Ten Years On

I was 25, working the 6am-2pm shift at my then job in a furniture factory. We all had radios, and when the reports first started it was hard to comprehend what was going on-it just didn't make fucking sense. I rang my brother who had the day off, and he was watching it on tv and said it was horrible.

As soon as work finished I went to the pub, and all of us there were like zombies staring at the tv, watching as the planes hit, and the towers came down again, and again, and again. It was so surreal-like being in a dream because the reality of the situation just couldn't be, if that makes any sense at all?

I was reading the paper the other day, and they had pictures from the attack. One was of the explosion as one of the planes hit, and the other was of the 'falling man'. Still fucking horrific, and utterly mind blowing.

 

I'm a little tripped out this morning. Didn't think I would be - but wow. I was 20 and working a graveyard shift when my coworker made this joke about a terrorist attack and planes hitting a building in New York. I was sure it was a hoax for about half an hour. Then I started trying to call my friends who worked and lived around that end of Manhattan, and couldn't get any of them.

I watched the news in a trance for the entire night, most of the next day. It was a couple of days before I realized that I still had the first itinerary from my trip plan. I'd gone to the US a few months earlier - but I had an an earlier itinerary from a previous event schedule. Turns out that with that cancelled itinerary, I would have been in the air, from Boston to LA when the attacks happened. Then I clicked, that some of the highjacked planes had been Boston to LA.

It's an intense feeling, realizing that a whim to go see a girl a little earlier might have made so much of a difference. Over the days afterward, I got in touch with all of my friends, with a lot of worry and moments of panic in between. I did find out that some acquaintances - not friends, but people I'd have been friendly too if we ran into each other had been killed. And several friends were close enough to have to run through the dust cloud to avoid falling debris. I was about as far away from new york as it was possible to be that day - but the impact was pretty intense.

 

I made it through most of the day today OK. Flipped on the coverage on CNN and watched the towers crumble, went downstairs and found the coveralls I wore that day. Never washed them or wore them since, they still smell like concrete and smoke. For a minute, I thought I was going to cry, but then I just got more angry than anything.

My kids are wondering what the big deal is about today. They are too young to tell them what happened or how any people can hate so much to do anything like that.

It's kinda funny watching people on here or on Facebook post about "I was at (whatever), I was so shocked" knowing that tomorrow they will move on again.

I think about it every single day. I wish I had gotten there earlier. I wish I could have stayed and helped longer. I wish that all the people who flew American flags that day and wore yellow ribbons and were patriotic then still did it now.

Never forget and never forgive.

 

I've been reading the barrage of facebook posts about the anniversary today. A couple of my "friends" have sent numerous posts and links about the conspiracy theory of 9/11, saying that the trade towers were a controlled demolition. Out of curiosity, does anyone believe in the conspiracy theory? Admittedly, I find it interesting but don't really believe in it. Then again, I see conspiracy everywhere...

Mods, feel free to delete if this derails.

 

On the day of the event, I was 19 years old and working at a franchise auto-repair shop with a wife and an 8-month old baby boy at home. While it was happening, the store manager was convinced that Sadaam Hussein was responsible. I knew that it had to be terrorists, and was right.

Things that I remember about the day:

-I got yelled at by the owner for not charging enough labor to replace a customer's turn signal flasher.

- That day was the only time my ex-wife ever brought me lunch at work.

- My dad's birthday is September 11th.

EDIT: I also remember the completely irrational* paranoia that overtook the country in the following days.
I was particularly touched when a Tejano music festival scheduled for the coming weekend was cancelled.
The reason stated: The sponsors and musicians were afraid that they might be attacked at the event(!).

Now, if they had said that they cancelled in honor of all the people who died in New York, I would have thought nothing of the announcement.

But let's be serious here: do you think that ANYONE is interested in attacking a Tejano concert in the asshole of Texas (the exception being an attack by people who hate Tejano music, like me)?

Yeah, I'm really sure that the terrorist are going to waste their time and resources on an event that is drawing MAYBE 2000 people.

