OT: 20th anniversary of 9/11: Where were you on that day?

[thebuzzardman]

I was coming home from SOHO and got stuck in the freaking subway for hours. Rolled up a spliff and smoked it in the train

Had no idea what was happening at the time.

Best 9/11 story yet.

Other than the other project manager I worked with who stated "After the towers fell, I hit the street looking for a girl to have 'survivor sex' with", and he claims was successful in this endeavor. He was a total horn dog with an A+ game from the times I hung out with him, so I'll assume this is true. Also, he just enough of that whiff of amoral anti-social behavior about him that made it seem likely as well. Good traits to have working for an investment bank.

Is his last name Stintson?

I forget his name but it's not that.

[Capn'O]

The night before the attacks a friend and I had dropped another friend off at the Albany airport and decided to take an evening jaunt to Boston before heading back to our college (Bard) in the Hudson Valley. She had lost her mother over the summer and I had just gone through a terrible breakup and we both needed some space to clear our heads so off we went. Got back around 6 in the morning or so. Bless college. I woke up sooner than I had hoped to my roommate freaking out and from there tried to process what the heck was happening like everyone else through each step of the day. Our classes that day turned into group processing sessions. Fortunately, I was able to determine that my NYC family was ok fairly quickly and move to thinking about the grander scale of what had occurred. What immediately struck me is my friend and I essentially took the same path that the planes did just a few hours before.

I remember at the onset being very worried about how the country would react. That worry has overwhelmed my thinking about 911 to this day and I'll leave at that as I don't want to take over from more visceral, personal stories about that day.

[Anotha Knicks fan]

I remember finishing up pledging the Oath AT MEPS, when I stepped out into the lobby and saw a guy standing, watching this action packed sequence on one of those big box console TV. Unknowingly, i asked him what movie was playing. He said, this is happening live. They sent us all back to our hotels that night. That gave me one last night with my family.

Monday will make 20 years of service in the US Army. I will retire at the end of the month. To say that this day has forever changed my life is an understatement.

[HarthorneWingo]

I had left city employment in '95 and was in private practice. In 2001, I began doing FOP union work representing officers at their Internal Affairs interviews.

That morning, it was a Tuesday, I had a few officers to represent at IAD that morning. The interviews are held in small 10'-15' rooms with two chairs, one for the attorney and the other for the witness, a computer desk and chair for the investigator. It was during the first interview that the first plan crashed into the WTT. We took a break during the interview and immediately found out about it when we left the interview room since there was a TV in the waiting room in the lobby right down the hall. My first thought was, someone really messed up. What could it be? Failure of the flight system or some other sort of malfunction of the plane? Then the second one hit and my immediate thought was "These are not accidents." I didn't even know about the other two, in PA and DC, until after I left the building. I think I finished all 3 or 4 interviews and then just drove home.

I remember that Tuesday night was our basketball pickup game night where a group of friends and friends of friends rented out an indoor basketball court in Philadelphia and ran full court to 70, by 1s. A brief water/bathroom break at 35 points. I chose not to play that night. They chose to play. I was waiting for Philadelphia to get hit next. I've had two very vivid/bad dreams of having to leave work in Center City on foot as buildings are being bombed and crumbling all around me, etc. The type of dreams where when you wake up, your heart is pounding.

Since coming back to Long Island, I sense that this area is still very scarred from this tragic event. I think it's better that we move on from this and allow the those who mourn and grieve the most to do that amongst their own families and friends. Of course we'll always observe this day like we do with VJ Day and Pearl Harbor.

I felt that FOX TV commercialized it in tonight's game between the Mets and Yankees. I'd like to know how much it made in revenue off the game and how much of it it'll be donating to the families of fallen 9/11 victims and the foundations that represent them?

I'm glad to see that none of the armed services bought ad time for their recruitment advertisements/between-innings commercials. I wonder how they dealt with that issue back in the boardroom?

[cgmw]

Law school in Boston. My aunt and two of my closest friends were in the towers, so I drove back to the city Wednesday 9/12. The night of the 11th I had a dream that I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5th Ave standing in front of an impossibly tall wall of Mark Rothko paintings (he does vertical blocks of colors) and each one somehow represented death, destruction, and war. In the dream, I got a feeling like trying to swallow dry saltines without water except it was in my heart. Turns out I woke up on 9/12 in cardiac a-fib and spent the night at St Vincent’s in Manhattan with actual casualty survivors of the blast. My heart went back to a normal rhythm and I went home.

On Tuesday morning, one of my closest friends had called me from some kind of fallout shelter after the second tower was hit. Apparently they were giving survivors 3 phone calls and he called his mom, his brother, and me. When I asked why me he said because he was watching people jump from the towers and he didn’t want to tell his mom or brother.

We couldn’t find my other best friend or my aunt until late Wednesday. Both were “ash people,” and my buddy was working in tower 2 and ignored people saying it was okay to go back to his office because the plane had only hit the first tower. I call all three of them every 9/11 to check in. My two best friends have both gotten married and started families since then. Both have two boys, actually. Not sure those boys will ever realize how close their dads came that day, and I’m okay with that.

[thebuzzardman]

My cousin worked for Morgan Stanley. I know there are a lot of stories about Rick Rescorla and how he saved a lot of people but ensuring all the floors were cleared, but I don't think my cousin encountered him. My cousin worked in 2nd tower hit, first to fall. Anyway - and I'm giving this story second hand and it's been a number of years - either an announcement or a coworker said "To stay put" but my cousin said "No way" and he and a some other co-workers immediately went down the stairs. Since Morgan Stanley got nearly all their people out, I figure the announcement to go followed shortly. I asked him where he was when the towers fell and he said "I was by that park by City Hall". I did the math in my head when he told me that story and I'm thinking "That's not more than a 10 minute walk away, if that" That's really close to having the building drop on you after you already got out.

He never worked in Manhattan again. He was living out near Burlington NJ where he grew up. Actually past that and more in the country. He took a job with some energy company that was closer to home for less money and never looked back.

[thebuzzardman]

Law school in Boston. My aunt and two of my closest friends were in the towers, so I drove back to the city Wednesday 9/12. The night of the 11th I had a dream that I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5th Ave standing in front of an impossibly tall wall of Mark Rothko paintings (he does vertical blocks of colors) and each one somehow represented death, destruction, and war. In the dream, I got a feeling like trying to swallow dry saltines without water except it was in my heart. Turns out I woke up on 9/12 in cardiac a-fib and spent the night at St Vincent’s in Manhattan with actual casualty survivors of the blast. My heart went back to a normal rhythm and I went home.

On Tuesday morning, one of my closest friends had called me from some kind of fallout shelter after the second tower was hit. Apparently they were giving survivors 3 phone calls and he called his mom, his brother, and me. When I asked why me he said because he was watching people jump from the towers and he didn’t want to tell his mom or brother.

We couldn’t find my other best friend or my aunt until late Wednesday. Both were “ash people,” and my buddy was working in tower 2 and ignored people saying it was okay to go back to his office because the plane had only hit the first tower. I call all three of them every 9/11 to check in. My two best friends have both gotten married and started families since then. Both have two boys, actually. Not sure those boys will ever realize how close their dads came that day, and I’m okay with that.

This very nice Sri Lankan guy I worked with came out of the WTC PATH stop after the towers had been hit but were still up, with no clue what was going on. Timing must have been before they stopped the trains. He saw many jumpers. He said "One guy I saw clear as day, I could see his face. He looked like that chef Paul Prudhomme, with a beard and he had a red tie that was flapping in the wind". He was completely haunted by it. Who wouldn't be?