[MB64]

I'm sure many have stories to share. I'm sure many still remember what they were doing and where they were when the attacks occurred . I have stories, and pictures. This week I will share them with you....

[ronfc]

We're at the different side of the world when it happened. I was with my father, going home from touring me inside the airport and facilities, where he works. We turned ON the TV upon reaching home, it was about 11 PM here when we saw the news on a local channel that New York has been attacked. I didn't realized the gravity of the situation yet back then. But growing up, and eventually landing on a job in the aviation industry, I realized the changes it made on society.

[MB64]

Living in NY since around 1970, the WTC was a staple of the NY skyline. Seeing it built from the ground up, you could see it while under construction all the way from the Bronx. Walking anywhere in the city you'd look for the twin towers and use them as a compass to know which way was north and east...
Eventually I, like thousands of other New Yorkers, was proud to have worked there for a few years in the mid '80's. I worked 2WTC. I was a mail clerk for Shearson Lehman Brothers. We had floors 101 thru 107 leased in that building. I'd go to our company cafeteria and look out those narrow windows out towards the harbor or go down to the main shopping concourse and just walk around the different stores. Lots of white collar workers in the area. But you also had blue collar worker as well as there was usually some kind of construction going on around the area. Heck!! I even found 3 $100 bills coming out of the train station once!! Once I left that job I never went back there again. It was just to crowded for me, to fancy for me...not my type of place to go unless I had to. But I'd always see those twin towers back up in the Bronx, the radio antenna flashing it's light at night. Sometimes the building half covered with fog. But I knew that through all I that fog, they were there standing tall. Later this week I will share my story of my cousin who was , and still is a member of the NYPD and was there on that fateful morning.....

[rambo47]

I was on the last PATH train they let into the station that morning, right into the basement of the Towers. The first plane had already struck the North Tower and I suppose they just lost track of our train in all the confusion. I was working on the NYSE trading floor then and commuting from NJ into NYC every day. We got ferried off Manhattan Island late that afternoon via tugboat. My shoes were covered in dust from waling just 6 blocks to the Seaport. When I got home I showered and changed, slid my shoes (still covered in dust) under the bed, and didn't even LOOK at them for more than 12 years. I knew exactly where they were but couldn't bring myself to even look at them. If I needed to retrieve something under the bed I'd grope around blindly until I felt it, but I wouldn't/couldn't seem to actually look. I never had a dramatic reaction to 9-11. The usual anger, sadness, and resolve, but no emotional breakdown. But those damn shoes! I guess they were my kryptonite.The first time I cried about 9-11 was when Dev Group killed OBL. "Geronimo. For God and country, Geronimo."

Then six months ago, during a house-wide cleanup, it was just time. I pulled the shoes out from under the bed, dusted them off, and promptly threw those shoes in the garbage. Odd how a simple little thing can be so cathartic, but I needed something like that to put it all behind me once and for all. That was the second time I cried about 9-11. I think it was my last.

[TEMPURmental]

Was a very very sad day, we lost 3 of our friends and co workers that day, a day I try to lose in the back of my mind

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[MB64]

[BlackBerry Guy]

I remember the day clearly. I had just graduated from university earlier that summer, and was getting up early every morning to go to work at my first full time "grown up" job. It was a typical late summer day in Vancouver...warm and sunny. I was up just before 5:30am (Pacific time) and had heard some bits and pieces on the news about a plane crashing into the WTC. At first I thought it was just a terrible aviation accident. Just under an hour later, I had jumped into my car and was heading into work. I turned on the radio and that's when I heard about the 2nd plane. By the time I got into the office, it was all everyone was talking about. We had the news on pretty much all day, and as the news continued to filter in, I was in utter shock and disbelief. What really brought the impact home for me was seeing all those commercial airliners landing at Vancouver International as part of Operation Yellow Ribbon, and the 747 that had to be escorted in by a pair of F-15s.

[MB64]

I moved to Florida in 2000. In hindsight, I wish I had waited 1 more year . The day before 9/11 I had faxed some papers to the court system in NY. I had a newborn here in Florida, he was all of 6 days old. As with newborns, he kept me up most of the night and the flowing day (9/11), when I got up to go and turn in my resignation at my job I didn't turn on the TV as a was running late from being up most of the night. As I was driving, I called the courts systems in NY to get verification that they had received my papers the day before. They said they did "but with everything that is going on it may take some time to resolve". I asked what she meant by that and then she began to explain to me what had happened . My wife says I turned as pale as a ghost. As if something terrible had happened. I pulled over to regroup, turned on the radio and headed to my job where I watched in awe on the TV the events that had taken place earlier in the morning. Went back home and I think that for 3 long weeks I barely got any sleep. Wishing I was there to help out in any way I could. Waiting for the firemen to pull out a bunch of victims, but that never happened. My mother worked at the main post office on 34th st. Across the street from Madison Square Garden. They saw smoke coming out of the first building and then they all saw the second plane hit the towers. The post office was immediately evacuated as all federal and gkvt buildings shut down, however, Manhattan was under lock down and she didn't get home till well into the night. The following year when they had that massive blackout again she was stranded and slept on the steps of grand central station.....it was time for her to retire from the post office....

