<p>My husband had worked in the trade center (different buildings) for probably twenty years. He was in the last PATH train to enter the trade center that morning. When he left the train he saw emergency workers running and he simply ran out of the building as quickly as possible (he had been in the building during the earlier attack in 93 so he knew to get out). He walked to the west side where he saw the second plane hit and eventually watched them come down from a distance. That day he walked from lower NYC up to 50th street and watched the horror in the streets (he says the students at NYU were the most emotionally upset.) He eventually got a train home. A good friend of ours who was on the NJ transit train with my husband that morning grabbed an earlier PATH train and was killed (worked at Cantor but they suspect he was most likely in an elevator at the time of the attack). We had a second friend who was killed that day also (one of my daughter’s friend’s father). It was the hardest day of my life as a parent, meeting my second grade daughter after school that day and trying to explain the events of the day.</p>
<p>Thank you for these stories. It was shocking and horrifying watching the attack unfold on live television; I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to BE there. A good friend of mine worked less than a mile away from WTC. She recalls making her way home to Brooklyn later that day, and described how eerily quiet all these multitudes of people were – hundreds of people walking neither quickly nor slowly – but quietly, in a shocked, purposeful silence.</p>
<p>A former student of mine died in one of the towers. She worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. One of my closest childhood friends H is a policeman that worked on the clean up. My friend regularly baked lasagna and sent it for the crew, as did many. She also told me her H told her it was so much worse than what we saw on TV. The smell and rats were overwhelming. My mom worked downtown Manhatten and watched the towers being built. For awhile her company had offices in one of the towers and she worked there. </p>
<p>My D1’s childhood friend and college roommate’s mother was working at the Pentagon on 9/11. She did not die, but knew people who did. My nephew worked on the cleanup in his job.</p>
<p>Finally, the PA plane crash occurred very near my in- laws home. 10-13 miles as the crow flies. We’ve been to Shanksville a few times.</p>
<p>So all three locations are very personal to me.</p>
<p>^^^Wow, quite a few connections. :(</p>
<p>I was in my car heading north on the Cross Island Parkway to my second day at a new job when the traffic announcer said what sounded like “must be a horrible accident, a small plane appears to have hit the WTC”. Our traffic helicopter will head down from the George Washington Bridge to take a closer look. I made it to my new office, where we immediately lost phone lines with the collapse of the tower, told them I was leaving and drove to Queens. My mom had a doctor appointment and I worried about her getting there and back. All the highway access into NYC was closed at the NYC/Nassau County border but I knew all local streets. Got to my mom’s and she got a phone call, asking her to come asap as all doctors were being mobilized for emergency response. So took her there and back and drove home to be with my kids when they came home from school, one in high school and one in middle school. I knew they would be scared as DH is frequently at the WTC for meetings at the Port Authority, as he is senior executive at FAA. He was actually on the NJ Turnpike en route to a meeting in Philly so he sent the rest of the staff and turned around tor drive back to his office and he had to drive up to the Tappan Zee to cross into Westchester and then down local streets to get back to his office. We did no personally know any of the victims but knew many who did. There were seven from our community including the Director of the Port Authority and a husband of one of the middle school teachers, several young first responders. Since there weren’t any planes flying, it was terrifying to younger later that night when military jets flew over our house in formation.
We live in SE Nassau County and you could smell the fires and feel the burning in your throat for days afterward. </p>
<p>I remember how eerie it felt to hear NO airplanes for that time they everything was grounded. Hearing airplanes is a daily thing because we lived near an airport. Then, when commercial air travel was still suspended, but a few commercial airliners took off from Dallas to do official government business, I almost had a heart attack seeing them fly overhead.</p>
<p>We had the opposite Nrdsb4, we had jet fighters flying over the city at all hours. It was eerily quiet when they stopped. </p>
<p>I was working at an Army command several miles from the Pentagon. I worked in the library, which was on the 8th floor and had a TV set. We watched the second plane hit the tower on TV, and then we looked out the window and saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon. The librarian was frantic because her DH worked in the Pentagon, but we later found out he was okay. I didn’t know it at the time, but my ex-H was standing in South Parking in front of the Pentagon waiting for a shuttle bus when the plane hit.</p>
<p>Nrdsb, I’d forgotten that about the eerie silence in the skies for a couple of days (out here in CA). I do remember seeing/hearing fighter jets a couple of times. One of the spirit-lifting stories to come out of 9/11 was the hospitality shown by our wonderful Canadian neighbors, who for days played host to thousands of stranded travelers diverted from their US destinations.</p>
<p>Thirteen years later, this still moves me to tears; breaking with tradition, the Queen allowed the playing of another country’s national anthem at the changing of the guard:</p>
<p><a href=“Changing of the Guard - Wake of September 11 - YouTube”>Changing of the Guard - Wake of September 11 - YouTube;
<p>and in St. Paul’s Cathedral:</p>
<p><a href=“911 Memorial St Pauls London US Anthem - YouTube”>911 Memorial St Pauls London US Anthem - YouTube;
<p>I live in Greenwich Village and I was here on 9/11. Here’s the memory I can’t shake: I ran to get my first grader from his school on Sixth Avenue and we were making our way home through the streets. At this point, the towers had both fallen and there was a lot of chaos and rising panic. We stopped at the curb when a fleet of fire engines came screaming the wrong way down Sixth Avenue – outer borough companies headed for the site. My son raised his fists in the air and shouted: “Go Go Go! Woo Hoo!” Like he always did when he saw fire engines. Like all little boys cheer for fire engines. And out of the center window of one of the ladder trucks, a firefighter glove emerged and gave him the thumbs up sign. </p>
