re: Where Were You on 9/11?

Studying at my appartment while attending ULL, I know, turned the TV on ,sound was turned off,for a break and saw a bulding burning thought it was a bruce willis movie. So i said im not watching this in the morning. Turned to the next few channels and they all showed the same burning WTC . Turned up the volume and as they say the rest is history.

I had a buddy doing one of his long solo cross country flights for his private pilot's license. Some bumfrick town in Texas that I can't remember the name of. He was stuck there over a week before they turned the airspace back on for everyone.

3rd grade, remember another teacher coming in and telling our teacher

I was in the 8th grade, walking to a technology class when I overheard 2 teachers talking, one of them mentioned that a plane hit the WTC. Didn't really think anything of it, I thought it was a small private plane that accidentally flew into it leaving minimal damage. Got to class and boy was I wrong. We watched the 2nd plane hit, then eventually watched the towers crash. Didn't do all of shite in school for the rest of the day but watch the news and discuss what happened.

It was my last day of work before we made our first overseas move with the military. Normally we got ready for the day with the news on in the background, but that day we both were going in late.

Friend calls and asks, have you watched the news yet?

Turn it on and they were saying, a plane hit but maybe it was a small plane. Husband said no, not with that huge hole. He said, we're under attack, and it's probably Osama bin laden (he read a lot of history and foreign policy stuff.)

A few minutes later the second one hits, and he says, I've got to go into work. Might not be back for awhile. Hours, days, months? Not sure. (Ended up being 12 hour shifts for awhile for those guys, but with our move, he only had to go in 4-5 times before he out processed.) He told me not to leave base, which was on lock down. I'd have had to sleep in my car or a hotel if I'd gone to work as usual that day.

While he got ready, they reported that there was an explosion at the Pentagon. At first they said there had been construction there, maybe it was that. Then, they said it might be a bomb.

Drove him to work, came home and sat in front of the TV crying all day. House full of shite that needed to be ready for the movers in 2 days, and I'm not even sure I got up to eat, much less work on packing.

Six weeks later we're flying into Brussels and I didn't sleep a wink on the flight. Every man that walked to the rear toilet and was back there longer than 2 minutes, I woke my husband up and told him about it.

Where were you when they built that ladder to heaven?

Calculus, senior year of high school.

Walking to Geography class on LSU's campus.

Underwater off the coast of Hawaii just doing some training mission. I was asleep and the captain came on the 1-MC (PA system) and started describing the message that came in.

Now, we usually would make up some sort of story that went with our drills (so-and-so invaded country X and we need to go shoot missiles at them, etc...) so I didn't think too much of it at the time.

But then the captain kept going, in pretty incredible detail for a made-up drill. In the end he, he didn't say what our mission was or who we were going to attack. That's when it sunk in that it might be real.

I rolled out of bed and walked through the narrow halls of the submarine into the mess decks. I remember passing ghost white faces (from more than just lack of sunlight). Apparently, we had gone pretty close to shore and stuck an antenna out of the water to try to intercept some local TV stations - essentially spying on Hawaii. We got ok reception, but not great.

That's where about 50 of us packed into a room designed for 25, and stood there for the next few hours - watching the scrambled Playboy channel version of 9/11 as intercepted from Hawaiian television stations.

I was in Almaty, Kazakhstan where there was an eleven hour time difference from Eastern time in the U. S. So the first plane hit around 7:30 PM Almaty time.

The U.S embassy sent out instructions for all Americans to go on lockdown until it was determined that Americans were not targets in majority Muslim countries like Kazakhstan.

I stayed up almost all night watching U.S. news channels and BBC on my satellite TV.

I was going stir crazy locked in my apartment the next day so around 3 PM I walked to the embassy which was about 10 blocks from my apartment to see what our situation was. When I got about 2 blocks away I saw the embassy was surrounded by Kazakh military tanks and amored personnel carriers all pointed away from the embassy. I decided not to go to the embassy.

On Friday evening the U.S. ambassador called a "town hall meeting" at a local theater for all American nationals. He told us the President of Kazakhstan had ordered the military to protect the U.S. embassy "at all costs" without being asked to do so by the ambassador or U. S. security officials.