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[MB64]

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[MB64]

Tomorrow I will post some picture of my cousin working on site at ground zero and tell her story...

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[dlrogers81]

I was 19 and I was on my way to work and it was a nice, sunny morning and felt like it was going to be a great day and then about halfway to work, I started hearing the news on the radio. When they were first announcing it, it didn't sound as serious as what it was, just because it was so early and no one knew the true impact yet. Once I got to work and seen it all over the news, I realized how bad it truly was. I will never forget those exact moments in time.

[zephyr613]

I was in the Pentagon on that fateful day and it is a day I will never forget. I was co-managing a very large team of IT contractors running all of DOD's Networks at the time.I was actually 1500 yards from the impact site when the building exploded around me.I knew instantly what had happened even though I was blown off my feet and thrown through the air. I immediately went down to our NOC and started evacuating our people and was one of the last out the door, and once outside turned back to look at the utter devastation to the Building I had come to call "Home". Our team was evacuated on the other side of the building from where the plane impacted and into the parking lot.
There are many stories of our team rescuing children from the Pentagon Child Day care center and running with them away from the building. I was with my Management team who immediately stood up a crisis center in a building about 2 miles away - we walked/ran to that site to commandeer office space to set up the crisis center and almost immediately went into Disaster Recovery mode. It was about 4+ hours later that I was informed of some of the fatalities, some were co-workers, some were friends.We all took a moment of silence after being informed and then went right back to work gaining access to thee building even though it was still on fire. I lead a team of Disaster Recovery people from across different organizations to rescue the Network Servers, Routers and Switches and data that we could pull out. All of which led us to regain Network connectivity in a matter of hours. The data retrieval took more time but that was also accomplished.

For all of our work, we (both individually and as a Team) were awarded all kinds of Medals, and Plaques , but I would give every single one of those up to have those people back and for that day to have never occurred.

Now, living in the "post 9/11" age, the world has truly changed for me. I still have the same recurring nightmare every single night and I completely understand what Rambo47 stated about the shoes. Fortunately for him, he was able to throw those shoes out after 12 years, I cannot seem to move on after that, and while I originally thought I would not post anything here, after reading all the postings above, I felt it would be therapeutic for me to do so.. There is much MUCH more to my story (including a trip up to NYC requested by an agency in DC) about the days and weeks after that fateful day (including how the ONLY devices that seemed to have some sort of connectivity were our Blackberry's riding the Nextel Network using Push to Talk) but for now, I will leave it as is.

I think about that day and the hours after,every day of my life, especially having to explain to my young Children why Daddy had to go back into a burning building and sleeping in my car in the parking lot. I want to think that what I did was worth it, but I really don't know. Thee real heroes are the Firemen and Police both in DC and in NY who lost their lives trying to save people, as well as all of those who worked on the recovery up in the "pile".

I have been to NY many times since that day, but so far, haven't been able to bring myself to go see neither the New Freedom Tower not the 9/11 Museum, maybe at some point I will, but this year I will do what I always do which is go back down to the Pentagon, to the Memorial there and just think back to that time.

Cherish your time with your friends and family, as we never know when the rug will be pulled from underneath us.

Thank you all for listening and sharing....

[MB64]

That was some story. That was totally unexpected as I've yet to hear a story of someone involved in this tragedy, for the exception of my cousin. I commend you and thank you for sharing that story with us. I will go into a little more detail about my cousin tomorrow, but it took her till last year to finally go to her Dr. To see if she had any ailments from working in ground zero. Thank god she came out with a clean bill of health. She will not go to the museum as well or ground zero. I went this summer and I cried like it had just happend,still fresh in my mind.

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[MB64]

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[MB64]

To me, I had to go visit the site. I tried to go every year but just didn't have the time to do it. It will never be the same. No matter what they build their (or what has been built), what belongs their are the twin towers. Yes we move on, no we never forget.

