9/11, where were you and what do you remember

Just leaving a Tuesday morning sales meeting. Started at 8. We were talking about travel expenses and how they were getting out of hand.

Left that meeting at about 8:50. TV's were always tuned to CNBC or Bloomberg for stock prices (I was in financial sales at the time) There was a crowd around one of the TV's telling us that a small plane had hit one of the towers. I was watching but had some phone calls to return. While talking to a broker in Austin, TX, he says to me "Holy shit a second plane just hit" TV must have been on some type of delay cuz I looked up to see it hit.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement.

Fielded so many calls all morning from people who thought our offices were in NYC. One of my friends had the Cantor Fitzgerald account. They lost every one of their employees that morning.

Saturday morning was tough to watch. But I watched.

And I will never forget.
 
Just leaving a Tuesday morning sales meeting. Started at 8. We were talking about travel expenses and how they were getting out of hand.

Left that meeting at about 8:50. TV's were always tuned to CNBC or Bloomberg for stock prices (I was in financial sales at the time) There was a crowd around one of the TV's telling us that a small plane had hit one of the towers. I was watching but had some phone calls to return. While talking to a broker in Austin, TX, he says to me "Holy shit a second plane just hit" TV must have been on some type of delay cuz I looked up to see it hit.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement.

Fielded so many calls all morning from people who thought our offices were in NYC. One of my friends had the Cantor Fitzgerald account. They lost every one of their employees that morning.

Saturday morning was tough to watch. But I watched.

And I will never forget.
🥲
 
Just ran across this from my author and editor friend Walter Donway.

I have another friend who told me of his story watching the entire horror rein down from the window of his 49th floor office in the Empire State Building. Tragic.

Walter mentions no government connection and I disagree to a point as both Iran and Saudi govermentsvare the wellspring of Islamic Totalarianism but this isn't a political thread so I hope that doesn't become a focus.

The words just moved me.

Made a tear fall.

Try to Remember (9/11)

I was in New York City, in my office at Fifth Avenue and 59th, on September 11, 2001. The office manager, Burt Mirsky, came in and said, "A plane has crashed into a World Trade Center tower."

I said, "Oh, a private plane?"

"No, it says commercial airliner."

"I doubt it."

All of it unfolded during the day. We ended, of course, grouped about the television set. Oddly, I don't think I left until quitting time. My apartment in the West Village with my wife is virtually in the shadow of the towers. No subways running there that day.

Beautiful autumn day, except that the air was filled with an acrid odor. I walked down Fifth Avenue, with my briefcase. It was just over three miles. Coming toward me were people with sooty faces and wild hair. I still can't interpret that. Were some survivors of the collapse of the twin towers only now walking home uptown?

I don't think I was in touch with my wife or Ethan all day. Not entirely sure what phones were working. But that is me, anyway.

My wife was down at her job at Little Red Schoolhouse, a prestigious private school on Sixth Avenue and Bleecker Street. That day, the children were standing at the windows watching the disaster unfold: You could see the towers, from there. Faculty stayed later with kids until their parents came--or never came, as in a few cases.

Ethan was in school at Brooklyn Friends, in downtown Brooklyn, and tells me that they stood on the steps of the school and watched the clouds of black smoke billowint over Manhattan across the East River (not a "river," a tidal estuary).

This was a gigantic, almost miraculous triumph for Islamism. If you can do THAT to a city, a country, then suddenly (and ever since) you are taken very seriously. On my walks along the Hudson, on my runs in earlier days, driving back into Manhattan from any direction--the twin towers were the raised arms and fists of New York City.

Brought down in a single day not by a country, a government, but just 19 religionists ready to die for their cause. Few of them went to jail; one who did is now freed.

And in years since, I have walked along the Hudson and the sky has spoken loudly of...an absence. Experienced from any direction: the city streets, the sea, the air. It is gone.

Not very long after 9/11, I tried the impossible: to write a poem that might capture some part of what it meant to me to my countrymen. This is it:

Who knew that day
That we had buried her,
Untenderly, the way
A violated lady
Once elected to seek
Merciful obscurity?

O, she had been lovely.
She dared all who could see
To hope that life again
Might be as young, as new,
As the hearts of boys when
Their secret dreams are green.

So bountiful, and she
Was big and easy, too;
And because she was free
Drew so many to her side.
Her head was held so high:
Around her, only the sea,
Above her, only the sky.
They ever failed, who sought
To take her, so many sons
To keep her free had fought
Two centuries of wars.

Evil came stealthily
That morning, like the heart
Putrefied with envy.
Who spied the swooping blow
That ravished utterly—
Swift and obscene to know
What was untouchable?

Bickering, strutting down
Corridors of power,
Disposed for the eye: Who,
That day, was by her side—
That world men once called “new”?
9 11 was a victory for fanaticism,
NOT a victory of Islamism.

I can introduce you to some of the nicest people you could meet that practice Islam.
 
9 11 was a victory for fanaticism,
NOT a victory of Islamism.

I can introduce you to some of the nicest people you could meet that practice Islam.

I agree there are many, I can make a case for why they are that way but this is not the thread to do so.
 
I woke up early on 9/11 because I was driving my Brother in Law to work, I came home and went back to bed and slept through the entire thing. When I woke up I must have had CNN on the night before, I turned my TV on and you know the old Tube TVs you could hear them before the picture warmed up and I heard "World trade center collapsed" and I'm like "Huh?" then the screen came on and I see "Attack on America" and I was confused to say the least, and to be honest a bit scared, at least until I figured out what had happened.

From that moment on I got as much information as I could. I was glued to the TV, or when I had to go pick my Brother in Law up at work the radio. I was probably awake for over 24 hours. I'm a major news junkie and this was the biggest story of my life; still is 20 years later and I slept through the whole damned thing. I've often wondered if I would have known after the first plane that it was a terrorist attack, because like I said I'm a news junkie so I knew about the attack in 93, and what would have been going through my mind when the second plane hit.
 
I also think of those brave people on flight 93. They had full knowledge of what happened in NY and DC. They decided not to just sit there and become victims of those monsters.
Heroes all.
From what I understand there were passengers on Flight 175 (The second plane) who were considering rushing their cockpit as well. The difference being that they ran out of time whereas the brave souls on Flight 93 didn't.

Brian David Sweeney tried calling his wife, Julie, at 08:59, but ended up leaving a message, telling her the plane had been hijacked. He then called his parents at 09:00 and spoke with his mother, Louise. Sweeney told his mother about the hijacking and mentioned that passengers were considering storming the cockpit and taking control of the aircraft.

United Airlines Flight 175 - Wikipedia

At 9:00am though they had less than 3 minutes until they hit the South Tower. Apparently Barbara Olsen who died on American Flight 77 (The plane that hit the Pentagon) was told about the attacks at the WTC, but at 9:31am, only 6 minutes before their plane hit the Pentagon. I have to believe that if the passengers in the other planes had had the time and information the people on Flight 93 had they would have tried to storm their cockpits as well. That's not to diminish at all the bravery of the people on flight 93, it's just really the only logical thing to do in that situation with that information.
 
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