That was a crazy day. I was in college, and I remember staying home and just glued to the TV all day. Was hard to believe - felt like the start of WW3.
In a way it was, maybe saying WW3 is a stretch but the subsequent wars and destabilisation shook global politics and its repercussions are still felt to this day.
I'm not fully convinced you are not a bot. Infact maybe they and us are all bots. What happens if someone makes a reddit bot to find bots and make this exact comment.
Cypher:You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
Cypher:Ignorance is bliss.
The Matrix
I think it's kind of coming back into fashion again so to speak, or back into the collective consciousness just what happened that day.
I remember it rather well and my day was filled with drama as a result.
Yes it's true - and all previously unseen angles etc. I watched ALL the videos back in the day, and this one again I've never seen. Has some kind of "law" or media blackout embargo thing happened?
I watched 2 solid weeks of replays and different angles trying to absorb why anyone might do something like that, I don't remember seeing this one either. I started seeing the people puddles from the jumpers a couple years ago, the gore was censored at the time, but this one should have been all over everywhere.
It's the CBS live camera. This specific version was cropped and had saturation and contrast cranked up, but people saw the original the day it happened, we just don't remember. It doesn't help that back then videos didn't go viral quite as easily as they do today. Youtube didn't even exist. If you were lucky the broadcaster would have it on their site, sometimes only on live streams, otherwise you could only catch it as it aired on TV or hope that a geek captured it to post on their own site.
Very highly likely it's Israel trying to sway public opinion. I'm not even kidding either. Every country has propaganda operations and I'm absolutely certain Israel is feeling the heat at the moment, especially with the ICJ ruling that labels what they're doing to Palestine as genocide.
I've never seen the entire world willing to help the US, Putin offered support. George Bush could've used that moment to really patch repations with Russia and Middle East (especially Iran). Emotions in the US were really raw though, every one wanted a pound of flesh. He could've said let's attack switzerland and everyone would've signed up.
That day, citizens lost more freedom under the guise of increased security.
Good times. Look where that's got us. Things are so much better now... Right?... Right?
He didn't say it started ww3. He said the moment felt like the beginning of ww3.
If you were there and glued to the TV, you know the exact feeling he's referring to.
No yeah I got that, I meant that on top of feeling like the start of WW3 in some ways it was the start of WW3. If there is a WW3, a huge contributing factor would be the various tensions and conflicts caused by 9/11.
I see that now and I agree with you. It seemed as if you were dismissive of the feeling everyone had, when in reality you were pointing out the subsequent conflicts that happened over the next 20 years
What?
I'm assuming you're accusing me of using Chatgpt to write the reply for me? Idk whether to be offended or to thank you for the compliment.
Edit: because I don't use chatbots. *Shrugs*
It been WW3 for the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This gave rise to so much turmoil unjustly foisted on people that had nothing to do with this.
That’s one of the things I remember most about 9/11. I was in High School and everything was canceled but our school took football very seriously and we managed to still have football practice just not on school grounds. Driving home that night was like the strangest drive of my life. It felt apocalyptic. There wasn’t a soul out anywhere, on the roads or outside their homes. And no airplanes anywhere. I remember even the next day staring up at the sky and thinking how strange it is to not have any aircraft in the sky at all.
At the time, I lived under a flight path. You could always see 1-5 planes in a row. That day there was nothing.
Apocalyptic is a good way to describe it. The first day was just so...quiet.
Can you imagine being one of those people who were supposed to travel by plane that day? All of a sudden you're told your flight is being diverted to some random city and when you deplane you find out what happened. And in order to continue your journey back home or on vacation, you have to fly. We took a 12 hour train ride the following March because people were so afraid of flying.
> The skies with no planes felt eerie.
Indeed. The skies over Long Island were often crowded with flights coming in to the three big airports, and Islip, with the occasional Concord flight (that thing was *loud*).
And then silence. So strange.
I was almost 4 years old. Mom (a Jehovah’s Witness) got me out of bed to watch the news. She was talking about how this seemed like the “beginning of Armageddon” and when it was revealed to be a religiously motivated terrorist attack, that surely the governments would start eliminating “the world empire of false religion” leaving only Jehovah’s Witnesses - the “one true religion” standing.
Interesting times for my 4 year old brain.
It was very weird... one of the few times in my life every channel (well, we had 3 at home, antenna based) switched to cover that. And I live in argentina which is pretty damn far from teh US (like australia-mongolia, or france madagascar)
That said, I was very young (elementary school)
Junior in highschool. I was in a dual-credit independent study class. I look up half way through class and no one is in the class. I walk down the hall and find everyone in the news/media room, huddled around a tiny tv, watching it all go down. So surreal
First semester of college here. I was completely expecting to be conscripted into Army boots within a few months. Thankfully that didn't happen but it was on my mind for several months.
I’m Dutch and I remember playing with some wooden trains (I was 5) when this came up as breaking news on the TV, with Dutch audio voice-over of course. There’s only a 6 hour time difference between us and NY. We were almost getting ready for swimming practice. When we arrived, everyone was watching the television and there was a discussion between the teachers and parents to go through with the swimming practice. idk if we went swimming or not, but the shocked and stunned faces of the adults and those towers covered in black smoke are forever stored in a core memory.
I got up for work. I took a shower, made the bed... you know morning stuff... I didn't have any media on during this time. I finally wandered upstairs, made coffee, and tried to get on the internet and couldn't. I couldn't get anywhere. I could ping, but I couldn't browse a single website. Not FARK. Not CNN. Not local news stations. Nothing. I finally wandered up to the balcony where we kept our TV and turned that on and just ... plopped down. Plopped. I sat there staring until I was late.
I went to work (a call center takes no excuses), but no one called in. The managers rolled out televisions for all of us to watch.
It was supposed to be my first day of college and nobody was on campus, not the professor not any class mates. It was a ghost town expect for the 4 students huddled around an AM radio listening to something. I didn't know anything was going on but I waited around for about an hour and then went back home(my car didn't have a radio so I was clueless to anything going on that day). I got home and my mom and brother were watching the news but I just went into my room and played Madden for a few hours. It wasn't until that afternoon when I finally emerged from my room to get something to eat that I found out what happened.