*By "Completely irrational," I mean on the part of people in rural/non-strategic locations in the US. People living in New York/DC/LA/etc. would be right to be on thier guard. But in Bumfuck,USA?
Don't flatter yourselves. Those terrorist were looking at the bang-for-the-buck factor here, and the WTC towers were it.

 

I have my coveralls from 9/11. If they are willing to pay for the testing, I'll send a sample of fabric from them and they can get it tested for explosive residue. That will end that bullshit.

 

It won't.

Slate has been running a series on 9/11 conspiracy theories all week. Have a look here: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2302831/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.slate.com/id/2302831/</a> It was an interesting revelation to see that the guy who made Loose Change has since come out against his own film.

The only other thing of value I have to add is this story of an ex-Marine who lived in Connecticut and bluffed his way onto ground zero and managed to rescue someone: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2070762/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.slate.com/id/2070762/</a> These are the 9/11 stories worth reading and sharing.

 

I'm on another forum that's very Euro-dominated, and not coincidentally pretty anti-American. This is a 911 call from the towers after the attack. I was dealing with the trolling OK until I watched this.

Spoiler

 

I was a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh. I can't remember what prompted it, but I wound up watching coverage in my neighbor's room with 3 or 4 other people. It stands out because we never talked, let alone hung out. I feel like we gathered together to simply to not feel so alone and scared. At first we were under the impression that just the one Tower was on fire, not exactly sure why. This was right around the 9 o'clock hour. Then the second plane hit in real time, and it was such an awful moment. I realized it was not coincidence, but there was still a tremendous amount of confusion, not to mention fear.

Fast forward thirty minutes, and reports are coming in that a plane hit the Pentagon. At this point I sincerely thought a country had declared war on the United States via a preemptive strike. Honestly it seemed like the only thing that made sense. We were going to war and someone was trying to take out our financial and government installations in the first wave. Who? Why? No idea. I thought about how much chaos must be going on in DC. Just two months prior I choose Pitt over a university in DC. I wondered what it'd be like for me at that moment had I chosen differently.

The scariest and most confusing part came when the plane crash in Shanksville were reported. It's around a 90 minute drive from us in Pittsburgh. This plane wasn't going towards New York or DC. Where the hell could they have been flying? Chicago? LA seemed too far. Some people in the room seemed convinced it was meant for Pittsburgh in order to hurt the steel/manufacturing industry. Not exactly the best logic, but I think we were just looking for any kind of plausible explanation. This was the breaking point for some. Several made worried phone calls to parents asking to get picked up to go. I stayed, called a girl I was dating at the time, and we watched more coverage in my room.

I remember how chilling it was to see an airplane in the sky in the month or two afterward. Religious fundamentalism became a household term. People kept having to be reminded that not all Muslims are terrorists. Just what did Muslims believe anyway? We were going into Afghanistan and get this bin Laden guy. It should only take a month or two. We fought the whole country of Iraq a decade prior and that only took seven months.

 

Having not paid too much attention to 9/11 for years except the standard moment of remembrance every anniversary, I spent several hours yesterday on youtube looking at coverage from that day. Holy fuck. The reactions in the street and on live TV as the second plane hit were painful, but the part that hit me the hardest was the jumpers. There's a video that shows falling people....one here, one there, and then a stream of living people falling from the sky like flies. That'll rip a hole in you just seeing it - to have known someone who died there is more than I can or would want to imagine. You see that, and then hear the above audio recording, and there aren't words. There's sadness, there's rage, but it doesn't really feel like any emotion is sufficient to convey the horror of it.

I think of those firefighters, desperately trying to pull people out of a burning building that could come down at any time, listening to the thud and crash of bodies from dozens of stories up hitting the ground outside the ground lobby, and I feel a sense of inadequacy. The courage and quality of character necessary to stay in there and keep trying to rescue people is just as hard to process as the terror.

As T2 said, never forgive.

And never forget the ones who willingly walked into that knowing they might not come back out.

 

You literally reached through my computer and shook me with that link.

How the @#$k does that get released to the general public?