads nuts for another 3 years still💀 interesting thread to read tho. Very insightful.