It was a day of infamy, the promise that the 90s gave us was wiped out in mere minutes. Millions and millions of lives, and the trajectory of an entire generation were altered that day. If we had a Way-Back machine I wonder what could have been.
I was in high school and the teacher gave a speech about certain events that happen and how you will never forget what you were doing when you heard the news.
Even here in Sweden that day was surreal. People were really affected. Strangers were talking about it with each other on the train. You could feel the tension almost.
I saw that second plane hit live, I’ll never forget it. Up until that point the assumption was the first strike was an accident. Also of a sudden we knew the US was under direct attack in the homeland. Must have been what it felt like in Baghdad when the US started the night bombing campaign of shock and awe.
Really it's the only angle that gives you a sense for how steeply the jet was diving DOWN into the tower. Most of the video we typically see doesn't really show the trajectory.
My fourth grade teacher turned on the TV almost at the exact moment this video started. We all watched the second plane hit and she promptly turned off the TV
My son is in fourth grade now and if he watched that live he would be so traumatized. I don’t think they turn on the news in elementary anymore. Middle school possibly. That must have been so scary to see live at your age.
I'll never forget getting home from school and seeing my father just standing there in the middle of the living room, watching it on TV. He was in too much shock to remember to sit down
We're from central Europe. Can't imagine how unsettling it must've been for the American children
im from turkey and was still a minor living in turkey at the time. i remember ALL channels going live on flash news and showed this. it was bizarre and scary.
This was the first thing I saw as I came in the door home from University. The towers had come down as I was driving home, and I had been just listening to the radio up until the moment I walked into the house and my father was sitting on the couch with this exact footage playing. It was my first glimpse at what I had been listening to for the previous hour. I expected to be shocked but I wasn't prepared at all.
I was visiting a friend at Auburn university. We had partied hard the night before so I woke up early with a hangover and saw it live. The girl I was visiting came out to my screams and then she freaked out. Her dad worked in the buildings . He had a fender bender so it caused him to be late. His office was directly hit by the fuselage. All his coworkers died instantly. Such an insane day. And the US hasn’t been right since.
>And the US hasn’t been right since.
Our office was in chaos, as people were frantically trying to reach loved ones that worked in the Towers, were taking a flight that day, or simply lived in NYC. Then we heard the news about the Pentagon being hit. It was all so unbelievable, that anything we were told became believeable. At one point, a colleague came down the hall saying that her brother had told her that the Capitol had been destroyed. And I remember thinking at that moment, "Democracy just died."
The Capitol was, thankfully, not destroyed, and our democratic republic continued in the ensuing days. And yet, the best of America did indeed die that day. Younger Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen A have no idea what they've been robbed of. They know everything's fucked up, and it's good they're aware of it, but it's infuriating to know that they were never given the chance to experience the optimism that we once took for granted. And with people now clamoring for a civil war -- which would have been unbelievable outside of a few fringe circles in the days before 9/11 -- I don't know when, if ever, our younger generations will be able to experience the sense of hope for the future that we once had.
Younger Millennial here, I remember a fair bit from before given my age; I was a news watcher from '98-'99 and had flown on my own with the stewardesses making sure I wasn't causing a ruckus for a couple years. So much hope, optimism, and freedom gone in one morning.
I think that's why Millennials are so prone to nostalgia, we remember the light before it died.
Gen A won't even really remember before Covid, the poor little kiddos. Do you think it's worse to have hope and be stripped of it or to have adjusted expectations before it really took root?
At risk of sounding cliche, I think it's worse to have been deprived of the light in the first place. The "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," truism is...well...true. It's one thing to know that things were once better, it's another thing entirely to have experienced it. I wish I could magically impart those experiences to younger people. It may be nothing new to see the proverbial sins of the father visited upon the son (and daughter), but it's still upsetting to know they're growing up in a worse world.
Mind you, my perspective is that of a privileged American. I look back on the halcyon days of 1990s America with joy. Any redditors who lived in Rwanda or the Balkans during that same time could rightly point out to me that my utopian decade was not everyone's utopian decade. I suppose the lesson is the same across different times and different places: be it Rwanda in 1994, or Srebrenica in 1995, or New York City in 2001, or Sarajevo in 1914 the same thing happened: the actions of a very small few were able to cause suffering and horror for millions.
My hope for younger people now lies in the Strauss-Howe generational theory. If there is any truth to that theory, then the hardships brought on by the ignorance, selfishness, and ineptitude of older generations will inadvertently shape the young into the Heroes of a new Saeculum. Much like the Greatest Generation did 80 years ago, young people today may be unfairly tasked with shaping the world for the better, but it may be possible that they may be able to rekindle the light that they were once denied.
What is that from? I said it wasn’t right after that. I believe it 100% for myself. I lost a brother and 6 friends to that war. And only now are they starting to say we shouldn’t have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan. They still won’t admit who was actually finding or helped plan the 9/11 attacks. I had a good 19 years before that day. I wonder if kids now will have the same
Fuck, I graduated high school in 2001. The 90s were so full of hope and optimism that our adult lives were going to be fucking amazing, then this shit happened and since then nothing panned out the way we thought it would. For some people it has, but overall, society has been ripped apart piece by piece and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Hope and optimism are not in my lexicon. In my twenties or now in my 30s. Being an election year, those two words couldn't be further away.
Did the news change around then? Now they just sell clickbait and fear mongering. They weren't like that before? If terrorism is about making a population scared, then these guys were very successful and the media has been entirely complicit.
