This sorta fell out when I was writing the next draft of my sixth grade thing

[Golden Applesauce]

In science class that Tuesday morning, our social studies teacher hurried in, breathing heavily. "Turn on CNN!" she said. "Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center!"

Most of us had never heard of the World Trade Center, but we were about to find out. The television showed two tall rectangular buildings. One was on fire, and a huge plume of smoke was pouring out. The camera alternated between street view, with bits of ash falling down and people panicking. Then the station got a video someone had managed to take of the plane smashing into the building. They didn't have anything better to show, so they ran that clip over and over again, intermixed with live footage of the smoke and panic. When the second plane hit, at first we thought it was just another re-run of the first. When the class understood, we became very quiet.

Two planes do not hit the same building on the same day by accident.

Then the Pentagon was hit. This was now an act of war.

We rotated between classrooms as normal, but the teachers didn't say much. Every classroom had the television on. We watched as more and more smoke filled the sky until it became a weather pattern. At street level, the police and firefighters had cordoned off the area and were moving people away from the World Trade Center. Two or three of the layered walls of the Pentagon had been breached. The first tower collapsed. The people on the street had not been evacuated far enough: a tidal wave of ash and debris engulfed the cameraman. We saw human bodies mixed in with the huge chunks of concrete falling from the sky as the building pancaked. We saw people jumping from the second tower.

People were very afraid. We thought it was going to be World War Three. Even as kids, we knew that if World War Three happened the nukes would go off and everyone on the Earth would die, killed by the bombs and radiation and then all the plants would die, choked of light by thick clouds like the one over New York City right now and nothing would ever live on the planet again. A lot of parents took their children home from school early, so they could be with their family in the last days.

Then we began to hear about Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was the terrorist network that was behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. They had members all over the globe. They hated America and our freedoms and would do anything to kill us. The news played videos of Palestinian children dancing in the streets. High ranking military officers told us that Al-Qaeda probably had hundreds of sleeper cells hidden throughout America, ready to carry out a second wave of attacks. They would attack soft targets like stadiums and shopping malls and schools. They would use dirty bombs or sarin gas or smallpox or the bubonic plague. We didn't have to wait long; Al-Qaeda started mailing anthrax manufactured by Saddam Hussein's Iraq to various senators and news agencies the next week.

It turned out that the videos of children dancing were from an unrelated festival weeks earlier. The FBI concluded a few years ago that the anthrax was stolen from a USA government lab, not made in Iraq, and had nothing nothing to do with Al-Qaeda whatsoever.

We didn't know that at the time. You have to understand that everyone was very scared, and when people are scared they make bad decisions.

[Jez]

I was in my first semester of college when it happened.  I turned the TV to CNN to see what was going on in the world while I was getting ready.  There was a bit of grainy footage of a plane flying near the towers, then fire.  I thought someone had made a bombing run at New York.  I remember kind of flumphing down on the sofa, dumbfounded.  All I could think was that someone had poked the sleeping dragon.

[Suu]

Got dragged out of bed in the morning by my mom. I was off of school that day, early in my sophomore year of college mark I. Got up in enough time to see the 2nd plane hit.

Lost 4 relatives in that, and my uncle didn't realize part of his ass was missing until he was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Mom served on of the terrorists in the restaurant we both worked in about a week earlier. He was at a flight school in Sarasota, and was driving through St. Petersburg to get to the airport in Tampa for Boston, and stopped for dinner.  The FBI and CIA paid a couple visits to us for questioning. Took the credit card slips from the restaurant records, thanked us, and wished us well.

I'm over most of it now, but I avoid the television like the plague every year on the anniversary. I can't watch the towers fall. I can't relive that day, or the weeks after when they finally found the bodies of my uncles and cousins: Heroes, supposedly. Working in the NYPD and FDNY.

2 weeks later, dad found out he got a job in Providence, and had to move. I fought my parents over staying to finish my degree.

And I thought this last semester was hard.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I've told this here before, in bits.

IIRC, I was at home, getting ready for work. There was live footage of the first tower on fire, and Matt and Katy were talking about how somebody accidentally crashed a plane into it, as far as they could tell. Then another plane came into the frame and I remember thinking "Shouldn't they be using a helicoptor? How do you rescue people with a plane?" A brain can throw up some stupid shit sometimes.

KA BOOM. That's what happened, and that's what the MBTA driver said when I got on the bus. That, and "We've gotta stop pissing off these other countries." He was cool, we were friends. Gallows humor, and he made a good point. (Wasn't the first time the WTC had been bombed, after all. What the hell were they doing to people?) Everybody was glaring at us but being from Texas, I'm used to that.

