9-11 stories and pictures

Like the JFK assassination a generation before us, our generation will always remember where they were on 9-11-2001. The day the United States was attacked on it’s own soil for the time since World War II.

My story is like so many others. I travel alot for work but on this day I just wasn’t, though many of my colleagues were. Working in high tech you have to spend time travelling to certain areas such as Silicon Valley, Shanghai, China, Texas or India. It’s just part of our world. But on 9-11-2001 I wasn’t travelling I was working in my office when one of my co-workers came in and said a plane, a passenger jet, had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. That was it. What a knucklehead I thought to myself. Air traffic must have messed up or maybe there was a malfunction in the instrument panel of the plane and with heavy fog well anything could happen. I shook my head and just thought, “damn” and went on with work. I figured it was bad but not horrible. Until I tried to reach some other co-workers for some information. They were not to be found.

So I stepped out of my office and headed down the hall then I saw them. All 50+ of them, crowded around a small portable radio. And they were listening intently. As I drew nearer a women looked up at me, terrified, and said, “they’ve attacked New York City”. I looked at her trying to understand what she meant as I strained to make sense of the radio broadcast.

Who attacked New York City? As I was thinking it through, my mind flooding with more and more bits of data, another man turned to me to say that “there are planes all over, no one knows how many more will go down”. Still a third person, their hands over their mouths, said, “it’s rush hour, there are 25,000 people in those buildings”.

Finally I understood what was happening. A chill went through my body, and it does still today, the United States was under physical attack from an outside entity, an unnamed (at that point) enemy.

I sat with the others, all 50+ of us, around a small radio listening as the second plane hit, as the Pentagon burst into flames and as the confusion, fear and terror of the day wore on. It wasn’t a productive day. It was a day I’ll always remember though. And something I will never forget.

More stories and pictures of that sad day have been archived the 9-11 Digital Archives. In case you don’t know about this site, it is, in their words, about:

The September 11 Digital Archive uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania and the public responses to them. Funded by a major grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and organized by the American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University…

(Photo courtesy of Babasteve’s Photos, used under Creative Commons License)