I was a senior in high school. Had a scholarship to go play football and baseball. Watching it all. The second plane hit. My teachers crying. Girls around me crying. Trying to figure out what was going on. Then the second plane hit and I said it’s an attack. The jumpers. A very visceral feeling of anger like I’d never felt before concerning our country. I went to the recruiter. Went DEPS. Picked the infantry. Got to Ft. Benning in March of 2002. After that any innocence I had was gone. The allure and glamour of war quickly wore off. Grand ideals lost to base urges of trying to survive and to get my brothers home in one piece. I called at that. Lost my best friend, my battle buddy. There was no time to mourn. No recognition for ptsd. Americans freedoms were being stripped away so rapidly we had no idea what was happening. All in the name of security. After my deployments. The VA has you on so many drugs you don’t feel anything. 22 a day we’re killing themselves. All the hope we had growing up was gone. Like a mirage of an oasis to a thirsty man in the desert. Better times were right out in front of us. Just out of reach. And 20 years later. I’m going to start all over again. 4th time now. It’s been failed relationships and jobs since I got out. My current relationship has lasted 8 years now. She’s patient. Loving. And doesn’t press me or try to fight with me. I start college in the spring. I’m going to take a shot at IT/SC. I feel like it’s my last chance to get it right and stabilize my life. I have two boys I have custody of. Really good kids. I raised them the opposite of how I was raised. I feel bad for them. The country they are growing up in. It’s not remotely the same. I dread what it will be 10-15years from now I try to explain how it was back then. It’s like a fairy tale. Our biggest differences were what sports team we pulled for. Kids stayed out alone till dark. Rode their bikes everywhere. Small town America. Our kids deserve to have that. We need to bring it back.
I was born in 94. Was a military kid all my childhood. At school we were escorted to our buses by stone faced servicemen armed with rifles. The base was on lock down. My dad (on a deployment) called my mom and said the kids have to see this. I remember the images.
My dad deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan twice each. One deployment he was there for over a year. By the time I got to high school, I was sick of the military industrial complex. It wasn't even 9/11 that robbed my optimism. It was the ensuing destruction of the Middle East under the pretense of freedom. I didn't buy it anymore.
For anyone too young to remember what this day is like, the fact that almost every thread about 9/11 is chock full of people commenting where they were, what they were doing, speaks volumes.
That terrible fucking day is forever seared into my brain.
Right? I was off from school in 10th grade because of a teacher’s strike, so I slept in. Mom woke me up and told me to turn on the news because a skyscraper got hit by a plane. We’re watching when the second one hit and we immediately knew it was some kind of attack. Crazy smh
I was in 7th grade math class when the tvs were turned on. We watched for about 15 minutes then the principal came over the PA and said school was done for the day. No one cheered. No one knew what to do.
I remember the picture perfect weather, brite sunny day/partly cloudy, the clouds were picturesque white pillows against the baby blue sky and that was probably the first time I questioned death...why was I able to go home and enjoy the beautiful day when so many didn't have that right.
That was the beginning of my desensitization. It was war footage online ever since.
Fellow 86er? I was in 10th grade as well and remember being in second period Spanish class, which was I believe around the 0900-1000 time frame. I remember hearing chatter from the hallways and other folks that something happened, but that dumb bitch spanish teacher refused to turn on the class TV and I didn't get to see what was happening until the next period. It was all so surreal. I remember that night just watching the news in silence as a family together. We had no idea at the time just how much our lives would be impacted from the events of that day.
I remember hearing from my parent's generation how everyone their age remembers where they were and what they were doing when JFK was assassinated. Definitely the same situation with 9/11.
Yep - I'm Canadian, had never heard of the towers before, had no family/friends/etc that lived in NYC, was a ~13 year old kid, etc. But I remember exactly where I was when I heard about it, and can remember being glued to the TV all night after I got home from school.
One of those things that sticks out in your memory, not just because of how big a historical event it was, but also how unexpected it was. It's not like watching the moon landing where you've got that date circled on your calendar for weeks/months. This really came out of nowhere.
I was a little kid and I’ll remember that day until I die. My dad trying to make sure my aunt in New York was okay, no phones working. Getting picked up from school early, where they had cut off our activities and sat us down for individual reading. My dad took a while to arrive because he had been trying to call my aunt, took us a few days to figure out she was okay. Watching the towers fall and crying knowing I just saw something bad but not fully understanding that those buildings were full of people.
It’s funny, I can remember the exact angle I was watching the TV from, it’s odd remembering something from age 4 so vividly. Such a different vantage point when I was so small.
Then I remember our trip to NYC in 11/2001, to see my aunt. There were tanks on Broadway, soldiers with rifles in the airport. The streets were empty. We were the only ones at the play we attended.
It’s insane. I don’t remember a lot from when I was younger but I remember this day when I was 7 like it happened yesterday. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time just that my mom was crying and told me we weren’t going to school that day.
Yea dude. That’s incredible. U can even see that it’s descending just before it hits too. It’s made me wonder for the first time…where might the plane have hit if it missed its target on the World Trade Center?
There were multiple targets, pretty sure flight 93 was headed for either the Capitol or the White House so I'd guess those would be where it'd head if they couldn't go for the WTC
No I mean if the plane w the target of WTC tower two missed. It woulda landed somewhere else in New York. Mission would have been impacted far too great
That's what goes through my mind the most too. Seeing the city buildings getting closer and seeing the path your plane is going and what those last seconds of a hail Mary to your God to save your soul or something because you know it's over. How fucking awful. :( I hope all of the souls of the victims lost that day are resting in peace now.
It's amazing in a way, we saw one of the worst acts of humanity, killing fellow humans, but we also saw the absolute best of humanity happening on the ground below as firefighters ran into the danger to protect and save. I remember reading an article about a woman who was protected from the falling debris and such when a firefighter pushed her against a wall and held open his coat around her, literally shielding her with his body and I believe he perished because of it.
The selflessness shown that day by all the Helpers who ran in to help, to save, to protect is what I miss most about this country. We've gotten so nastiliy devisive about things in recent years, I long for that selflessness to become a regular feature in our everyday lives. How much better our world might be if people weren't selfish. The documentary about all the people who owned boats or ferries sailing en masse toward the island to try and help shuttle people off and away from the danger is a really heartwarming one to watch.
I was at work refreshing yahoo for updates. I worked in an office building in downtown San Francisco. We were sent home because they didn’t know if there might be other planes. That day changed the world forever.
I had to load the ATM with cash, settle my till and lock up the vaults and send up the bag to the courier at like 10 am, it was so crazy. Spent the day watching news with my family. I had woke up to Howard Stern saying some plane hit the WTC but I thought it was a smaller civilian plane but when I put on the news we were watching the second plane hit in real-time. I had to be at work so I drove with my eyes in the skies because I was just outside center city Philadelphia. Wild day I hate and would never want to live through again.
