1 Life is so phuckin precious, it's so hard to truly value life without the reminder of death.

2 Obama is a stuttering clusterf*ck of a miserable failure.

3 1 Life is so phuckin precious, it's so hard to truly value life without the reminder of death.

Posted by: proudonkey at September 11, 2011 09:21 PM (NadeK)

So your Planned Parenthood takes care of that for everyone?

I'm one mile from the Pentagon. My day was a little more frantic. Did you know that the smell lasted for a week miles from the Pentagon?

4 And this is just one battle in the centuries long war that the koranimals have been fighting.  Thank G-d they are mostly hapless losers most of the time.  They will keep coming and coming and coming.  It's what they've always done. You're right Russ, I am glad there were only 19 and not 190.

5 Obama is a festering pustule of a miserable failure.

6 I had just stepped out of the shower when the first report of a plane flying into the World Trade Center Tower 1 came across my radio. I went to the living room, turned on the TV and watched for a few minutes before returning to the bathroom to grab my toothbrush and finish getting ready for work. I returned to the TV, toothbrush in mouth and towel in hand just in time to see the second plane hit WTC Tower 2. I knew at that moment this was deliberate and that it wasn't over yet. I called into work, told them to turn on the TV to see why I'd be a little late coming in, and slowly finished getting ready. As I drove in, listening to the horror unfolding in NY, I watched a plane on approach to Love Field, after the ground stop had been ordered. I wondered if this plane, too, was about to become another deadly missile.

I arrived at my job, and joined the rest of my stunned colleagues in one of the conference rooms. When the station we were watching suddenly switched to a view from Washington, before the announcers could find out what they were showing I said, "That's the Pentagon." For the next 30 minutes, we all watched silently until the WTC Tower 2 collapsed. That's when the spell finally lifted for everyone and the true evil of what we were witnessing bore it's dark fruit.

I composed this on the first anniversary of 9-11, with the intention of creating a video to accompany it. I have never really gone past the initial stages for the video, as I still react so viscerally to the images—my somber mood returns to white-hot rage at what this 7th century cult of death wrought that day. So this song remains as tribute to all who lost their lives on that horrific day, and especially for those who ran towards the catastrophe and showed how selfless sacrifice will always ring eternally over death's empty sting.

7

My best friend was spared that day because a guy refused to hold an elevator door open for him.

8 Reposted from the other thread, my recollection for that day, and as always my prayers go out to the thousands of victims.

My memory of 9/11 started as a 19 year old who had just been kicked out of university the prior spring for spending my freshman year living the AoSHQ lifestyle. I was enrolled in a local college, think it was the third week, first class wasn't until 10:30 or something so I was sleeping in.

My mom didn't have work that day so she was just doing housework and had been watching the morning news which of course was covering the first tower having been hit. A few minutes after 9, I had the strangest wakening of my life. My mom busted into my room screaming, "Wake up! We're under attack!" To which I just responded with a dumbfounded, "huh?"

She dragged me in front of the tv as she hysterically told me she was watching when a second plane flew into the other building. It didn't take long to understand what had happened. She wanted to know what we should do, so I just suggested we should go down to the yacht club where we could see the Manhattan skyline across Long Island Sound, 17 miles or so away.

So we hopped into the car, and 3 or 4 minutes later were looking out over the sound. The Twin Towers being the only huge skyscrapers in downtown make them easy to pick out on a normal day, but the plumes of black smoke against the clear blue sky were the most obvious indicator. Within a few minutes, a local cop car pulled up and two officers got out. We asked if they knew what was going on, but they were there for the same reason me and my mom were, just to watch.

The first eerie thing I noticed was the quiet. There's always a ton of air traffic, from where we were, it's usually hard to look around and not be able to count a dozen planes in the sky, but there was nothing, and the lack of the regular background noise was very apparent and unsettling. We did see a few fighter jets soar by, adding to the unease.

