Remember 9/11

[christiangirl]

I was getting ready for school when I found out. That day marked my being 16 for exactly two weeks, so I was a little excited (but also grumpy because being 16 had sucked so far). I had a club meeting before class so I was rushing my dad. My mom ran out in her underwear, yelling at us to turn on the tv...something about a plane crash and a building. Unfortunately, when I was 16, I was extremely selfish. If it didn't revolve around me, I didn't care. Plus, I was still embarassed about seeing people in their underwear, so I fussed at my mom to go back in her room and put some clothes on. Even though I caught a few glimpses of fire on the TV, I didn't stop to watch because I didn't want to be late to my meeting. It was the African American Student Union, my favorite club. I dragged my dad out the door, but when I got to the room my meeting was in, everyone was silent and staring at the tv. I knew something was up--we'd always begged our teachers to let us watch TV if there was nothing left to do in class, but it'd never been allowed. That's when I found out exactly what happened. I was shocked and scared. The reporter was saying something about "acts of war." War was something we read about in textbooks...something really old people went off on tangents about...it wasn't something that happened anymore. A war couldn't really be coming, could it? The thought terrified me and blew my mind. All my classmates with family in NY were crying and asking people to pray. I went to Catholic school, so we prayed multiple times during the day. If my memory serves me correctly, we had an emergency mass that day. We weren't allowed to donate blood because we were teens...we didn't have any money to buy supplies to give. We all felt so helpless...like little kids even though we were almost adults, we should've been able to do something. All we could do was pray...

[KSUViolet06]

I remember it pretty well myself. It was my senior year and I was at school. I was on my way to American Government, which was 3rd period. When I got to class, my teacher had it on TV and was staring at it and not saying anything.

When we started watching, I believe the first plane had hit. We were all sitting in class super confused thinking that this was an accident of some sort. Then I remember the anchor saying that this was believed to be a terrorist attack.

As we were watching in horror, the second plane hit. We were supposed to be taking a quiz that day, but once the plane hit, the teacher told us that what we were seeing was more important than a quiz and we watched the coverage for the rest of the period. In the rest of our classes, that's all we did, watch the coverage.

None of us could concentrate the rest of the day. We were all really worried. We knew it was all the way in NY, but we didn't know what else was going to happen. Because we were naive HS kids, we figured that if terrorists could fly planes into buildings, they could blow up something closer to us like Browns Stadium (slightly funny in retrospect).

Some kids insisted on going home and just left school, some parents were calling frantically trying to get their kids to be excused early. Everybody was just really worried, scared, and wanted to be at home with their families.

[AKA_Monet]

I remember waking up seeing it on the TV News. Then being told that "terrorists" hit these locations. Then wondering why would "terrorists" hit building with plane when the Republicans are in office? That was just crazy... Especially with General Colin Powell in the 3rd government position--he KNOWS how to fight wars...

I also remember many of my military friends were hella pissed off about what happened. It was like, they have trained and trained on "readiness" for any attack and they were not allowed to do somethings that they knew about--let's just leave it at that...

Then, it dawned on me, we fell for the gank move, big time...