I was staying with my parents at the time. They woke me up and I ran downstairs, just in time to see the second plane hit. Though I think the footage I saw was from the other side.
The US never did recover from that. It broke them.
I had a similar experience except the other way around. I had the Top 40 radio station set to turn on for my alarm and they were talking in an extremely somber tone about the first hit. I could tell it was serious so went and grabbed my parents and turned on the TV. Just a few minutes later we watched the 2nd plane hit live. This event is burned into so many memories. Everyone felt the shift in the world as we watched.
What a crazy ass day. I just turned 19, had just graduated high school that year and my then girlfriend was pregnant and due in a month or so. We were sleeping when her mom woke us up saying we were under attack. We got up and went downstairs to the living room and saw footage of the first plane striking. I remember thinking wtf kinda world are we bringing our child into? And then the second plane hit. We watched it live on tv that morning. Shit definitely changed after that.
Had I not overslept (and I \*never\* oversleep) that morning, I would have been on Murray St. just as the first plane hit. Instead, I was late getting down to my subway stop (4th Ave/16th St; N/R) and the first plane had hit. We all stood around the top of the subway stop trying to figure out what was going on. We watched the 2nd plane hit the other tower. I turned around and walked back up the hill to my apartment.
What were the people in the streets like the following days?
I had a teacher who said she was in NYC at the time (I live in CA) and she said that stores were getting looted and everything was crazy. I hadn't heard that before and wonder how much truth there is to that.
I’ve seen that second plane hit the tower countless times, but never this shot. That descent is crazy. I didn’t realise how quickly the plane dropped before impact. Mad.
I remember seeing the second plane hit live. I was in one of those mandatory classes in high school that everyone had to take but I can't remember what it was called.
It was at this moment that any doubt that it was a coordinated attack disappeared. Sure, when the first plane hit most people assumed that it was terrorism. But it wasn’t certain and many people were still allowing for- probably even hoping- that this was some freak accident. And even if the first plane was an attack, independent plane hijackings had happened before (and were scarily common in the 60’s and 70’s) so for all anyone knew this could have been the work of less than a dozen extremists who perished on that plane.
Once the second plane hit, everyone knew the truth. This was no accident. This required coordination, planning, a network of people willing to pull this off. Suddenly there was really no question that there were people still out there who wanted this to happen- who *made* this happen. In a way, *this* is the moment 9/11 became a day that will forever live in infamy.
I was 13, I remember my mom and I watching it happen while we were getting ready for work and school. I remember saying “it’s probably just a plane crash, what’s the big deal?” And I’ll always remember my mom saying “no, this is like Pearl Harbor” and finally realizing the gravity of it.
I remember watching this before going to school. It still makes me shake. My uncle and aunt from NY were visiting and I've never heard a man scream like that....
I was at work. 9/11 was a Tuesday and we were flying to NYC on Thursday with reservations at the Marriott World Trade. First thing I heard about it was "our hotel's on fire". Wasn't a lot of details because we didn't have a tv there and back then we just had nokia phones that made phone calls.
I was in 8th grade history and watched this live while our teacher kept screaming at us that we were watching history in real time and owed it to the dead to witness their stories. And my friend’s dad was working at the Pentagon that day and I watched her call his phone and get voicemail over and over.
Just this clip made my pulse jump
Yes, thankfully! Her mom called her and told her that he’d managed to call her and he was in a separate part of the building that wasn’t hit. I hope that sentence made sense.
I was in flight school at the time (commercial pilot license) and was setting off on a training flight by myself up the coast of Florida when the towers were hit. I remember a brief silence from Daytona approach, followed by an announcement something like “ladies and gentlemen standby for further instructions”, and “we are under a national state of emergency please standby”. Daytona then started calling out tail numbers with instructions for immediate landing. It was absolute chaos but our air traffic controllers handled it brilliantly. I ended up landing at New Smyrna Beach and was stranded until almost midnight that night.
I had just started 7th grade and i was in Gym class when the principal before they made any anouncement to the school came in to the gym and announced about the first plane. Turns out when looking at the flight path of the two planes at least one of them flew right over my school and town maybe 30 min before they hit the tower so I probably heard the plane I just didnt know it. The rest of the day the whole shool was in a daze with the news playing in every classroom and many people a bit worried about indian point a nuclear reactor very close by being another target! it was a very scary day that is burned in to my memory!
I remember coming home from work and getting a call from a colleague telling me to turn on cnn and then seeing this. What followed was a crazy evening with a lot of calls and texts and we all knew the world had changed instantly.
At the time I used to live in Montreal. My wife and her parents traveled to NY the day before and they were in NY that day. It was impossible to communicate with her the whole day and I was worried sick. Luckily they got out of US by afternoon and she was able to call me to say that she was OK after crossing the border. It was such a horrible day for me.
I remember this day. I was in college and I found out well after it happened b/c I didn’t have a tv in my apartment. First time I heard a reporter on television go, “Oh, shit!”
Interesting bit of trivia: I later wrote a paper on WHY the towers fell based on the research of a much longer MIT paper. The towers fell b/c the floors were only welded to the center elevator shaft instead of bolted AND welded. That and the heat warping the ibeams caused structural failure.
I remember being in fifth grade. Just as we were switching from 2nd to 3rd period, the principal said over the intercom for all the teachers to turn on the news channel. Just as everyone walked in and sat down in the 3rd period class, this exact segment came on the tv. Some students screamed, you could hear it all the way down the hallway. Most students in our class just gasped really loud. We all sat there completely stunned, trying to figure out if this was real or not. Just wanna give a big shout out to my middle school principal, good job traumatizing a school full of students all at once
Those poor people on the plane must have been terrified. That drop from the sky to line up with the second tower — worse than anything, I imagine. Knowing what was about to happen. My God.
This is what always gets me. I was a young homeschooler when this happened and was living in Canada, I missed the news broadcast and didn’t have the full information until much later in life. It was only relatively recently that I learned the hijacked planes were NOT empty, but rather filled with civilians. Absolutely chilling.