The cops had left their car on, and the radio was broadcasting one of the NYC news stations. What they were saying just faded into the background, until one of the newscasters started yelling, "The building's falling!" Staring at the skyline, sure enough, one of the towers appeared to almost split, then disappear from view. We all stood in stunned silence. I remember thinking about Obi Wan when he sensed a great disturbance in the force, I knew I just watched thousands perish, maybe even people I know.

Over the next few minutes, lower Manhattan was slowly engulfed in an expanding dome of dark dust. It's still an image I've never seen again in the ten years since. I've seen many pictures and videos from a much closer perspective, but never anything from my perspective, it was really like something out of a sci-fi movie. One of the cops had a camcorder with him and I'm sometimes tempted to ask the PD if I can get a hold of it, just to confirm I actually saw what I remember.

We heard when the radio said the second tower had fell, but didn't see it through the dome, the only change was the dome would grow blacker.

We continued to stand there for some time in silence, how long, I really don't know. Eventually we left, meet up with other friends, try to get a grasp of the situation, and find everyone immediately close to us. I was lucky, nobody close to me died, but 13 men and women from our little town did not return home that night or ever again. Everyone knows someone who lost a husband or a wife, a brother or a sister, a mother or a father.

It seems to me that more and more, those who wouldn't end up directly affected by the massacre that day, have become ever more complacent in their vigilance to stop these murderous fucks. But what can I say, I live in NY, solid scoamf territory, the people here are idiots. I do what I can though, to remind myself and those around me of what happened that day, and that the job we must continue to do.

9 Every time I think of 9/11, I remember a radio show I heard here in California in 2000, guest hosted by the actor Kevin Pollack.

He was talking about current events, and he said, "Who's that guy who declared war on the U.S. a few years ago? What's his name? It sounds like a Jerry Lewis bit. Oh, yeah! Bin Laden. 'Hey, LADY! Bin LADEN! SheBOYgan!'"

Isn't it weird thinking back to a time when almost nobody knew who bin Laden was, and if you'd heard of him he was just some comical weirdo megalomaniac Arab who'd declared war on us all by himself?

10 I was living in the flyover for military planes coming into Hunter Army Airfield, and just nautical miles from Parris Island and mere miles to Ft. Stewart, home of the Third ID.

For weeks we had low flying aircraft over our house.  We'd literally cringe every time. 

Just a couple of days ago, a couple of military jets flew REALLY low over our house.  You still find yourself wondering, WTF?

And I grew up with an Air Force pilot dad and all, so I'm not "sensitive" to planes over the house.

11 Posted by: mugiwara at September 11, 2011 09:31 PM (KI/Ch)

Dammit!

12 I was living on the west coast then. I will never forget walking into work which was a very large medical center. What was normally a bustling loud place was that day nothing but silence, tears and shock of 5000 employees, visitors, and patients. We put our heads down as best we could and got to work. What an awful day.

13

I was editing a website all morning on that tuesday, TV off, didn't hear about it till about 1:30PM when I turned the TV on. By that time they were showing clips of the days events, and being a heartless prick suspected of having aspergers the first thing I thought was WOW, hollywood could never in their wildest imagination create a scene like that.  

14 We have people here in Savannah who lost family in the towers. 

And we have first responders who jumped in their truck with their dog and were among the first on "the pile" for the first couple of weeks, until the dog was seriously injured.

Our paper here today featured stories of the many people who dropped what they were doing and drove north to help.

And several families here never found the remains of loved ones who died in the towers.

Yeah, it was strictly a NYC thing.

15

There were AWACS (radar planes) over DC for weeks after the attack. They droned on all night long, night after night. You'd just lie there pissed and glad that you were being taken care of.

I remember being so outraged that the closest fighter jets to DC were at Langley AFB in the tidewater (Hampton). Really what country doesn't have fighter jets anywhere near its seat of govt?????

They do now.

Jeez

16 The attacks really opened my eyes to a lot of things. I was a naive 16yo who thought death and destruction of that magnitude was something that happened to other countries. That all changed as my friends and I watched the second plane hit and (later) the Towers fall. At that time, over 30,000 people were thought to have died and over a dozen airplanes were supposedly missing. This was so obviously deliberate and my heart just hurt for my country and those who had lost their lives. The entire experience opened my eyes to a lot of things and I'll never forget the stories of sacrifice and the lessons about Islam.

