How did you hear about the 9/11 attacks? Where were you for the 2001 Rice game?

[God is a Husker]

Bump

 

[ChocaEgg]

Bump

Gotta love Ilhan Al-Shabaab

 

[Cash68847]

I think it's possible that the game wasn't televised live, but widely covered by the sports media. At least that's what huskermax suggests.

I was in class learning how the hot girls had no interest in introverts like me, while the windows were open so we could hear the stadium reactions.

I was going to say I didn’t think it was on tv. I listened to it on the radio.

 

[HuskerPsych]

I was at a 3 day meeting at the Marriott in Dana Point, CA and had gone down for breakfast. They had set up a TV so we could watch. It was surreal at first, like a movie. Around 1PM they cancelled the rest of the meeting and told us to drive home.

About that same time there was a rumor that there was another plane headed for L.A. That had a huge impact on the traffic as in it just disappeared. When I drove back to Newport Beach from Dana Point on the 5/405 Freeways one of the busiest in SoCal, a distance of about 30 miles, I saw maybe 50 cars total on the road. That image sticks with me to this day. Like the end of the world empty.

In early December I attended a neurology preceptorship in Connecticut and stayed in Manhattan. I walked down to Ground Zero and it was still a gigantic open hole. I remember thinking how large the area was. Each of those buildings had their own zip code to give you an idea of what a presence those buildings were. The most emotional part was seeing the hundreds of pictures of missing people and requests for information on each put up by family and friends. That was tough.

I remember the Tunnel Walk from the Rice game.

I was setting up my new office that morning. My first day on the unit as the director of a VA residential substance abuse program. First job outside of the Navy. Had a couple vets come down telling me that a plane flew into the World Trade Center. We watched the news in the lunchroom as the events unfolded and it became clear it wasn't an accident. Had quite a few veterans fired up and ready to reenlist. As the new director I was expecting a real shitshow to develop on the unit, but we managed fairly well and there wasn't a lot of drama. A lot of PTSD triggered and definitely a lot of intense anger vented in the groups for several months

 

[kenyanfeline]

I was in 5th grade at the time and my teacher showed the news for a bit until our school sent us home mid morning.

My uncle worked in the Pentagon in an administrative role for the Navy at the time. I remember walking a few blocks to my grandmas house after school was let out and seeing her and my grandpa frantically looking at photos of the pentagon and comparing it to tv footage to try to find out if his office was in the area hit. They couldn’t come to a definitive conclusion for a few hours until finally he was able to call and say he was one section over and unharmed.

The Rice game, I have no recollection of.

 

[God is a Husker]

 

[MrKnightedHusker]

I was at a 3 day meeting at the Marriott in Dana Point, CA and had gone down for breakfast. They had set up a TV so we could watch. It was surreal at first, like a movie. Around 1PM they cancelled the rest of the meeting and told us to drive home.

About that same time there was a rumor that there was another plane headed for L.A. That had a huge impact on the traffic as in it just disappeared. When I drove back to Newport Beach from Dana Point on the 5/405 Freeways one of the busiest in SoCal, a distance of about 30 miles, I saw maybe 50 cars total on the road. That image sticks with me to this day. Like the end of the world empty.

In early December I attended a neurology preceptorship in Connecticut and stayed in Manhattan. I walked down to Ground Zero and it was still a gigantic open hole. I remember thinking how large the area was. Each of those buildings had their own zip code to give you an idea of what a presence those buildings were. The most emotional part was seeing the hundreds of pictures of missing people and requests for information on each put up by family and friends. That was tough.

I remember the Tunnel Walk from the Rice game.

The mess was ominous in NYC. I was in NYC the first day that flights were flying in again, for an event I was to speak at. My bride and I walked around Ground Zero and it was bizarre. One jewelry store a block and a half away was closed up, sealed tight, but the accumulation of fine ash was everywhere inside - making the displays six inches larger by the ash outline. We stared at that for probably ten minutes or so - a lot to take in.

There was a loud preacher woman shouting the Gospel on a corner - normally people in NYC would be walking by and completely ignoring something like that. There probably 50+ people surrounding her and hinging on every word.

The air was thick with all kinds of crap and our throats were sore within half an hour. But to stand by the NY Marriot Marquis and look both directions, there was a very surreal vibe going on. I realized it was the site of tons of cabs, but no one was honking or making much noise at all. And as I sneezed, a stranger in NYC said, "May God bless you." This was not the NYC I had known, it was a surreal and different place, even if just temporarily.

 

[vailhusker]

 

[Blackshirtproud]

I've posted my story a few times on TMB and RSS.

Worked the early shift on the flight line at GRI. After fueling the airlines, FedEx and UPS, I typically had about two hrs until the rest of the staff came in at 8:00. Usually, I would talk with my bud up in the tower until things would get more busy. He told me to hang on as the squak was going off for him.
He said something was happening in NY and would radio back and let me know.