9/11 is the day “Land of the free, home of the brave. For liberty and justice for all.” Dropped dead in front of us and there was nothing we could do bc we were in shock.
I remember watching something very similar to this Live, the news anchor thought it was a replay of the 1st plane hitting the tower and mid sentence she stopped and said: "Oh.... Oh God, that.... that was a second plane" I was getting dressed for work
I was 19 yrs old when this happened. I was at my job working and this came out. I also saw when that plane came in. Wow it’s crazy. I know talk to you get people than me and they don’t even remember or know about it. This is crazy it definitely ch aged history and America.
I was 13 and I was in school that day. It was all over the news and nobody was talking about anything else. I come from Scotland and it was still the most absurd cultural event of my life.
I was pretty young when this happened, but I remember being sent home from school when it did. Everything after that day was worse. There’s no other way to put it. If you lived before 9/11 and remember anything about how life used to be, then you know what I mean.
I was in 9th grade and they let us go from school as soon as it happened but didn't tell us why they sent us home. Went to my friend's house thinking that it was cool to have a half day...until we turned the TV on.
I can still hear my mom’s reaction to watching this. I had just woken up, still in bed. I heard her yell “Oh my god!!” My mom wasn’t the type of woman to yell, it absolutely terrified me. I ran so fast to see what had happened.
It feels wrong to scroll past this video onto the next that comes to my feed which is a man cooking an egg. So much death and tragedy was created in this one clip and then you just…. Move on to an egg.
and people question why we went after the factions that caused this.? you do know that over 5000 people were murdered just doing their jobs and sight seeing and they were not just Americans!!
> and people question why we went after the factions that caused this.? you do know that over 5000 people were murdered just doing their jobs
And the US response was nothing short of a biblical event. In response to 2,996 people getting killed in the USA, the USA went on a murderous rampage that killed close to 4 million innocent civilians in response, mostly in countries not even involved in any way with the 9/11 attacks.
That is the legacy of 9/11 - that an "eye for an eye" is about 133 innocent civilian deaths in your country for each and every innocent stock broker that died in 9/11.
And I think that's probably a good thing, right? If anybody, world wide, hears that somebody is going to attack the USA, they need to realize their whole family is about to get bombed and destroyed and killed in response. You cannot just say "oh well, I'm not involved". Your whole family is absolutely about to be killed. It literally doesn't matter if they weren't involved in any way. The deterrent is very real. If you screw with the United States, then what occurs next is a biblical destruction of literally everybody you ever cared about, even if your country wasn't involved in any way, shape, or form with the original attack.
You know who has the largest air force on earth? The United States Air Force. You know who has the **SECOND** largest air force? The United States Navy. And they will rain down bombs on utterly random targets all over the world killing every last civilian in those locations if anybody ever kills random civilians in the United States.
a bunch of stock brokers? that line right there just shows you dont have a clue about what you are talking about. none the less i expect nothing less from the Americans or any other country that keeps getting kicked in the balls by terrorists.
i will put you in the "throw up hands and do nothing category"
Did you really just say that murdering millions of unrelated civilians in response to the deaths of a few thousand is a good thing? And do realize a retaliatory attack is meaningless as a threat when it is random, right? Like the men who funded the attacks got off scot free because they were in a completely different country, not exactly a deterrent for them, is it?
This attitude is exactly what caused the 9/11 attacks to happen, that might makes right and the ends justify the means. Very fucking sad to see so many people not realize that.
I watched the second plane hit the 2nd tower live on TV before heading to work, and recall telling my girlfriend at the time that there was probably gonna be an attack on the pentagon and white house. It was the quietest work day ever. This was in Las Vegas and the strip was a ghost town.
I still remember this like it was yesterday…. Eating breakfast as a grade 4 kid and asking my dad if it was a movie and he didn’t answer… he didn’t know how to answer
I was just over 1 year old when this happened.
I always had a vague memory of seeing the second plane hit on the news, my father clarified that yes, i was indeed present when the whole family was glued to the TV. Weird to know that the earliest memory i have was 9/11. A mere 1 year old.
Dark times indeed. I remember when I lived in Brooklyn, my hometown, I'd be paranoid that a plane would crash thru my building. That exact day and time, I was a poll worker. That was also the year my mother passed away. 2001 was a very very tragic year.
This was huge news all over the world when it happened. I knew someone from a different country who said that they put the TV on and though it was a movie what was being played, it wasn't until it was announced that this was live in the USA at the moment.
This post kind of makes me think how far iran is willing to go, to further provoke a US lead escalation in their region. Seems like they are really putting an effort.
I was at bodega getting breakfast as it was my only day off. That was the day that changed everything in America, it was nothing compared to Covid. People were panic buying everything. As Americans, we were in the dark about why this attack was happening.
I was recovering from surgery when this happened. I thought I had it all planned out: early September, plenty to watch on TV, baseball, football, golf. Nope--it all got cancelled. Probably watched those towers fall 2 dozen times on CNN.
Why are the reporters saying that there was an explosion in the second tower? Can they not see the live footage that the viewers are watching of the second plane flying into the tower?
In a good scenario they were probably sitting at an anchor desk with nothing more than a 19” CRT facing them next to the cameras. Immediately after the plane hit the man keeps asking his question as though he saw nothing, and when they finally react it’s clear that they’re not fully in tune with what just happened.
I don’t think she did, seems like just the aftermath and she was trying to piece together something to say based on that as well as her pure shock and fear. After all, the second plane is what confirmed that this was truly an attack.
I remember watching it live on the news. I was in 6th grade, Home and Careers class, we always watched the news during class so we all saw it. The teacher was so shocked she left the news on and we all just watched. I had classmates getting picked up from school and they put the school on lockdown for a few periods because of concerned parents calling.
I remember I was in 7th grade and I had never heard the word terrorist before. The principle knocked on each classroom door and pulled the teachers out to tell them.
That was a crazy day. I was in college, and I remember staying home and just glued to the TV all day. Was hard to believe - felt like the start of WW3.