It was also unsettling because people knew that there was going to be a war but not how we would fight it. My history teacher told us the next day that our generation would be tasked with a call to serve, and I am so thankful to all those who have placed their lives in harm's way so that we may be free.

17 I posted my and my husband's stories yesterday.

The thing that stands out ten years ago is our then eleven year old son.

He never cried, not once.  He came home from school and said, "When I'm a grown up I'm going to be a soldier and kill all those bad guys."

Ten years later he's a Marine, preparing to do just that.

18 It was a gorgeous day in Colorado. i was bummed because Ed McCaffrey had broken his leg on MNF against the Giants the night before. I commuted to Denver then, and always looked forward to hearing Lewis and Floorwax to wake me up for an hour. I had barely got going when I heard Rick Lewis reporting about a plane hitting one of the WTC towers, and they were speculating on commuter flights, single engine planes, guy having a heart attack, etc. Then Rick stopped and said, "Whoa. Was that another plane?" After that I simply drove for a while, then switched to 850 KOA, which had already joined the CBS feed. I was never a Dan Rather fan, but he was clearly jarred by what happened. I arrived at the office, totally disinclined to do anything productive, a sentiment shared by everyone else I worked with. i left for home a few minutes after the first tower fell. Sounds lame writing it down here, but a decade later it remains so damn vivid in my mind.

19 Oh, looky, the festering pustule is sending his "jobs bill" to congress tomorrow.  Didn't take 'em long to knock that together.  It calls for lower Social Security contributions from individuals and businesses.  Great idea, sparky!  Don't cut income taxes, whatever you do, we know you rely on those for important shit like GM, Chrysler, Fannie & Freddie, refinancing mortgages for those who never could afford a house.  Fuck grandma, she probably won't vote for your sorry ass anyway. 

20

I normaly watched Fox news in the morning, while getting my 10 year old twins breakfast and ready for school... but that morning I was running a bit late... so did not turn it on...

Heard about the first plane hit on the Radio, as we left the house to take the kids to school...

Dropped off the kids... went to work where I was teaching Network Engineering (MCSE) to adults... and tried to both watch what was happening online, and teach... needless to say I cancelled class as the Towers fell... but no one left except the one guy whose kids were in School in Downtown Denver... he went to get his kids...

Mine were in the Southern Burbs (Highlands Ranch) so I figured they were safe... but I did pick them up as soon as I could...

Two days later I bought a New .45 to practice with, because I was SURE I would get recalled back to the Navy... turns out that I was marked as 0% disabled when I retired... so no recall...

21

I'm a vet, son, nephew, great-nephew--or whatever it might be--and brother of vets.  I follow military affairs and military history.

I had not heard much news until about ten in the morning, when the Towers were down but other planes were reported to be unreported.

It was war.  There are certain ways you think about war; white-hot anger at those who attack, review personal plans that might be relevant, try to think of who I might know in NYC--I'm in the midwest--or DC, so forth.  Think about our military resources and political leadership.  All SOP for war.

Next day, I had to call a regional office of Met Life.  Asked if they'd heard anything from HQ in NYC.  Nope, said the lady. Different from standard war thinking.   Felt both as if the country might be decapitated, but that we could soldier on regardless due to decentralization and American spirit. Madder, though.  Madder now than then.

22 Ten years later he's a Marine, preparing to do just that.

Posted by: Jane D'oh, Tea Party Terrorist and Barbarian at September 11, 2011 09:40 PM (UOM4

/SALUTE

and ten years later... my Son is in the Navy... waiting on orders....

Thank God, Jehovah, and the Creator, that those young Men are still out there.

23 Jane, I hope that your son's rounds all find willing targets downrange and that he returns safe — indeed may they all return safe to a humble and grateful nation.

And in a wonderful bit of cosmic juxtaposition, a commercial for the Marines is playing as I type this.

