Anonymous wrote:I was in 5th grade in the Midwest. The teacher wheeled the tv to the front of the classroom and turned on the news. We just sat there and silently watched. I think that was the turning point for me where the news went from just being background noise that was on the tv to something to pay attention to.

+1

I had just dropped the kids at preschool and remember being so scared and then in shock … pick up the kids. They need to be home. … like everything slowed down.

Working on Capitol Hill (Senate side). Saw the second plane hit the South Tower live on TV and saw the Pentagon smoke from my office window shortly thereafter. My office convened an emergency meeting just before the decision was made to evacuate. I remember there were lots of rumors floating around (e.g., car bombs on Capitol Hill, the Mall being on fire, etc.). Stuck in gridlocked traffic with a colleague on Constitution Avenue when we heard about the first tower collapsing on the radio. Ended up walking to Georgetown to meet my girlfriend who was working at the hospital at the time. Eventually walked back to her place in Arlington, and later that evening drove back to my place in Alexandria.

Back to work the next day.

I was a sophomore in college in Boston but myself and one roommate were from NY. My roommate woke me up and I thought she was joking. Classes were cancelled and we frantically called our parents. My cousin was in one of the towers and we didn’t hear from him for hours (he made it out okay but to this day will not talk about what happened). My roommate’s uncle worked in one of the top floors of the WTC. She watched the footage and realized she was watching her uncle be killed. It was awful.

Seventh grade in a Long Island suburb of New York. They didn’t tell us anything, but I noticed parents signing their kids out of school by first period, which I thought was odd given it was the first week of school- mass sign outs only happened the day before vacations. My mom came to pick us up a few hours later. We watched the smoke in the distance from a bridge near our beach town.

My dad is a retired lawyer who worked in battery park at the time. He saw the first plane hit from his office and watched it burn. Only missed the second plane because he was trying to make it up to the roof for a better view. His building filled with dust when the towers collapsed. He walked across the Brooklyn bridge to get a subway - the a- train as close to Long Island as possible. My grandfather was a college professor downtown and it took us a few hours to track him down but he also walked across the bridge and made it home. We were lucky. It was a horrifying time.

Farragut North.

Here in Nova, I remember seeing fighter jets fly above when everything was grounded.

I was in 5th grade in the Midwest. The teacher wheeled the tv to the front of the classroom and turned on the news. We just sat there and silently watched. I think that was the turning point for me where the news went from just being background noise that was on the tv to something to pay attention to.

I was in 8th grade in a New York-adjacent suburb of CT. School started at 8:45am and they came on the loudspeakers to tell us what happened after the second plane hit. Just about everyone’s parents came to pick them up from school that day.

I was at my job at Walter Reed. My coworker and I were in a meeting with my boss to finalize a presentation she had to make later that week.

When the first plane hit, I was at a gas station in Arlington after dropping my eldest kid off at preschool. I was home in time to see the second plane on tv. I was supposed to take my younger kid to Arlington hospital ER that morning for some follow up treatment - they'd told me that they weren't usually very busy on Tuesday mornings. We didn't go.

In math class in Greenwich, CT. I had no idea where in Manhattan my dad worked and spent the entire morning wondering if he was dead until we were sent home early and my mom told me he was fine. Then we watched the footage over and over on the news. I was terrified of planes for almost a decade.