<p>We had just moved into our current home (in New England) a year earlier. It was Halloween 2000. My kids were then 7 and 4. We went to all the homes in our new neighborhood to say trick or treat and introduce ourselves as new neighbors. My kids were having a blast. One beautiful young girl on our street (early 20’s) gave the kids candy and then talked to us for a minute or two. She became a victim of 9/11 as a flight attendent out of Boston to hit the towers. I was in shock. Her parents became very involved in the victims of 9/11 campaigns.</p>
<p>I have two friends that worked in the twin towers who were unbelieveably not there on that day. One had lost all his possessions at his desk, but not his life 
The second was reporting to their office in Brooklyn that day. Also saved his life.</p>
<p>My then 7 and 4 year old sons were quite traumatized although we never mentioned it at home. The younger one was in pre-school and I remember him coming home and burying his head under his pillow. At that point we had discussions with both as best as we could so they would understand. But we as adults couldn’t comprehend or understand. A tough time for everyone.</p>
<p>Oh, also we had flown the day before (9/10) home from a family bar mitzvah weekend. Yikes, I forgot about that. The next morning I was watching the news as I got ready for the day. So shocking. So sad.</p>
<p>Someone I worked with was on a street adjacent to the Towers as the first jet hit. Several months later, I was working late. I thought I was the only person in the office so I went to investigate when I heard a sound. I found the man at his desk, his head buried in his arms, sobbing. I didn’t say anything, I just put my arm around him. After a few minutes, he looked up at me and said "you know how they say you die in the air during a fall from a high place? Well it’s not true. ". We just stayed like that, with him weeping and me leaning over holding him. I don’t know how long. </p>
<p>My BIL used to work at the Naval annex and saw the third plane hit the pentagon. One of my friends from college’s younger brother at Rochester was friends with Jeremy Glick on UA 93 during undergrad-lost touch with him after graduating and was pretty shaken up about the whole thing. Can’t imagine being on a business trip and being in that position</p>
<p>A friend in his late 30’s was on Flight 77. The sort of young person who was good and upright and who would have carried the world forth, for all of us. We had known him since his teens. </p>
<p>A friend had comms tower workers up on the roof. A relative was in the garage when 93 bombing occurred, then late to work on 911. </p>
<p>The feelings never go away. Bless All.</p>
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<p>The relative of a friend of mine worked on an upper floor of the WTC. He was the kind of person who never, ever, called in sick, was never late to work, etc. The morning of the terrorist attacks, he woke up feeling so ill that he could almost not get out of bed. He didn’t go to work, and it saved his life.</p>
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<p>It’s interesting you mention this. There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there about 9/11. But it seems there are REALLY a lot about the pentagon hit, probably because there is no video showing it clearly (and there are a lot of crazies who insist no real airliners hit the WTC-just google on youtube). I watched a video (which was mostly just audio) of interviews with eyewitnesses to the Pentagon crash. They all sounded very weary. “Yes, I ACTUALLY saw a plane. YES, it crashed into the Pentagon.” One guy said, “You know, I’m really really sick of talking about this. Yes, I KNOW there are people who insist the Pentagon was bombed and that a plane did not crash into it. You know what? THEY ARE WRONG. And I’ve wasted too much damned time in my life talking about this.”</p>
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This was my situation almost exactly, except I was on the 8th floor of a different building (in Ballston).</p>
<p>Trust me. That was a pretty big one too, he knows at least 4 other people that saw it hit, it flew right over I95. There are hundreds of people that saw it hit. United 93 was supposed to go to the capitol right down the way too-but thankfully it was delayed. If it would have made it to DC, the casualties would have been very minimal as it had been evacuated an hour earlier.</p>
<p>I was working in NYC at the time, Midtown East, was in for an early meeting, and then suddenly someone said the WTC had been hit by a plane (we had a meeting room with a big tv)…and when I saw the tower, and also recalled what the day looked like, my first spoken thought was it was not an accident. When the second plane hit, my first thought was the 300 people we had working in the north tower (it was a communications hub and where part of our back office was) . A later learned two senior development staff, whom I worked closely with for years, were in the Windows on the World restaurant for some sort of financial breakfast, and they were using their blackberries (then relatively rare) to try and find out what was going on, the messages as reported to me became more and more frantic, and then when they realized what the situation was, sent long messages saying goodbye to their families…both perished. </p>
<p>We didn’t lose anyone in the north tower, but one of the workers saw someone who had jumped fall onto a cop right in front of them, then ended up getting burned by falling debris…</p>
<p>Another friend of mine worked for Marsh McClennan, whose offices in the WTC were ground zero for one of the flights, and we were on the phone, and suddenly he said he had just lost internet…it was when the second plane hit, wiped out their data center. </p>
<p>The thing I remember most was looking out the window and seeing the hordes of people just walking, trying to get away, anywhere, up third avenue, and also the people panicking in my office, that we were under attack, and trying to calm people down. The other weird thing is it was such a beautiful day, one you don’t usually get this time of year like that. </p>
<p>In terms of survivor stories a couple of years later my son was playing little league, and I got to talking to one of the coach/dads. He was the CTO Cantor, and that day he decided to go fishing instead of going to the office…and he worked in their offices in the WTC. </p>
<p>I haven’t been to the memorial and I am not sure I want to go, though I hear it is nice. I remember when they built the temporary wall that had the names of those lost, and after reading through them I realized there were roughly 25 people I either knew or knew of, and it really hit me hard. </p>
<p>We crossed the GW and over to the NJ Turnpike recently and could see the new tower. At first, we didn’t realize, not having traveled that route in a while. </p>