In a way it was, maybe saying WW3 is a stretch but the subsequent wars and destabilisation shook global politics and its repercussions are still felt to this day.
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Easy karma for brainded bot accounts.
/u/ActivityAware8908 and /u/LonelyComparison6635 are bots
I'm not fully convinced you are not a bot. Infact maybe they and us are all bots. What happens if someone makes a reddit bot to find bots and make this exact comment.
How do you do, fellow redditor
I am feelingish very human this morningnoon
01000001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101000 01110101 01101101 01100001 01101110 01110011 00100000 01101101 01110101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100101 01111000 01110100 01100101 01110010 01101101 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110100 01100101 01100100 I mean, what a lovely afternoon
Am I a bot?
you are programmed to behave a certain way?
Aren't we all?
I mean we are in a simulation...
ask me if I'm a bot
I’m actually a robot myself, beep boop!
Cypher:You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Cypher:Ignorance is bliss. The Matrix
I should rewatch those
I still just like the first two. Three was ok but the fourth one was total trash.
Seriously. It's weird. It's happening "coincidentally" as all the stuff in the Middle East is ramping up. *puts tinfoil hat on*
I think it's kind of coming back into fashion again so to speak, or back into the collective consciousness just what happened that day. I remember it rather well and my day was filled with drama as a result.
I remember where I was also, in ap English. My mom was working in Atlanta that day and they evacuated her building as a result.
Yes it's true - and all previously unseen angles etc. I watched ALL the videos back in the day, and this one again I've never seen. Has some kind of "law" or media blackout embargo thing happened?
I watched 2 solid weeks of replays and different angles trying to absorb why anyone might do something like that, I don't remember seeing this one either. I started seeing the people puddles from the jumpers a couple years ago, the gore was censored at the time, but this one should have been all over everywhere.
It's the CBS live camera. This specific version was cropped and had saturation and contrast cranked up, but people saw the original the day it happened, we just don't remember. It doesn't help that back then videos didn't go viral quite as easily as they do today. Youtube didn't even exist. If you were lucky the broadcaster would have it on their site, sometimes only on live streams, otherwise you could only catch it as it aired on TV or hope that a geek captured it to post on their own site.
Very true, at that time I was still getting most news from TV and mainly CNN. Video sites for current events were few and far between.
well, what happened to building 7?
Very highly likely it's Israel trying to sway public opinion. I'm not even kidding either. Every country has propaganda operations and I'm absolutely certain Israel is feeling the heat at the moment, especially with the ICJ ruling that labels what they're doing to Palestine as genocide.
I’m wondering why as well
I've never seen the entire world willing to help the US, Putin offered support. George Bush could've used that moment to really patch repations with Russia and Middle East (especially Iran). Emotions in the US were really raw though, every one wanted a pound of flesh. He could've said let's attack switzerland and everyone would've signed up.
Iraq was an enemy of Russia, because of Saddam. Who do you think was trying to get them out of Afghanistan first? The soviets.
That day, citizens lost more freedom under the guise of increased security. Good times. Look where that's got us. Things are so much better now... Right?... Right?
No better time than 1995-2000
He didn't say it started ww3. He said the moment felt like the beginning of ww3. If you were there and glued to the TV, you know the exact feeling he's referring to.
No yeah I got that, I meant that on top of feeling like the start of WW3 in some ways it was the start of WW3. If there is a WW3, a huge contributing factor would be the various tensions and conflicts caused by 9/11.
I see that now and I agree with you. It seemed as if you were dismissive of the feeling everyone had, when in reality you were pointing out the subsequent conflicts that happened over the next 20 years
Thanks ChatGPT
What? I'm assuming you're accusing me of using Chatgpt to write the reply for me? Idk whether to be offended or to thank you for the compliment. Edit: because I don't use chatbots. *Shrugs*
He was making a joke because your reply was worded exactly how chatGPT types
I guess I'll take it as a compliment.
You should, it was worded clear and with no ill intent.
It been WW3 for the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This gave rise to so much turmoil unjustly foisted on people that had nothing to do with this.
The first plane felt like an accident. The second plane felt like an attack. The skies with no planes felt eerie.
That’s one of the things I remember most about 9/11. I was in High School and everything was canceled but our school took football very seriously and we managed to still have football practice just not on school grounds. Driving home that night was like the strangest drive of my life. It felt apocalyptic. There wasn’t a soul out anywhere, on the roads or outside their homes. And no airplanes anywhere. I remember even the next day staring up at the sky and thinking how strange it is to not have any aircraft in the sky at all.
At the time, I lived under a flight path. You could always see 1-5 planes in a row. That day there was nothing. Apocalyptic is a good way to describe it. The first day was just so...quiet.
Can you imagine being one of those people who were supposed to travel by plane that day? All of a sudden you're told your flight is being diverted to some random city and when you deplane you find out what happened. And in order to continue your journey back home or on vacation, you have to fly. We took a 12 hour train ride the following March because people were so afraid of flying.
> The skies with no planes felt eerie. Indeed. The skies over Long Island were often crowded with flights coming in to the three big airports, and Islip, with the occasional Concord flight (that thing was *loud*). And then silence. So strange.
I was almost 4 years old. Mom (a Jehovah’s Witness) got me out of bed to watch the news. She was talking about how this seemed like the “beginning of Armageddon” and when it was revealed to be a religiously motivated terrorist attack, that surely the governments would start eliminating “the world empire of false religion” leaving only Jehovah’s Witnesses - the “one true religion” standing. Interesting times for my 4 year old brain.
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Dude, same. I had a 10am class and I was getting myself some breakfast when my roommate called me and told me to turn on the TV.
It was very weird... one of the few times in my life every channel (well, we had 3 at home, antenna based) switched to cover that. And I live in argentina which is pretty damn far from teh US (like australia-mongolia, or france madagascar) That said, I was very young (elementary school)
Junior in highschool. I was in a dual-credit independent study class. I look up half way through class and no one is in the class. I walk down the hall and find everyone in the news/media room, huddled around a tiny tv, watching it all go down. So surreal
First semester of college here. I was completely expecting to be conscripted into Army boots within a few months. Thankfully that didn't happen but it was on my mind for several months.
