Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktI was eating breakfast in Nau’s Pharmacy in Austin. The TV was on behind the counter. A moment of consternation. I looked up. The tail of an airliner was sticking out of one of the WTC towers. The next hour passed in a fog. No one left for work. We talked quietly among ourselves. We shed tears. We knew war would follow.
In the days that followed, I learned that my bro-in-law had been making an engineering presentation in Manhattan in the 30s and the building he was in went onto an automated lockdown. My friend’s daughter stepped up from the Metro, a bit late for work at the Pentagon, when that plane hit. There were many more stories from friends. It is still with me.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: 9-11 |
All Things in Moderation 
At the time, I worked for Circuit City’s IT department in the corporate offices. I was at work dealing with a problem with a software upgrade that had occurred the previous night to our company’s DCE/Encina system.
So while fighting an IT problem that was affecting our operations, I was also checking on the news reports, primarily through the Washington Post’s website. Once it was clear what was going on, my primary concern was for a friend of mine who I went to high school with who was living in New York City. Turns out her apartment was within view of the WTC and she had to evacuate due to the debris contamination, etc, but was otherwise unhurt.
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I was on the trading floor at Bear, Stearns in London. It was just after lunch. A headline went across Bloomberg saying a plane had hit one of the WTC towers. CNBC mentioned the story as well, but no one was thinking “terrorism.” I emailed one of my friends at Merrill Lynch (right across the street at the World Financial Center) and he wasn’t even aware of what happened. The European markets were down a bit on the day, but didn’t really react to the first hit.
After a few minutes, CNBC started showing live footage of the fire and then we saw plane 2 hit. Immediately, the world realized what had happened. The Euro markets were collapsing and I was inundated with sell orders. The news of the Pentagon hit came out. People on our floor started freaking out. We were in Canary Wharf (One Canada Square) in the tallest building in the UK. Planes routinely come close to the building as they approach City Airport. The head of Bear Stearns Europe came on the trading floor and told everyone if they were uncomfortable, to go home. No one knew if today was “fly a plane into financial headquarters day” Everyone bailed, and I was one of the last guys on the trading floor, trying to reconcile my book by hand and get flat before I left.
I looked up at CNBC before I left and saw the place I got married at a year earlier collapse on my birthday.
P.S. As I headed to the tube to go home, I passed the Slug and Lettuce (a pub) and found all of the “uncomfortable” Bear Stearns employees having a pint directly below the building they were so uncomfortable being in.
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Brent:
Um, Happy Birthday!
A terrible thing to have happen on one’s birthday, or any day for that matter. I had reported for jury duty in Rockville, MD. Watched CNN in the holding room until they let us go then sat at home watching the news and listening to the fighters fly cover over DC.
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Happy Birthday, Brent. It also would have been my parents 63rd anniversary [2001] or their 74th [2012]. They only had sixty together.
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My wife and I were on a plane heading to (we thought) Hawaii. We were the last plane to land at LAX and there are a couple of things I’ll never forget. The first is the pilot who came charging out of the cockpit once we were at the gate and shouting to the gate agent, “What the fuck is going on!” It turns out we were the last plane that was allowed to land at LAX, all other traffic was then rerouted to Canada. Another memory is of walking through a completely empty LAX terminal. Empty except for SWAT members every 50 or so feet looking at us suspiciously. There was a man in front of my wife and I who stopped and a SWAT guy yelled at him, yelled, to “KEEP MOVING!” He told the SWAT guy he was waiting for his wife and the guy screamed back “MOVE!” Apparently one of the 9-11 planes, I think the one that crashed in Shankseville, was supposed to be heading to LAX. Finally, I remember looking up at the video monitors at a rental car place and seeing the footage of planes hitting the towers for the first time. It was so well filmed (the second one anyway) that it looked fake at first.
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My son was working in PA at the State Department. We couldn’t reach him for hours and there’d been a report of an explosion there, which later turned out to be a sonic boom from jets scrambling. He’d looked out his window and saw the Pentagon on fire across the river right after they saw the first tower burning on TV and the second plane hit. He was on a 24 hour a day task force for weeks afterward.
He’d just met his future wife. One of her friends from college was among the men who rushed the cockpit on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. Her mother had recently taken early retirement from a firm that lost most of its staff in Manhattan. Her sister ran through the smoke to find her dad on Wall Street while her husband drove the other direction to get their kids.
My son says it always comes back on a bright blue sky day.
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I was in the Watergate building at the time. Heard the boom at the Pentagon and saw the smoke.
Got in the car, and for some reason my girlfriend (now wife) drove separately to my place in Maryland. Local radio was littered with erroneous reports. Shooting at State, bombing on the Mall, etc. A friend was a UA flight attendant who was on that BOS-LAX route, but she’d flown it the day before.