24 I had no clue it happened until my father called from the jersey turnpike, he was heading to jersey city and pulled over to call me and tell me what was happening because he could see the towers. Probably 30 seconds into the conversation I turned the TV on, and then I hear my father yelling that the tower was falling. Was  weird to see that on the TV as my father was seeing it happen. I missed all the earlier stuff before that. Later I went outside and there was just a strange quite. I'm used to hearing the planes heading to newark, and it was the first time there was dead quite. Then some F-16s flew over the house. Unreal day.


oh yeah, it occurred to me pretty fast I was glad that fucking asswipe gore lost, because I knew with Bush somebody was gonna pay big time, Algore would have just greased up his own ass in appeasement.

25 Damn...quiet, not quite. jeez

26 I'll always remember that Sept 11 2001 was a Tuesday, because it was my day off. I slept in until past noon, and didn't turn on the TV at all before taking a shower and heading out to the bank to deposit my paycheck. It didn't take long to figure out that something tragic had occurred, because the all-sports station was running news reports, but it took a while to piece together exactly what had happened, tuning in to the middle of coverage as I had. I DO remember specifically thinking "thank GOD Gore lost" and that feeling was multiplied after hearing Bush's first speech afterwards.

27 A phone call from my mother woke my wife and me up. My mother-i-l was flying BOS->ORL, and was probably on the tarmac at Logan with one of the (to be) hijacked planes. We didn't have internet at our apartment, so we headed to the public library to see if the airline's websites had any info, while hitting the cell phones to try and find someone who knew anything. It was about two hours after the first plane hit that we received confirmation that she had landed safely in NC.

Found out later that one of my wife's uncles, ~50+ at the time and 30 years out of the Marines, heard about the attacks, put on his old fatigues, threw water bottles into the back of his car and drove from Boston to NYC to help out. He stayed for 3-4 days before coming back.

The most eerie thing I remember about the event was the complete lack of anything flying for the next couple of days, except periodic views of an F-15 flying over Phoenix.

28 Nice post, Russ.

It took me so long to wrap my head around what was happening.  I didn't get to the point of acceptance for a long time.

29

I was in a hotel room in Mt Carmel, PA getting ready for my grandmother's funeral; my brother came pounding on the door, yelling at me to turn the tv on, a plane had hit 1 of the Trade Center buildings. I turned the tv on just in time to catch the second plane hitting the 2nd tower. I told my brother "that was a passenger jet". We went on to the funeral, but all I could think of, all anybody could talk about, was what had happened. After the funeral, we all returned to my grandmothers house to eat, and get ready to drive back to NC. By this time, the towers had collapsed, and we were hearing about flight 93, and the Pentagon.

It was a weird drive home. I-81 through Virginia was almost deserted, and I can remember thinking how strange it was with no planes in the skies. We would stop every now and again, and I would attempt to call my wife from various pay phones (those were my pre-cellphone days), but could never get through, which was really scary. I got home-finally got in touch with my wife and then ended up having to go into work when my PD called "all hands on deck".    

30 I was working one my first job of the day up on a telephone pole behind a bar on the lake, fixing their phones. The place has a great view. After I climbed down I went inside with my belt and hardhat on to tell the owner his phone was fixed but no one was in the office. I wandered up through the kitchen into the bar and there was the manager and some folks just watching tv.. The towers were on fire and I remember thinking "WTF is going on?" After watching for a few minutes I went out to my truck and called wife at home, told her to turn on the TV. I listened on my truck radio. I remember one of the network anchors talking on the radio when the first tower fell and his disbelief, being corrected, no something did not fall off the tower, its gone. The rest of the day was a blur. Just went through the motions at work. I thought about reenlisting in the Navy, thought they would recall me since I had just finished my inactive reserve time a week before 9-11. Neither happened. I have never been back to that bar and I know I never will, every time I drive by it I remember...

31

One final thought for the day:

http://proteinwisdom.com/

 

32

  One other thing I remember thinking that day?  The planners for that attack must have consulted a structural engineer on where to hit the buildings.