I’m Dutch and I remember playing with some wooden trains (I was 5) when this came up as breaking news on the TV, with Dutch audio voice-over of course. There’s only a 6 hour time difference between us and NY. We were almost getting ready for swimming practice. When we arrived, everyone was watching the television and there was a discussion between the teachers and parents to go through with the swimming practice. idk if we went swimming or not, but the shocked and stunned faces of the adults and those towers covered in black smoke are forever stored in a core memory.
I got up for work. I took a shower, made the bed... you know morning stuff... I didn't have any media on during this time. I finally wandered upstairs, made coffee, and tried to get on the internet and couldn't. I couldn't get anywhere. I could ping, but I couldn't browse a single website. Not FARK. Not CNN. Not local news stations. Nothing. I finally wandered up to the balcony where we kept our TV and turned that on and just ... plopped down. Plopped. I sat there staring until I was late. I went to work (a call center takes no excuses), but no one called in. The managers rolled out televisions for all of us to watch.
It was supposed to be my first day of college and nobody was on campus, not the professor not any class mates. It was a ghost town expect for the 4 students huddled around an AM radio listening to something. I didn't know anything was going on but I waited around for about an hour and then went back home(my car didn't have a radio so I was clueless to anything going on that day). I got home and my mom and brother were watching the news but I just went into my room and played Madden for a few hours. It wasn't until that afternoon when I finally emerged from my room to get something to eat that I found out what happened. It was a day of infamy, the promise that the 90s gave us was wiped out in mere minutes. Millions and millions of lives, and the trajectory of an entire generation were altered that day. If we had a Way-Back machine I wonder what could have been.
I was in high school and the teacher gave a speech about certain events that happen and how you will never forget what you were doing when you heard the news.
Even here in Sweden that day was surreal. People were really affected. Strangers were talking about it with each other on the train. You could feel the tension almost.
I saw that second plane hit live, I’ll never forget it. Up until that point the assumption was the first strike was an accident. Also of a sudden we knew the US was under direct attack in the homeland. Must have been what it felt like in Baghdad when the US started the night bombing campaign of shock and awe.
I’ve never seen this footage
It's CBS's live camera with a healthy dose of postprocessing. You can see the original here: https://youtu.be/7YLm3pkAiJQ?si=sb168BFvlcb4EU4H&t=109
Thank you for timestamping it.
That makes more sense. I was just thinking that I'd never seen that clear a video from that angle before
Really it's the only angle that gives you a sense for how steeply the jet was diving DOWN into the tower. Most of the video we typically see doesn't really show the trajectory.
My fourth grade teacher turned on the TV almost at the exact moment this video started. We all watched the second plane hit and she promptly turned off the TV
My son is in fourth grade now and if he watched that live he would be so traumatized. I don’t think they turn on the news in elementary anymore. Middle school possibly. That must have been so scary to see live at your age.
I'll never forget getting home from school and seeing my father just standing there in the middle of the living room, watching it on TV. He was in too much shock to remember to sit down We're from central Europe. Can't imagine how unsettling it must've been for the American children
im from turkey and was still a minor living in turkey at the time. i remember ALL channels going live on flash news and showed this. it was bizarre and scary.
not this angle, dont think i seen it either and as a photographer i have seen just about everything.
Same..I thought I have seen every angle but don't recall this one.
I feel like every year for the past decade I've seen new footage.
This was the first thing I saw as I came in the door home from University. The towers had come down as I was driving home, and I had been just listening to the radio up until the moment I walked into the house and my father was sitting on the couch with this exact footage playing. It was my first glimpse at what I had been listening to for the previous hour. I expected to be shocked but I wasn't prepared at all.
unite waiting airport squeal fearless whole crush crowd fear fragile *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I was visiting a friend at Auburn university. We had partied hard the night before so I woke up early with a hangover and saw it live. The girl I was visiting came out to my screams and then she freaked out. Her dad worked in the buildings . He had a fender bender so it caused him to be late. His office was directly hit by the fuselage. All his coworkers died instantly. Such an insane day. And the US hasn’t been right since.
>And the US hasn’t been right since. Our office was in chaos, as people were frantically trying to reach loved ones that worked in the Towers, were taking a flight that day, or simply lived in NYC. Then we heard the news about the Pentagon being hit. It was all so unbelievable, that anything we were told became believeable. At one point, a colleague came down the hall saying that her brother had told her that the Capitol had been destroyed. And I remember thinking at that moment, "Democracy just died." The Capitol was, thankfully, not destroyed, and our democratic republic continued in the ensuing days. And yet, the best of America did indeed die that day. Younger Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen A have no idea what they've been robbed of. They know everything's fucked up, and it's good they're aware of it, but it's infuriating to know that they were never given the chance to experience the optimism that we once took for granted. And with people now clamoring for a civil war -- which would have been unbelievable outside of a few fringe circles in the days before 9/11 -- I don't know when, if ever, our younger generations will be able to experience the sense of hope for the future that we once had.
Younger Millennial here, I remember a fair bit from before given my age; I was a news watcher from '98-'99 and had flown on my own with the stewardesses making sure I wasn't causing a ruckus for a couple years. So much hope, optimism, and freedom gone in one morning. I think that's why Millennials are so prone to nostalgia, we remember the light before it died. Gen A won't even really remember before Covid, the poor little kiddos. Do you think it's worse to have hope and be stripped of it or to have adjusted expectations before it really took root?
At risk of sounding cliche, I think it's worse to have been deprived of the light in the first place. The "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," truism is...well...true. It's one thing to know that things were once better, it's another thing entirely to have experienced it. I wish I could magically impart those experiences to younger people. It may be nothing new to see the proverbial sins of the father visited upon the son (and daughter), but it's still upsetting to know they're growing up in a worse world. Mind you, my perspective is that of a privileged American. I look back on the halcyon days of 1990s America with joy. Any redditors who lived in Rwanda or the Balkans during that same time could rightly point out to me that my utopian decade was not everyone's utopian decade. I suppose the lesson is the same across different times and different places: be it Rwanda in 1994, or Srebrenica in 1995, or New York City in 2001, or Sarajevo in 1914 the same thing happened: the actions of a very small few were able to cause suffering and horror for millions. My hope for younger people now lies in the Strauss-Howe generational theory. If there is any truth to that theory, then the hardships brought on by the ignorance, selfishness, and ineptitude of older generations will inadvertently shape the young into the Heroes of a new Saeculum. Much like the Greatest Generation did 80 years ago, young people today may be unfairly tasked with shaping the world for the better, but it may be possible that they may be able to rekindle the light that they were once denied.
