Ask HN: What’s your 9/11 story?

I was in middle school, about 90 miles north of NYC, in a school district where a lot of parents commuted to the city for work. It was a cloudless morning, near the start of the school year — I was in 7th grade, and my dad had commuted into the city as usual.

Sometime during the day we became aware that something was going on, but the faculty kept us in the dark. A lot of my classmates also had parents who worked in the city, and I think the administration was wary of upsetting anyone before we were sure if anyone was directly impacted. Regardless, some news trickled in, but most of it was wrong. I remember one classmate saying she'd heard that the Pentagon had been bombed. I found that so upsetting.

Near the end of the day, my social studies teacher told us everything she knew. As she said: "my job is to teach history, and this is history." Most of what she knew was wrong — information was very fluid that day and the news didn't know what to report — but I appreciate what she did.

My dad got home late that night. He'd been in his Midtown office when the second plane hit, watching from a colleague's corner office. They evacuated the whole building, and he started running for Central Park — nobody was sure what was happening, and he wanted to be in a wide-open space in case the city was being bombed. He said cabbies were parked along the streets with their doors open and their radios turned up, so people on the street could hear the news as they ran.

He made it to Grand Central to catch one of the last trains out of New York, but they were evacuated twice due to bomb threats from opportunistic copycats. He considered walking uptown to stay with relatives who lived in the city, but finally they let him on the train. He caught the last train out of Manhattan. He remembers vividly sitting on the train silently along with the other commuters. There was a woman on his car who was covered in ash and smoke, and she burst into tears as the train passed out of Manhattan.

For days, surfaces throughout the city were covered with home-printed posters of missing relatives. Miraculously, nobody's parents from my school district were killed that day. My dad started taking steps to work closer-to-home and out of New York City soon after.

Freshman year of high school, middle of the country. I was walking to English class in passing period and people going in the opposite direction were chattering with excitement about something. I saw a friend and he said, did you hear? They blew up the World Trade Center. He was smiling not with happiness but with like crazy excitement.

Then I got to English class where they had a TV set up watching the news coverage and a few other teachers came in with their classes to share the TV. One of them said, there it goes, the whole world’s finance is in that building.

The horror of it all didn’t really kick in. Not it sure if that was due to being 14, or due to experiencing it all through TV, or just being kind of a bastard at the time. I feel a lot more sensitive to loss and human life now that I’m older, some of the old footage I’ve seen this week has affected me a lot.

Nobody knew anything about it until I got to social studies class where my teacher told us that bin Laden has claimed responsibility but having never heard the name before I thought he was saying “Ben Laden” due to his midwestern pronunciation of the vowel sound, so I was picturing perhaps an Englishman.

In science class I remember half of us were trying to convince the teacher that there was no way we could come to school tomorrow. Totally disingenuously.

The news reports all suggested nothing would be the same but as a kid from the suburbs far from NYC, everything seemed the same but we had the national anthem going off more often and people started to argue about the wars a couple years later. Only after many years could I see in hindsight how different our path has been from others we all might have taken.

I was in elementary school at the time 11 miles away, just across the river, in NJ. They really didn't want us to see the news so they took all of us into the main auditorium and had us just sit. A few of the parents of the other children worked in the city. They made it an early release day.

One of my parents worked close by and my cousin lived close too. Her house had a clear line of sight to the towers with some binoculars. I remember seeing little black dots fall out of buildings and I remember wondering if they were chairs. I am older now and understand it was people. I missed the collapse of the first tower but saw the second fall through the binoculars.

A lot of my classmates didn't show up for a few days. I didn't understand the gravity of what had happened until was quite a bit older.

I remember ABC news was playing all day and associate the voice of Peter Jennings to that day.

I plan on watching the Nat Geo documentary, One Day in America. Last year I tried the 110 flight stair climb challenge, the same total as the towers, and gained a different level of appreciation for what the responders and volunteers faced that day.

I was in college. I told a professor I would put a sign on their 8am classes door that class was canceled. It was Greek studies.

So I made a goofy picture of Honer Simpson with a donut for a head eating himself saying “Mmm I’m delicious”. Underneath it said “Professor so-and-sos 8 am Greek studies class on Sept 11 is cancelled”.

I woke up early, walked across campus, put the sign up, came back and went back to bed.

I woke back up between 10-11, turns on the TV and they were focused on the first plane then the second plane… And of course we know the rest :(

I was in my 3rd year of college, I woke up early for some reason and was watching CNN while eating some breakfast. I was watching when they went to the building after the first plane hit and everyone was scrambling to figure out what was going on. I can still remembering watching live as the 2nd plane came into the camera shot and slammed into it live. It was surreal. At the time I was taking Arabic and Middle Eastern studies classes. I remembering just being stunned. I was glued to the TV the rest of the day watching. I felt the same thing Jan 6th 2021, I sat there watching the capital videos with my mouth open along with my wife. I was watching the proceedings randomly and watched as the Senate started freaking out and calling for everyone to get out of the room. Those two events just left me stunned and trying to grapple with the new world we just entered.

If you want to imagine what it was like on 9/11 on CNN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iwlFFM3DDQ

Go to 13:25 to see the 2nd plane hit it live.