9/11 remembrances

[wtg]

We are sort of watching the ceremony from NY (the TV is on in the background, so not paying close attention). As they do every year, they are reading the names of those who perished. Several people who are doing the reading of names have made additional comments about how Saudi Arabia hasn't been held accountable for its role in 9/11.

I don't recall this happening in years past, but maybe I just missed it.

[AndyD]

It's 25 years since
We're also being told it was preventable, if the CIA, FBI etc had shared information back then.

[Bernard]

Kudos to this widow for saying so in front of their faces.

Link to video

I fail to see how having former presidents there bestowed much honor. Especially Bush, who lied and lied and lied causing more and more deaths.

[Daniel]

One of those where were you when questions.

All good.

Captain Cook. Same as Diana story. Different details.

I got place wrong with Diana post. It was the apartment where I lived in Arizona, Prescott Valley for 4 yrs.

I blame age.

So. TV on. Roommate is watching.

I'm in kitchen on phone with the military credit union outside MacDill, Air Force base in Tampa.

He walks in the kitchen and says airplanes hit the WTC towers!

I literally said I'm sure they did but I'm on the phone with my bank.

The employee tells me the credit union is being evacuated.

Walked into living room, started watching the TV, what else.

So my roommate told me, and my mind refused to process it in the moment.

[Bernard]

I slept through the initial attacks of 9/11. I would get off work at around 10 pm to 11 pm and get home via subway between 11 and midnight. It would take at least an hour to unwind from the day, so not early to bed and not an early riser. Around mid morning my sister-in-law called which the answering machine picked up. The message was they were concerned about me and hoped I was safe. I was dumbfounded by the message, what in the world is she talking about? I phoned her back and got the news. My apartment was the 1st floor of a 4 story walk-up not far from the East River and I raced up to the roof where we enjoyed an unobstructed view of almost all of Manhattan. I will never forget that feeling I had when seeing--where the twin towers would have been--billowing black smoke rising and flowing to the East over Brooklyn. I was the only one on the roof and I didn't know where my fellow tenants were. In that instance I felt very alone in a surreal setting that was unimaginable. It was incomprehensible even though I was seeing it with my own eyes. It gave me a glimpse of what it feels like to be under attack. I remember yelling something, and a shiver crept up my body. I didn't stay on the roof long. I went back down to my apartment to see what was being televised but there was no reception. When the guy on the fourth floor showed up, I was able to watch tv at his place due to his having cable.

[jon-nyc]

I’ll repost what I posted on Facebook

Four of us from my firm - Christine McNulty, John Moran, Bill Cline, and myself- were registered at the Risk Waters Electronic Trading conference at Windows of the World that morning, the restaurant and event space on the top floor of the north tower. I had a last minute conference call scheduled at 11am with a prospective client. I considered doing the call from the Trade Center but I knew cell phone service was spotty up there, and I wasn’t sure how private the pay phones would be. So I decided to stay home until after the call. Bill was similarly saved by a schedule conflict. Christine and John, who had flown in from London for the event, arrived on time. They perished that day, as did every attendee who had arrived by 8:46.
We often hear the stories of people who worked in the trade center every day but were saved by some dentist appointment or a kid’s first day of kindergarten. When I hear these stories I think of Christine and John, who had the very opposite experience. They should have been thousands of miles away, but fate intervened the other way. Christine left behind a husband and a five year old daughter. John a wife and two small kids. May they rest in peace.

[DougG]

I was working as CFO of a bank at the time and two of the investment firms who provided coverage for us were Canter Fitzgerald and Sandler O’Neal. So there were three analysts who I would talk to on a regular basis, either about our financial results or about the state of the banking industry in general. All employees of Canter Fitzgerald who were in the office that day died, and the firm had more losses than anyone else -over 600 I believe. All the analysts I knew from those two firms died that day.

[jon-nyc]

Cantor figures in my story as well. I visited them (actually their electronic trading subsidiary, eSpeed) on Wednesday 9/6. That’s how I knew the cell phone service didn’t work that high. The conference call I was to take at 11 involved them too, peripherally.

In one of those weird coincidences, I actually spoke to the guy about the 93 bombing of the building on that visit.

You see the twin towers were the only buildings I was aware of at that time that checked ID and printed out a temporary badge for you to use. It seemed really novel at the time. But since I wasn’t expecting it, it made me late to the meeting. (There was always a queue near the top of the hour)

The guy said he always expects a first time visitor to be late for that reason. That tight security got us talking about the 93 bombing. He said he was at Bankers Trust across the street and saw first responders jumping off helicopters onto the roof and thought (I can still hear him saying it) ‘whatever they’re paying those guys, it ain’t enough’.

Five days later he was dead from the next terrorist attack.

[ShiroKuro]

My experience was not as dramatic as @jon-nyc 's or @bernard 's (and I believe I wrote about this at the old WTF) but I was living in Japan at the time, so it was just before 10pm. I was brushing my teeth and my husband called me into the living room where the news was on TV. (We didn't have a computer at home at that point). I couldn't process what was happening at first, it seemed like a movie, and we watched the rest of it unfold in real time just like the rest of the world. Then I couldn't get a call through to the US for what seemed like forever, I didn't know where my parents were, whether any of my family happened to be traveling (in NYC or elsewhere)... I have family in many places in Western PA, and the Japanese news didn't use any specific place names in their reporting about that part of it. That made me almost lose my mind.

I think being overseas for 9/11 was maybe somewhat similar to being abroad when a family member dies. I felt isolated from the US, and I remember feeling alienated from the Japanese people that were around me (esp at work) in ways I never had before.

In the months that followed I went crazy trying to get American flags to decorate our house. (Which, in a small town in Japan, and before the days of ordering everything online, was not very easy to do). It was another year or more before I made it back to the US for a visit, and when I finally returned, I found a country I did not recognize.