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[randy050]

I am a sound engineer and was on tour with a well known rock band. I was sleeping in my bunk in our tour bus as we were heading to Tucson AZ. We were in a bad signal area and when we hit some use able signal my Motorola Star Tac buzzed with a message from my mom about some horrible attack in NYC. I got up and went out to the front lounge and turned on the satellite TV. It took a while to lock on but it did just as the second plane hit. I thought I had some Sci fi movie on or something. I started scanning channels and when I hit a cartoon channel that was carrying a news feed I figured this is real and serious. I told the driver and we pulled over to hold tv signal and I started waking everyone up. All the cell phones were not connecting so whenever someone got signal we used that phone. We went on to Tucson and actually did the show because the promoter and money people insisted. We actually had a packed crowd but I felt really weird that we shouldn't have done the show. But not my call. We continued on and finished that leg of the tour about 3 weeks later. I flew home from LAX and it was a mad house of armed security. At my gate people were refusing to board if 3 darker skinned men with accents got on the plane. It was insane and I was glad to finally get home.

[MB64]

My cousin was a cop with the NYPD at the time. She was on her way to battery park for some training that morning. For those of you that don't know, battery park is practically right down the street to the south of WTC . She was driving an NYPD van when the first place struck. She immediately went into action and she began to pick up people into her van and drive them to a "safe zone" I'm assuming several blocks away., just to get them out of harms way. She made several trips and then realized that people in the courtyard of the buildings needed assistance and first aid as well as she said that one person in particular was shredded with cuts from the large glass windows when they exploded with the impact. She tried to attend to several people on the court yard when all of a sudden a woman came crying to her begging her to get her away from there. She told the lady that the people there needed her attention. The lady explained to her ( I guess and showed her) that she was pregnant and was concerned for both her safety and that of her unborn. My cousin reconsidered and decided to make one more trip. She took her and a few others. And just as she was pulling away, the first tower collapsed. The way my cousin describes it, that was her guardian angel. My cousin wound up spending several months there during the clean up at ground zero. I believe she said she'd work like 16 hour shifts. She would go to her mothers house after her shift in Williamsburg, Brooklyn just across the bridge. She and several co-workers and boss would arrive at my aunts house covered in soot from head to toe, shower and eat and try to get a little rest....and head right back out. This went on for several months. For her to tell her story sounded (and seemed) to be like something out of a war movie. The smell, the stench, all of the artifacts or personal belongings that she found. For years she never went to the hospital to check her health. I think she did it just this past year and she was OK. She has not gone down to ground zero ever again. In the news you always here the reporter saying that "pictures cannot describe what you see" and I believe that. You had to stand there in the middle of that courtyard to see how tall those buildings were and comprehend what happened. I wonder if that lady my cousin rescued is OK, I wonder if she has a healthy baby. I wonder what her story would be. Later on today I will post some pictures that my cousin took when she was working at ground zero.

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[Norg]

God Bless NYC, God Bless the United States, God Bless us all...for ever more!!

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[zephyr613]

Sigh,

Well, after much thought and contemplation, I decided to go down to the Pentagon Memorial today. It has been a couple of years since I could bring myself to go down there, bur I felt it was necessary. Not only to sit in the memorial area and remember those who were lost, but for me as well, hoping to move along with my life.

I spent about 2 hrs down there, sitting on the benches with the water flowing underneath each of them, thinking of those lost soles, some off which I knew. While it was somewhat therapeutic, it brought back all those horrible memories. I sometimes thought that I could still smell the burning of the building, the jet fuel and all that screaming - over and over.

After a while, I needed to move on from the site, and on my way back to my car, I saw am old friend, a 2 Star General across the parking lot. He and I recognized each other from about 300 feet, we both stopped in out tracks. But then, he did something that absolutely shocked me - he stood ram rod straight, and saluted me. I saluted him back and then - we just walked away in different directions, knowing that we would see each other again.

That statement, that physical, expressive and most respectful Salute, meant more to me on this day that I can ever express.

It was a semi-therapeutic time while I was down there, and I will continue to keep trying to get out of this rut that is identified as PTSD.

It is my up most hope and dream that our Children will never EVER have to deal with something like this, but I can only hope...

To all of you have may just be viewing this thread and were in someway involved on that fateful day, talk to someone, anyone a Therapist, a Doctor or a best friend. sometimes it helps.

I have decided that I am going to donate some off my medals, relics, coins, plaques and even a large burnt piece of the outer Pentagon building, still wrapped in a Law Enforcement/Police/MP evidence bag as well as some of my ID badges to the 9/11 Memorial Museum up in New York. I haven't decided when I will be going up there to do this, but it will be semi-soon.

It is again, my hope that these donation's bring some peace to the Families, and the Hero's of that terrible day.

[Aljean Thein]

I was just a little boy when it happened. Watching it at home right before school starts. I thought nothing of it. But it was in every news channel that time.

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[VictorRight]

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