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Originally Posted by BMW X5
we shall never forgive the monsters that did this
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I still remember that morning very clearly. I was on my way to work listening to the "Curtis and Kuby" radio show (WABC morning show in NY) when they said that a plane had crashed into the WTC. Initially after receiving the report, they thought it was a joke.
But they then put a caller on who said he worked in the Empire State Building and his office window faced the WTC and he said he saw the plane hit the tower. He claimed it was a small Cessna -- I'm guessing the initial reports of a Cessna that most of the media reported may have come from this one guy. I can't imagine how someone could judge the size of a plane from 40 blocks away.
As I was pulling into my office parking lot, they reported that the second plane had hit. When I got up to my office (I was 10 minutes late), I told everyone and they all thought I was joking. But then one of my workers got a call from her sister about it -- her sister's husband worked in the WTC. We found out later that day that he had gotten out and was ok.
Within an hour, most of my employees went home as they were worried about friends &/or family who worked in or near the WTC. The rest of us sat around a radio and listened. There were all kinds of false reports that morning. For most of the morning, they were reporting that their were 8 hijacked planes, not 4. I don't know whatever happened to that story as the radio stations never addressed what happened to the other 4 planes or why they had reported them hijacked. They also reported that the Capitol building had been bombed, as well as a shopping mall in Washington DC.
There were also reports that morning of a failed assassination attempt of George Bush which turned out to be true although it has not been discussed much by the media since then, probably because it failed.
Even though my office is 30 miles from NYC, our office phones went dead when the 2nd WTC building fell and were not up and running again for 2 days. Cell phone circuits were all busy.
So at around 4pm I left my office to drive home. I was on the Palisaides Parkway headed north, and at one point a convoy of 100-200 police cars and SUVs passed me headed south obviously going to NYC.
The following day I went down to visit a friend who lived in Fort Lee NJ (across the river from Manhattan) and we went down to the peer in Edgewater to see everything. You could see everything right across the river. The fire was still burning heavily and the smoke cloud took up the entire sky.
I'm not sure how people around the rest of the country felt, but for me, that whole week felt kind of sureal -- like a big dream. It was hard to come to grips with the reality of everything. It felt like you were watching a movie and soon enough it will end and you will get up and leave the threater. But of course, it was real. It took a while for things to get back to normal.
After this experience, I cannot possiblly imagine what people must go through who live in an actual war zone like Iraq, Lebenon or Afghanistan. I know people to this day who are still not psychologically right as a result of the 9/11 attacks.