A security guard told me later outside the mall that the Pentagon had been bombed and that's when I got worried about WWIII breaking out any minute, just like GA said, with the nukes and everything dead, dead, dead. I wanted the day to hurry up and be over so I could die with my kids if that happened. I didn't know it generally seems to take about two years to jump into a war. Other than that, it was business as usual and they had the same shitty DVD repeating endlessly on the display TV's. Alanis Morrisette or something equally horrible, maybe the one with LeAnne Rimes singing about commitment like her pussy was so golden that some guy'd better sacrifice his whole life just so he can get it.

The real crazy started on the ride home. The bus driver said to me (but making sure the whole bus heard it) that he was WRONG to joke about that and he REGETTED it and it was THE MOST HORRIBLE THING THAT HAD EVER HAPPENED or something to that effect. After that there were flags on everybody's houses and no air traffic and they were playing fucking SOUSA MARCHES in Walgreen's. And we got a break from Alanis or LeAnne or whatever, corporate sent out a memo that we could keep the TV's on the news and watch people paw through the busted concrete for bodies. Wahoo. People would come in and watch and cry and say how they wanted to kill Muslims. All I could think about was the Arab guys who had the Dollar Days store at the other end of the mall and how they hadn't been to work since. I kept looking for them, but all I ever saw was white kids working there after that. I never saw them again. They were nice people.

There was a tribal looking Suanese man with patterned scarification on his head who used to come in when Sprint gouged him (Sprint always counted on people not understanding how their daytime vs. nights/weekend minutes work), he said Muslims would raid Sudan and kidnap people for slavery. So I could understand why he wanted to kill Muslims. But not these fat white fuckers who didn't even know anybody at the WTC. Mass has a big faction as stupid as Texans, even if people don't wear cowboy hats. But the crossing guard on the way to my daughter's school was great. He heard a guy in a restaurant say that we need to "deport ALL the foreigners, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans..." and he called him out on it. This crossing guard had a son working in the Pentagon when it was hit (but not the part that got hit, luckily) and he was a lot angrier at the racists than the bombers. I miss that guy.

Lynn had a Hell's Angels chapter and they were usually low key, but in the days after 911 there were lots of them roaring around town in groups, flying colors, making a big show and looking for some shit. The cops, for once, didn't fuck with them. This made it occur to me how weird things would get if we ever really did get invaded.

Which we didn't. Sad all those people died but no reason to make such a clusterfuck out of the aftermath.

[Suu]

I had issue with the momentary patriotism as well. I don't need to fly the colors to know I'm an American. This country pisses me the fuck off a lot, but that doesn't change where I was born.

In some ways, I figured it was therapy for some: A way to atone for those "sins" of bitching about the president, or not voting at all, or not even watching the nightly news. I really see nothing wrong with celebrating one's nationality, but you shouldn't use a national tragedy or the Fourth of July as your only excuses to do so.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I had issue with the momentary patriotism as well. I don't need to fly the colors to know I'm an American. This country pisses me the fuck off a lot, but that doesn't change where I was born.

In some ways, I figured it was therapy for some: A way to atone for those "sins" of bitching about the president, or not voting at all, or not even watching the nightly news. I really see nothing wrong with celebrating one's nationality, but you shouldn't use a national tragedy or the Fourth of July as your only excuses to do so.

It didn't strike me as "I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees" patriotism, it was more like rooting for a sports team except it was "us vs. Muslims" and the scoring apparently went by body count. Just a really creepy strident racist nationalism, and a Hitler could have stepped in and said "I'll get those towelheads for ya" and they'd have been cheering him on.

Which is pretty much what Bush did anyway. That was another thing I overheard, "We're gonna see if Bush puts on the boxing trunks or the panties".

[P3nT4gR4m]

I was at work, came down to the factory and heard it on the radio. Boss told me - a plane had been flown into world trade center. First thing I thought was "awesome, just like fight club" Boss didn't see the funny side. "That's people dying there, have a heart." he told me.

"It's always people dying" I said "If I had a heart the news would have killed it years ago."

People die on the news. Sometimes just one or two, other times it's thousands. Thank my lucky stars it wasn't anyone I care about, wake up tomorrow and do it all again. Sooner or later it is someone I care about and that sucks. Fuck feeling like that every time it's six PM and I'm sitting down to my dinner. Once was enough.

I felt the same as I felt all those times I'd seen the brown people blowing the piss out each other with American and Russian ordnance, nothing, with a side order of "Quelle surprise."

Jingosim kicked into high gear. Elmer Fudd was on teevee, ranting about Axis of Evil and Operation Landgrab like, yeah, make the world ten times worse is the most obvious solution and Iraq got stomped and Afghanistan got stomped and I found an old tin of engine oil in my shed and I got rid of it just in case they decided there was a "terrorist training camp" or "WMD's" in my back garden and I got fucking stomped.

I've seen the footage of the places that got "Freedomated" I'd be a liar if I said I didn't see where they were coming from. I don't necessarily have to agree with the way they're making it to see their point.