  Hit them too low, and you're dealing with stronger supports that are designed to hold up the WHOLE building.  That's what happened in '93, they hit the foundations and tried to topple the whole structure in one blast.  Hit them at the top, and you just damage the floors you hit.  No, you have to hit them about 2/3 of the way up:  so that the weight of the floors above the impact damage will cause the structure around the impact to fail and start pancaking down on the floors below.  Let gravity do most of the heavy lifting for you.

  Not a surprise that they had that knowledge avialable to them.  All the Pakistani & Arab muslims enrolled in structural engineering over the past few decades, and none of them are devout muslims with sympathies to the Al Quaeda death cult?  Not bloody likely.

33

September 11th is my birthday. My two little kids were standing in front of me looking incredibly precious in their school clothes and backpacks trying to sing happy birthday to me while watching the horror unfold in front of their young eyes.

After the first airplane hit and all the confusion from the networks we weren't sure if it was an accident or terrorism. My father called me from Colorado, and like me he's a retired USAF MSgt, and while we were watching the second airplane hit the South Tower.

Terrorism.

It wasn't 80 year-old grandmothers, little kids, housewives, blacks, Latinos, Japanese, Chinese or any other of the countless varieties that make up our Republic. It was Islamic Jihadist who didn't give a damn about women, children, husbands, fathers, mothers, aunts or uncles - they just wanted to kill American's to further their religious/political goals.

Lucky for them a good, decent, and thoughtful man was President that day. If it had been me, the Middle East from the West Bank to the Indian shoreline would be radioactive for another 200 years.

Bastards.

34 Posted by: Murph at September 11, 2011 10:55 PM (8q89E)

Happy birthday and thank you for your service!  God bless you and yours.

35 If anyone cares to watch it, archive.org has all the major network coverage archived on that day (uncut), or used to, haven't watched it in a few years.

36 Another thing that I just remembered, CNN.com which was a building full of servers became so overloaded they had to resort to a plain text front page with no images for a couple hours just to stay up.

37 CNN so hammered with traffic, for the first (and only?) time they had to convert the front page to ultra low overhead static html just to stay up.

http://tinyurl.com/3jn6h9u

38 My husband was on a one-week vacation from work and was doing repairs around the house. In fact, he tore out the wooden staircase to the front-door the day before and we had a ladder set-up, which at the time was amusing. He awoke very early, then fell back asleep on the coach downstairs, with the t.v. on. I was upstairs reading the newspaper. He came upstairs and told me that an airplane had hit one of the twin towers in N.Y. I thought Cessna. I can't remember how many minutes passed, but he came up again and told me I'd better come downstairs because another airplane just hit the other tower. (He later told me he thought he had woken up to some disaster movie). After viewing the horror, I woke-up our son, and the three of us stayed glued to the t.v. the entire day. I saw the map of the amount airplanes that were still in the sky, diminishing gradually, landing where they could, until there were none. Our daughter, who had stayed overnight at a friend's house, called and asked me if I thought it would be safe for her to cross the bridge that separated Oregon and Washington. That night, all of our neighbors stood together in the dark, stunned into low murmurs. The eerie silence of the normally noisy jets going overhead was an exclamation point. Within a week, I learned that one of our neighbors, who was retired from the National Guard, was called back in, pronto.

39

I was in a meeting, the normal Tuesday morning production meeting we had. The receptionist came in and said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. So I kinda blew her off because it had to be some little plane, stupid pilot off course.

She came in and told us a second plane had hit. Pretty soon, her young husband came to the office and brought a little TV, we all could watch.  As we watched the towers burn, I remember saying, "Osama Bin Ladin". I knew who he was, and the connection to the twin embassy bombings and the Cole bombing in 1999.

One of the Lab techs that worked for me was crying, because her son was in his senior year at West Point, and she knew this meant war.  West Point was locked down tight. He graduated in 2002 (the Bicentennial class of West Point).  A few years later she showed me his year book and pointed out all the guys who were already dead from accidents and war.

