Sept. 11, 2013

[Brewmaster]

I will never forget where I was or what I was doing the instant I heard - to be honest I still want revenge even to this day. I hope bin laden is enjoying his non-real 13 virgins

 

[ColSndrs]

The Sunday night before (Sept 9) in the wee hours of Monday morning I was in College Station, TX doing my checkride for my first airline job. I finished about 2am, got about 2 hours of sleep, then woke up, and deadheaded from College Station to Houston to Atlanta on Monday. Tuesday morning I woke up, turned on the TV and saw the news about the first tower being hit. Got to watch the second tower get hit, and by Friday I got the phone call that I was being furloughed (pilot talk for being laid off).

I remember racing out to the local airport later that day. The police were out there to ensure that no aircraft took off. All of us pilots stood outside and looked at the sky. Mesmerized by the fact that you could not see one airplane or contrail in the clear skies above.

Sept 11 reminded me of January 1986 when the Challenger space shuttle blew up. I cried then for the astronauts, and on Sept 11 every year, it brings tears to my eyes thinking about my fellow pilots who perished and the thousands of other innocent lives that were lost.

I still think we should have dropped the MOAB (the largest non-nuclear bomb ever built) on those terrorists. I flew down to Eglin AFB in Florida an hour after they tested the MOAB and there were still remnants of a mushroom cloud it created. That was one BIG bomb!

 

[kYuKi]

I was living in Birmingham, Alabama at the time. I was asleep at my girlfriends house, and my best friend had called and woke me up. He was frantically talking about something that I didnt understand so I handed the phone to my girl. She said, "Oh my god" and hung up, and turned on the TV. I was appalled. I then had to go to work. I was a server at Chilis at the time, and we were absolutely dead that day. Not a single customer. We all sat in the bar area with our eyes also glued to the coverage.

Things DID change, dramatically, from that moment on. My daughter, who wasnt even born yet, was taught about it in school Wednesday. Part of her homework for social studies was to find coverage on Youtube of that fateful day and talk to her parents about what it meant, and what it means still. That was a hard conversation to have. To tell a child about the evil that transpired. Even 12 years later, still chokes me up.

The last paragraph almost made me ball up.

 

[Annihilator]

I remember what I was doing, I was working by myself that morning and a customer came in and told us that a plane had hit the Trade Center. Then a little while later someone else came in and said the same thing, and I said "yeah i heard about it already" and then they said, "no another one" Thats when I knew something was up. We had no cable tv or even antenna in the store. Of of the other workers fortunately had a portable tv in their car, they brought it in and got enough reception in to watch the first tower fall, it was probably the longest day I ever experienced staying at work, no one shopped and everybody there was panicked. The federal center was in the town I worked in and people were concerned someone was going to attack it. Finally when it was time to go home, I was going through town to find every gas station backed up forever with people trying to fill up. I got home and grabbed every vehicle we had and filled them up and spent the rest of the day glued to the tv watching every replay and update about the attack.