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I was driving to work when the first plane hit and they broke in on the radio with the news. Apparently, the radio announcers were watching footage without any sound. They kept saying, over and over again, “Oh my God! There’s another one[plane]!” It was a few minutes before they figured out they were watching footage being played on a continuous loop, so there was much confusion about how many planes had hit. I was crazy worried about my favorite nephew with whom I am very close, but of course I was not able to get in touch with him. At the time he lived just across the river in NJ and worked in the city. Much later when I was able to talk to him, he related to me that from the 3rd floor of their house, he could see the people jumping from the towers. Needless to say, that made an indelible disturbing impression on him.
After I got to work, I watched the collapse live on a TV in a conference room. It was stunning. Odd that I no longer recall (without looking it up) how much time lapsed between the 1st and 2nd planes and between the planes and the collapse.
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Forgot to mention that I had just been to visit my nephew and had left just the day before the attack. I may have some of the latest photos of the towers still standing.
Happy Birthday, Brent!
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Back then I regularly got to work around 7:30, so I had gotten in before anything happened. My intern at the time and I were working on lab notebooks and getting ready to start the day when my technician walked in at about 8:30 and asked if we’d heard the news. No, what news? That someone had flown a plane into the WTC and the Capital–I looked at her and said, Jenny, that’s not even close to funny (Tom Clancey plot–remember?). She insisted that she wasn’t pulling my leg, so I ran to my computer and started trying to pull up CNN, MSNBC, local news stations and nothing would load because the sites were so overrun. That’s when I knew it was real
I had dropped our new CRV off at the dealership that morning to get a couple of add-ons installed, and when I went to pick it up they had ABC on the big screen TV in the waiting area; Peter Jennings was crying as he was reporting.
I was on one of the first flights that launched after the attacks; Brian was at an Army physical therapy training course in San Antonio, and I had planned to fly down to spend the weekend with him. The SLC airport looked like a post-apocalypse movie set, with no one around anywhere, and there were maybe 10 of us on the flight. San Antonio was more of the same, except that there were soldiers with M16s throughout the terminal.
Ummmm. Happy birthday, Brent!
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I was a senior in college and working as a prep cook at an Applebees in Portage, Michigan. I think we started around 6:00 am. We always listened to the radio and I remember the DJs cutting in to talk about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. They didn’t seem to think it was a terrorist attack and neither did I. I remember assuming it was some small plane rather than a passenger plan. We always took a break out in the restaurant before opening and the TVs were usually on at the bar. So we were sitting down as the second plane hit. I remember realizing then that this was not just an accident. I also remember thinking that nobody around me seemed to grasp what was going on. After the break I tried in vain to listen to the radio, but it was too loud. So I went right to my girlfiend’s house from work and watched the news coverage for the rest of the day. We were all glued to the TV all day and night.
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My wife and I were on a plane heading to (we thought) Hawaii.
That must have been harrowing? Did you ever make it to Hawaii?
I was at work and we pulled a 12″ TV out of the closet and watched it for a while. My wife called me and reminded me that my uncle worked in the World Trade Center. He was in the second tower and evacuated his floor as soon as they knew what was going in. His whole team survived but he has a harrowing tale. His wife and my aunt was stranded in Texas for a few days. Everybody was relieved when he finally got into cell phone coverage and called everybody to reassure them he was fine.
I’ve written twice about it. Once for the five year anniversary and also after visiting Shanksville.
I also have a bunch of photos of the WTC Memorial from last winter.
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I lived in Annandale VA and drove to work in DC that day. It was very much like today’s weather in the DC area – cool crisp morning with a very clear and very blue sky. I remember thinking what a great day it was as I walked from my car to my building. My cube was on the 8th floor of a building, right across the river from the Pentagon, that had open architechture and basically wall to wall windows looking across the river. I was watching the frozen picture on my PC of WTC when we felt the boom. We all walked to the windows and saw the smoke. I used my relatively new cell phone and called my pregnant wife at home and did not hang up for basically the next hour. She was telling me what was going on as the web was frozen. When the call was made to allow us to leave, people were figuring out how to get home. My commute should have taken me across the 14th street bridge which runs right next to the Pentagon but people were saying it was closed. I started driving trying to figure out how I was going to get out of a gridlocked city. Then my wife said she saw cars driving over the bridge. I made an illegal U and headed across. It was wild – cars were stopped along the multilane highway shoulders and people were out standing and watching the Pentagon. I could (and still can) smell the smoke and the jet fuel as I slowly drove by trying not to run into any one or any car, while getting glimpses of it. 15 minutes later, I pulled into my driveway, hugged and kissed my wife and son, and basically watched it unfold on TV the rest of the day.
