5 years later - remembering 9/11

As I was going through my old posts this weekend adding labels, I noticed that I didn’t have a post about 9/11/01. I wish I did. It’s one of those moments that you only live through once (hopefully) and writing down the experiences/emotions/facts in the moment is invaluable. So I guess I’ll recount that moment right now, 5 years after the fact. The whole day was surreal and hazy so I’m actually trying to reconstruct my morning based on the timeline presented here.

I grew up in NYC (age 8+). Maybe 3 years after we were here I actually went up to the observation floor of the WTC with a friend. It was really cool.

In September 2001, instead of being upstate in Ithaca, I was actually in D.C. doing a “Semester in Washington.” I was “extern”ing at the NIH and I got in about 9am, the usual time. My desk had a little radio on the shelf above it and every morning it was tuned to the local morning show. The DJ was named Elliot, who used to be on the morning show on Z100 in NYC ("Z Morning Zoo") which I listened to every morning on my walkman on the way to school.

On 9/11/01, I don’t remember if we turned the radio on in the middle of the show, or whether I only tuned in half-way through, but Elliot was talking about something happening in NYC, something big. Then I heard him say something about “another one, there’s been another one.” I think he was referring to the 3^rd plane (flight 77) that struck the Pentagon at 9:37am. Looking at the timeline, I don’t think I would’ve been in the lab yet for when the second plane crashed into the WTC. For the first few minutes I thought Elliot was just doing his regular shtick (he used to do a lot of crank calls on this old show). But then the people I was working with started trying to figure out what was going on. Everyone tried to get to the news online but all the sites were down (probably due to high traffic). I think I finally got Reuters.com to load and saw pictures of smoke billowing out of the twin towers.

There were 3 of us in our bay and we went on a search for a TV. Above a few floors of research labs was a dozen or so floors of patient rooms. We ended up in a waiting room on one of the top floors. We could see a little bit of smoke from the Pentagon from out the waiting room window. We turned on the TV just a few minutes before the first of the twin towers collapsed. The video was so surreal, it was like watching a movie. I had been to the WTC and around the area so many times, yet I could barely feel anything. I was just watching it dumbfounded. Then I suddenly realized that my dad drives around the city all day so I went back down to the lab to call home. I got through to my grandmother and she said she had heard from my dad and he was fine and away from the commotion. But then she said that they had been worried about me and why I hadn’t called yet. I guess the fact that DC was also a target and that I was in any possible danger never crossed my mind.

It took another hour or so for the NIH to call for an evacuation of all non-essential personnel. I took the metro home. My roommate Christine who externed at the American Museum of History had to walk back to DuPont Circle (where we lived) because by the time her building was evacuated, the metro had shut down. For the next few hours, I and my 2 roommates just watched the news. Christine was much more emotional than I was. I envied her emotional release. In a way, I also felt like a bad NYer for not being more distraught. By the evening, when video of the planes actually hitting the twin towers began to run, we’d had enough. I don’t think we turned the TV on for the following week. We just couldn’t watch it anymore. The smoke, the collapse, the rain of ash, the constant replay of the planes hitting the buildings…

Although I had worked at the NIH for about 2 weeks already, I didn’t have an ID badge since security had been non-existent. I stayed home for the next few days since security at all government buildings had suddenly tightened and I had no way of getting in.

To this day I can’t watch footage, listen to, or even read stories about 9/11/01. This morning, I watched about 10 minutes of the Today Show’s special, including the moment of silence at 8:46am, when the first plane (flight 11) flew into the north tower. Then I had to turn it off. The timeline on the Cooperative Research site is actually the first details about 9/11 that I’d read. Ever. I have no compulsion to see the Flight 93 movie, or the new WTC movie. Maybe in another 5 years. It's just so morbid. I don't need to know what the last words of the flight attendants and passengers were. It also seems inappropriate and too soon for the commercialization of this tragedy, no matter how tasteful these movies are.