[Golden Applesauce]

There was one kid who kept making the same stupid joke about the stock exchange crashing, even though I told him that they had closed trading for the day. Adults said we could be a targets because we were near Oak Ridge, which even I could tell was stupid because Oak Ridge was like an hour and a half away. I think they were afraid, and needed to invent a good reason to be afraid.

I don't really remember the surge in patriotism... or maybe I don't remember much from before to have a good point of comparison? Tennessee flew a lot of flags to begin with. Businesses were certainly more public about in, like July 4 had come early but more so.

I remember eagerly reading the newspaper to find out more about the science of bio-weapons, and the general public being unable to understand the difference between bacteria and viruses and antibiotic resistant vs modified for better transmission. There was some thing where Dick Cheney suggested that in event of a bioterror attack you should duct tape up all of your doors and windows and the there was a run on duct tape and the manufacturing company had to announce that duct tape was not air proof and would not stop airborne pathogens.

A news crew came in to our school and interviewed some of us. The evening news got a clip of me saying something along the lines "my Dad could have been on one of those planes" because he was flying around for business a lot back then.

It wasn't until years later in a college psych course that I found out about much psychology knew about the effect of the Columbia disaster on all the schoolchildren who watched it that I became angry about how my school handled 9/11.

[Cain]

Strangely enough, I was also in a science class when I heard about the World Trade Centre attack.

I remember it pretty clear.  It was afternoon, a double session of Physics.  Not my favourite subject, even within the sciences, and made worse by the teacher's monotonous Welsh accent.  There had been whispers after lunch about something going on in New York, a plane crash and a building on fire or something.

The whispers continued through the afternoon.  I don't know how people were getting the news, but by the time we had gone to our afternoon registration session before heading home, the rumours had become more clear.  Two planes had hit the World Trade Center.

Already something of a current affairs nerd, I wondered at first if what was going on in Israel had anything to do with this.  The whole situation there didn't make a lot of sense, but it had been in the news lately.  Plus, they did suicide bombings.  If you're prepared to suicide bomb someone, flying a plane into a building isn't really all that far out as a next step.

As we lined up for the buses, there were whispers of war.  No-one knew exactly against who, or what, or why, but everyone was sure that we'd be at war real soon.  Some idiots were even talking about nuclear weapons.  I recall thinking they were idiots at the time, but I fervently hoped they were wrong, just in case.

By the time I had returned home, the TV was on, with the news running.  They were talking about Afghanistan.  That surprised me, since I'd actually heard of Afghanistan.  I remembered the 2000 USS Cole bombing, and also the destruction of Buddhist statues there not long ago.  I wasn't so clear on Bin Laden, or his precise relationship to the Taliban, but the path ahead seemed pretty clear.  The news stations had, by the time I had returned from walking the dog, gone into a kind of apocalyptic-derived depression, glumly recounting all the possible ways in which terrorists would kill us by the thousands.

[Golden Applesauce]

There was a thing where a woman discovered an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell at an Arby's. The Feds intercepted the terrorists' minivan on the highway and did controlled demolitions of backpacks and stuff because they thought there might be bombs. The president called the woman a national hero and said everyone should follow her example.

Later, the "terrorists" turned out to be ordinary guys trying to eat lunch when this obnoxious woman began blatantly eavesdropping on them and giving them dirty looks... so they decided to put on a show with their best fake foreign accents and "Great Satan" cliches.

People said that they ought to have known better than to make jokes like that in the public privacy of their own restaurant table, and said they should be billed for the whole antiterror operation. Some people said the woman was an idiot and probably racist, but more said "better safe than sorry" and that Muslim was a religion, not a race. Everyone forgot about the whole thing pretty quickly.

Between that and all the pranksters across the country who sprinkled flour on their shoes to try to get people to lighten up about the whole anthrax thing, I've always thought of telling jokes in public to be a subversive act.

[Golden Applesauce]

By the time I had returned home, the TV was on, with the news running.  They were talking about Afghanistan.  That surprised me, since I'd actually heard of Afghanistan.  I remembered the 2000 USS Cole bombing, and also the destruction of Buddhist statues there not long ago.  I wasn't so clear on Bin Laden, or his precise relationship to the Taliban, but the path ahead seemed pretty clear.  The news stations had, by the time I had returned from walking the dog, gone into a kind of apocalyptic-derived depression, glumly recounting all the possible ways in which terrorists would kill us by the thousands.

Our house had a couple of afghans, which were a kind of crocheted fuzzy blanket or something.

That was more than any of our neighbors had heard about Afghanistan, not that I had heard of the place either. Then again, I thought "Bulgaria" was a fictional country invented to be Tom Swift Jr's Cold War antagonist as a stand in for Russia, so I didn't have the best geographical awareness.

[Cain]

I used to read the world news in the morning, while drinking coffee to wake up.  Also, some of the few books I was allowed to read in the house were the full edition of the Encylopaedia Britannica.  Living out in the middle of nowhere and having lots of spare time meant I had a fairly eclectic knowledge base for a 14 year old.