He did three tours in Iraq, the last one started in 2008. The first tour started in May 2003, and was pretty bad, the second tour was worse. He lost people in his command to IED's and snipers.

A close friend was in the Air Force National Guard, and did six months starting in November of 2001 in Pakistan. The air base he was at was a staging base for Bagram in Afghanistan.

10 years out, and the rest of our lives to go.

40 10 years out, and the rest of our lives to go. Posted by: Reader C.J. Burch writes..... at September 11, 2011 11:36 PM Yes, the rest of our lives to go. Like many people who have put their thoughts down, as the years pass, the images still ingrained in my mind cannot even look at a video or picture of that day any more. It just gets worse.

41 I also had a very rebellious thought for a long, long time. I knew we were headed for war, but I didn't want to put our children in harm's way. I wanted the military to take me and all people over thirty. I was so mad, I thought I would make a great warrior.

42 Quote: I remembered thinking that Tom Clancy was going to have an especially bad day because he used a jumbo jet kamakazi attack against a Presidential address to a Joint Session of Congress at the close of one of his novels. It's funny how some thoughts stick in your head. /Quote I'm not going to go into all my thoughts on that day, but that one hit hard. I swear to you that this anecdote is true. Pre-9/11 I was talking to my boss, a veterinarian, about books that we had read and enjoyed. At one point Clancey's works came up, and said something to the effect that I had read and enjoyed most of his works, but that the most recent one (i.e., Debt of Honor) was ruined for my by the implausible ending, in which an airliner was crashed into the Capitol. It just seemed so far-fetched, that it took me out of that story. The day we had this conversation was Monday, 9/10/2001. I had no idea how much the world would change the next day, and how the implausible would become horrible reality. Never forget, Brian

43 I was in the air terminal on Grand Cayman, heading for my first vacation in 7 years (I had been getting my company off the ground and stable).  I was booked into a place on Cayman Brac (a short island hop away) and my flight departed maybe 15 minutes later while things were still in confusion--the last flight to leave for two days.  I spent rather a lot of the vacation in the condo watching the news.  I still remember a phone call with my father in Alberta during that time: "Someone," he said rather perceptively, "is going to get their ass kicked."

44

I was working night shift so I was in bed. My wife woke me up early, as I was coming down the stairs she told me "We've been attacked" and then about the towers coming down. I didn't really believe her at first, thought she was pulling some kind of sick joke (even though that is NOT her style).

In the family room, the couch was pulled out from the wall. My wife had made my then 5 y.o. daughter play behind the couch so she couldn't see any of the images on TV. I got sicker and sicker as I watched the reports from that day, my stomach still flips whenever I see images of the Towers in flames.

I write this while on nights again, again I get the all the coverage on my own personal delay.

45 God, I remember this like it was yesterday.  I was on the way to a client (the GA Department of Labor in Atlanta) that morning.  I was listening to Neal Boortz, and was on 75/85 North.  Heard the news and knew I wouldn't be getting in the government facility that day.  Met up with some friends that were at Networld/Interop, and later that day made the drive back to Birmingham.

I've still got the copy of the Atlanta Journal/Constitution from that day up in the attic.

46 The Dead Miss Emily was recovering from the surgery that saved her life but took her beautiful clear voice away.

I was on Free Republic when the report came in "a small plane has hit the twin towers..."

I took one look at the picture and the fireball and went to where she was and told her

"We just got attacked by terrorists..."

47 In a carpool line...they said small plane on the radio, but my military mind was screaming...Fucking Terrorists. I drove to Wal-mart and bought all the USA flag material they had...Ripped it into squares, folded them and put in on my  back wiper, dashboard of both cars. It remains there today...10 years later, because I will never forget the chill that ran down my neck when I heard that Pentagon was hit and then Flt. 93.
I continue to be thankful that I live in the best Country in the world, and my allegiance to support and defend will not abate, ever. I soldier on for those who cannot.
God Bless everyone who died that day and especially those left behind. God Bless everyone who has made a difference. Amen.

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