Remember

[RACER X]

8:46:30: Flight 11 crashes at roughly 466 mph (790km/h or 219m/s or 425 knots) into the north face of the North Tower (1 WTC) of the World Trade Center, between floors 93 and 99. (Many early accounts gave times between 8:45 and 8:50). The aircraft enters the tower mostly intact. It plows to the building core, severing all three gypsum-encased stairwells, dragging combustibles with it. A powerful shock wave travels down to the ground and up again. The combustibles and the remnants of the aircraft are ignited by the burning fuel. People below the severed stairwells start to evacuate no one above the impact zone is able to do so.

9:03:02: Flight 175 crashes at about 590 mph (950 km/h) into the south face of the South Tower (2 WTC) of the World Trade Center, banked between floors 77 and 85

9:37:46: Flight 77 crashes into the western side of the Pentagon and starts a violent fire. The section of the Pentagon hit consists mainly of newly renovated, unoccupied offices. All 64 people on board are killed, as are 125 Pentagon personnel.

10:03:11: United Airlines Flight 93 is crashed by its hijackers and passengers, due to fighting in the cockpit 80 miles (129 km) southeast of Pittsburgh in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Later reports indicate that passengers had learned about the World Trade Center and Pentagon crashes on cell phones and at least three were planning on resisting the hijackers; the resistance was confirmed by Flight 93's cockpit voice recording, on which the hijackers are heard making their decision to down the plane before the passengers succeed in breaching the cockpit door.

[Mr Lefty]

I was off from work and my dad called to wake me up and tell me the news.... I drove to my friends house and there i sat the rest of the day, trying to comprehend... still can't.

[RACER X]

i was at work and heard it on the radio, somebody set up a TV in our conference room

trying to explain to april what happened, we walked to the neighborhood flags and put them at 1/2 mast.

[101lifts2]

After the first plane struck...I was like mechanical error. After the 2nd, I was like wtf did our government go and do now.

RIP

[Gas Man]

I was driving for work, in my work truck, going from my work to Lima, OH to pick or drop something off. LIstened to it on the radio in SHOCK! Calling the girlfriend (now wife) and she's watching it on tv.

I will never and can never forget that day.

[derf]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfWa9gI-Bks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgGQAr5hmRI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k8HHfJe828


http://www.youtube.com/user/storycorps#g/u

[Porkchop]

I was in eighth grade, sitting in Mrs Santry's class when out principal came over the loud speaker and announced that planes had hit the WTC and one had fallen, and that lessons were to stop. Unfortunately they did not allow us to turn on the tvs. I was 13 and had no idea what the WTC was, had no comprehension of the size of the buildings, and definitely no comprehension of the massive tragedy that had happened. At the time my mom was working in a sky scraper in downtown columbus, and when the second plane hit, my dad called her to gtfo of the city. I was one of the first ones to leave school that morning, and I spent the rest of the day staring at the news channels. I was still fighting with what I was seeing was reality.

[Particle Man]

I was still reeling from losing my dad 2 weeks before. I remember being numb.

[Rider]

I was sitting at my desk at work. Made me almost want to go back into the military to fight these poeple.

[Archren]

It was my first day to basic training. I had already been at Fort Jackson for a week or so at the in-processing station, but it was my first day actually moving into barracks, meeting my drill sergeants and my buddies for the next nine weeks.

We had already gone through the "GET THE **** OFF THE BUS! TAKE YOUR BAGS HERE!! YOU'RE NOT MOVING FAST ENOUGH, SO GET DOWN AND DO PUSHUPS!" routine, and were actually sitting with our bags waiting for barracks assignments when the rumors started to fly. Initially it was just word that a bomb had gone off in the World Trade Center. Then someone (not a drill sergeant, I assume just a clerk who worked for the Company) asked for anyone who was from New York or who had family in NYC.

After that, I don't remember much. They didn't tell the rest of us (those who didn't have any direct ties to NY) what had happened until much later. I know those others were likely given the choice to go home, particularly if there were deaths or injuries, but they never really told us, so that's just the speculation between me and my platoon-mates.

Literally, I did not see any visuals from 9/11 until about half-way through boot camp - one of the girls who lived in the same bay as me received a package from her family with a copy of Time magazine. And even in the ten years since, the most I have seen is photos and brief clips of the towers...

...at least until last night. The History channel had a two-hour piece on the events of 9/11. It was like reliving that day, but with the horror and shock that I didn't experience on the day itself (since they did such an outstanding job of filtering everything that we read and saw - and they kept us so focused on training, we didn't have time to be scared). I've been to war twice, been shot at, nearly blown up... but nothing quite shook me to the core as that did. Even ten years after the fact.