A day or so later we visited the makeshift memorial that was across the street from the Pentagon on the side where it was hit. Very moving. The official memorial at the Pentagon is very nice. I was to Shanksville several years ago before they had the officlal memorial and was really amazed how much I felt basically looking at a field. I read earlier today that many people have “put it past them” last year at the 10 annivesary. I don’t think I ever will.
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I was sitting in on the trading floor at my office in London, down the street from Bank tube station. I saw a Bloomberg headline about a plane hitting the WTC, so I called one of my colleagues in New York, who was sitting in our mid-town office, asking if he knew what was going on. He said they were watching the TV, and it was the most unbelievable thing. There was a smoldering hole in the tower exactly where our offices had been until just 5 years earlier. We had moved out of the 96th floor of the North Tower (WTC 1) when our lease came due in 1996, primarily because of the experience of having been in the towers during the bombing in 1993. Management had decided that being that high up was not a good idea in any kind of an emergency. So we moved to the 5th floor of a mid-town building. Wise choice.
Anyway, my colleague and I discussed what kind of screwed up pilot would fly a plane into a building on a beautiful clear day, and then hung up. A few minutes later a new headline scrolled across my screen, and it suddenly became clear exactly what kind of pilot would do such a thing. My immediate thoughts were of my father-in-law, who worked in the now-also hit South Tower (WTC 2), but I was not sure what floor, and my brother, who worked in Chicago but had an office in one of the towers (I was not sure which one) and whom I knew had a scheduled trip to New York that week.
Fairly quickly I got a hold of my brother, who as it turned out was not scheduled to be there until the next day. But getting in touch with my father-in-law proved to be impossible. No answer on his cell phone, and eventually the phone lines were jammed anyway. When the first tower fell and then the second, we started to get fairly concerned, so I left the office for home to be with my wife. It wasn’t until about 6 stressful hours later that we finally got a call from him telling us he was OK. He was on his way to get a cup of coffee and had just stepped out of the 45th floor elevator into what was called the Sky Lobby when he felt the building shake from the first plane hitting the other tower. Having been in the building for the ’93 bomb, he immediately went to the stairs and started walking down. He was out of the building and watching when the 2nd plane hit his tower. Of course, his wallet and phone were all still up in the office, so he couldn’t call anyone, and no one could call him. It took him several hours to make his way home back in New Jersey.
Thankfully, all the people I knew in the towers were safe and sound. But, Marsh Mclennan, the company that took over the 96th floor when my company moved out, got wiped out. 295 people lost, not a single survivor.
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Marsh Mclennan, the company that took over the 96th floor when my company moved out, got wiped out. 295 people lost, not a single survivor.
Holy crap. I’m so glad your family members were OK, Scott!
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Thank you everyone for your stories. I’ve never grown tired of hearing people’s tales of where they were on 9-11, or what they were doing and what they did. I think for Americans, regardless of any other differences between us, it is universally the same, shock, revulsion, sadness and and anger.
Anyway, for me, those memories are still vivid and extremely fresh. I don’t think I remember any other day in my life as clearly as I remember that day.
Hope I’m not sounding to dramatic, and thank you Mark for putting the post up.
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George, I was glad to do it – I suspected most of us had not lost the memory of those feelings, as you wrote. And I thought we should not go all day without revisiting them, aloud, so to speak. I was moved by every single story, as you were.
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Blissfully unaware. My girlfriend (now wife) was working on an assignment with a particularly difficult group of Mexicans (a dozen cops and two human rights advocates). She got back on September 10 and stayed overnight. Pity her replacement who arrived on the 10th and had to deal with that group on 9/11.
I had an appointment at the dentist that morning, which was cancelled for unrelated reasons. So, we went out for breakfast. I dropped her off at her apartment and then took the T into work. The only clue I had that something was up was that a friend of mine had left a message on my mobile phone account, but I couldn’t access it. I dropped by the Pete’s for coffee on the way to work and was on the toilet when his call finally came through. I figured it was important, so picked up.
What I most remember in the following days is taking the T across the Charles River. The two planes that hit the Twin Towers took off from Boston. There are two iconic towers in Back Bay–the Prudential and the John Hancock Tower. It was very easy to imagine those building burning as I crossed the river.
BB
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I should note that a friend of mine worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. They had had some layoffs preceding the event. As it turned out, my friend was late into work that day and so just left the subway when the first plane hit. Nearly everyone he worked with was gone. Including someone his boss had fought hard to keep.
He spent weeks working continuous days as the remaining staff rebuilt their programs.
BB
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Reading all these stories, I’m struck by the many connections. We share the universal experience of the events themselves. Then there are all the overlapping personal connections to the places and people of the day. Reading Scott’s comment, I remembered the name of the firm where my son’s mother-in-law had worked. It was Marsh Mclennan.
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