In the next 10-15 our secretary called me freaking out telling me NY was getting bombed and told me to turn on the tv.
Turned on the tv and, Holy shit!

Air port director, faa and tower manager came speeding in to the airport office. After a bit is when we were told airspace was closed! Our entire ramp was covered with just about every type of aircraft you could think of.
It looked like the scenes from Pearl Harbor, trying to keep aircraft from clipping each other taxing around.

Shit felt more real hrs later as phone services were basically jammed and unable to make call.

Proud of my crew that day but wish it never had to happen.

 

[NebHurr]

I was working at the University of Wisconsin and was attending a Tuesday morning retina conference from 7 am to 8 am cst on 9-11-01. While I was walking out of UW's University Station, I saw all the ophthalmology patients looking at a television screen with smoke coming from a hole in New York Trade Center's North Tower. I asked the patients what they were watching. I thought maybe it was a trailer for a new Bruce Willis Die Hard movie. The patients told me a Cessna airplane accidentally hit the North Tower. I walked to the University of Wisconsin Hospital & Clinics and then heard another airplane hit the South Tower. That was when we all knew we were attacked by terrorists. After the Pentagon got hit, I called my father, who worked at the Pentagon, and he told me the airplane hit the opposite side of the Pentagon from his office. I believe the area of the Pentagon hit was a newly constructed office space, so not many people worked on that side of Pentagon yet. Those were scary times! I did go visit the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial around 2009 and the plane that hit the Pentagon came in very low to the ground and practically skipped off the Shirley Highway before hitting the west side of the Pentagon.

I went to a West Point event in Tyson's Corner in Fairfax County, Virginia in 2008 and my dad's classmate was a 2 star general in the Army. He told me that Secretary of State Colin Powell was outright against going into Iraq and, even to some degree, Afghanistan in 2003. He told George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, "it is fine that you guys want to go into Afghanistan and even Iraq in order to hunt down ObL and to find and destroy Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, respectively, but what is your exit plan?" They had none and that is why Colin Powell left his cabinet position with GWB. I agree with Colin Powell! IMO, we should have went to Afghanistan only and stayed there until we found and hunted down Osama bin Laden, but we had no business going to Iraq. And don't get me started on the conflicts of interests Dick Cheney had in getting a long-term war started in the Middle East (e.g. former chairman and CEO of Halliburton). According to my dad's military buddies, Bush and Cheney were planning to do something militarily in Iraq the minute they won the 2000 election. 9/11 gave them the excuse to go to war there too in addition to Afghanistan. My dad graduated West Point in 1952 and went directly to the Korean War, where half of his West Point class of 1952 died in Korea! In essence, war results in no winners! Everyone loses! Military power can solve some problems, but it often creates more! Sheesh, in Afghanistan alone, we wasted $2.3 trillion dollars, 10 years of direct war and the 10 more years trying to exit this war, 2,400 US lives lost, and countless disabled young men and women for what? For all the wars in the Middle East caused by our reaction to 9/11, we spent $6.4 trillion dollars and 801,000 people have died as a direct result of fighting. Interestingly, the majority of the money we spent in the Middle East the past 20 years stayed in the US as it went to contracted US military-industrial complex companies, who make money by producing all the supplies, equipment, weapons, and technology needed to kill humans in our wars.

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www.washingtonpost.com

 

[NebHurr]

Over the past 20 years, the costs of this new policy regime — costs in terms of lives lost, money spent, people and whole communities displaced, bodies tortured — have become clear. It behooves us, then, to try to answer a simple yet vast question: Was it worth it?

A good-faith effort to answer this question — to tally the costs and benefits on the ledger and not just resort to one’s ideological priors — is more challenging than you’d think. That’s largely because it involves quantifying the inherently unquantifiable, but some things can be measured. There have been no 9/11-scale terrorist attacks in the United States in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, according to the most recent estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, at least 897,000 people around the world have died in violence that can be classified as part of the war on terror; at least 38 million people have been displaced due to these wars; and the effort has cost the US at least $5.8 trillion, not including about $2 trillion more needed in health care and disability coverage for veterans in decades to come.

When you lay it all out on paper, an honest accounting of the war on terror yields a dismal conclusion: Even with an incredibly generous view of the war on terror’s benefits, the costs have vastly exceeded them. The past 20 years of war represent a colossal failure by the US government, one it has not begun to reckon with or atone for.

20 years, $6 trillion, 900,000 lives

The enormous costs and elusive benefits of the war on terror.

www.vox.com

 

[TooTall]

Was at work in Orlando, when the news came on the TV in the waiting room, everyone gathered around to watch the events unfold live for several hours.

Our country after that event changed overnight, everyone was unified, there were Flags and God Bless America signs and banners hanging everywhere.

It was a horrible tragic event, but i have never been prouder of this country than the months after 9/11.

I'd love our country to be unified like that again, just hope it doesn't take another tragedy to do it.

 

[nscottie]

Active duty stationed Germany. It was towards the end of the work day. For the next week, we were all told to stay home.