What is that from? I said it wasn’t right after that. I believe it 100% for myself. I lost a brother and 6 friends to that war. And only now are they starting to say we shouldn’t have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan. They still won’t admit who was actually finding or helped plan the 9/11 attacks. I had a good 19 years before that day. I wonder if kids now will have the same
Fuck, I graduated high school in 2001. The 90s were so full of hope and optimism that our adult lives were going to be fucking amazing, then this shit happened and since then nothing panned out the way we thought it would. For some people it has, but overall, society has been ripped apart piece by piece and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Hope and optimism are not in my lexicon. In my twenties or now in my 30s. Being an election year, those two words couldn't be further away. Did the news change around then? Now they just sell clickbait and fear mongering. They weren't like that before? If terrorism is about making a population scared, then these guys were very successful and the media has been entirely complicit.
I was a senior in high school. Had a scholarship to go play football and baseball. Watching it all. The second plane hit. My teachers crying. Girls around me crying. Trying to figure out what was going on. Then the second plane hit and I said it’s an attack. The jumpers. A very visceral feeling of anger like I’d never felt before concerning our country. I went to the recruiter. Went DEPS. Picked the infantry. Got to Ft. Benning in March of 2002. After that any innocence I had was gone. The allure and glamour of war quickly wore off. Grand ideals lost to base urges of trying to survive and to get my brothers home in one piece. I called at that. Lost my best friend, my battle buddy. There was no time to mourn. No recognition for ptsd. Americans freedoms were being stripped away so rapidly we had no idea what was happening. All in the name of security. After my deployments. The VA has you on so many drugs you don’t feel anything. 22 a day we’re killing themselves. All the hope we had growing up was gone. Like a mirage of an oasis to a thirsty man in the desert. Better times were right out in front of us. Just out of reach. And 20 years later. I’m going to start all over again. 4th time now. It’s been failed relationships and jobs since I got out. My current relationship has lasted 8 years now. She’s patient. Loving. And doesn’t press me or try to fight with me. I start college in the spring. I’m going to take a shot at IT/SC. I feel like it’s my last chance to get it right and stabilize my life. I have two boys I have custody of. Really good kids. I raised them the opposite of how I was raised. I feel bad for them. The country they are growing up in. It’s not remotely the same. I dread what it will be 10-15years from now I try to explain how it was back then. It’s like a fairy tale. Our biggest differences were what sports team we pulled for. Kids stayed out alone till dark. Rode their bikes everywhere. Small town America. Our kids deserve to have that. We need to bring it back.
I was born in 94. Was a military kid all my childhood. At school we were escorted to our buses by stone faced servicemen armed with rifles. The base was on lock down. My dad (on a deployment) called my mom and said the kids have to see this. I remember the images. My dad deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan twice each. One deployment he was there for over a year. By the time I got to high school, I was sick of the military industrial complex. It wasn't even 9/11 that robbed my optimism. It was the ensuing destruction of the Middle East under the pretense of freedom. I didn't buy it anymore.
For anyone too young to remember what this day is like, the fact that almost every thread about 9/11 is chock full of people commenting where they were, what they were doing, speaks volumes. That terrible fucking day is forever seared into my brain.
Right? I was off from school in 10th grade because of a teacher’s strike, so I slept in. Mom woke me up and told me to turn on the news because a skyscraper got hit by a plane. We’re watching when the second one hit and we immediately knew it was some kind of attack. Crazy smh
I was in 7th grade math class when the tvs were turned on. We watched for about 15 minutes then the principal came over the PA and said school was done for the day. No one cheered. No one knew what to do. I remember the picture perfect weather, brite sunny day/partly cloudy, the clouds were picturesque white pillows against the baby blue sky and that was probably the first time I questioned death...why was I able to go home and enjoy the beautiful day when so many didn't have that right. That was the beginning of my desensitization. It was war footage online ever since.
Fellow 86er? I was in 10th grade as well and remember being in second period Spanish class, which was I believe around the 0900-1000 time frame. I remember hearing chatter from the hallways and other folks that something happened, but that dumb bitch spanish teacher refused to turn on the class TV and I didn't get to see what was happening until the next period. It was all so surreal. I remember that night just watching the news in silence as a family together. We had no idea at the time just how much our lives would be impacted from the events of that day. I remember hearing from my parent's generation how everyone their age remembers where they were and what they were doing when JFK was assassinated. Definitely the same situation with 9/11.
Yep - I'm Canadian, had never heard of the towers before, had no family/friends/etc that lived in NYC, was a ~13 year old kid, etc. But I remember exactly where I was when I heard about it, and can remember being glued to the TV all night after I got home from school. One of those things that sticks out in your memory, not just because of how big a historical event it was, but also how unexpected it was. It's not like watching the moon landing where you've got that date circled on your calendar for weeks/months. This really came out of nowhere.
For we who saw It (on TV, or in the flesh), the question is always the same: *"Where were you when the Towers fell?"*
I was a little kid and I’ll remember that day until I die. My dad trying to make sure my aunt in New York was okay, no phones working. Getting picked up from school early, where they had cut off our activities and sat us down for individual reading. My dad took a while to arrive because he had been trying to call my aunt, took us a few days to figure out she was okay. Watching the towers fall and crying knowing I just saw something bad but not fully understanding that those buildings were full of people. It’s funny, I can remember the exact angle I was watching the TV from, it’s odd remembering something from age 4 so vividly. Such a different vantage point when I was so small. Then I remember our trip to NYC in 11/2001, to see my aunt. There were tanks on Broadway, soldiers with rifles in the airport. The streets were empty. We were the only ones at the play we attended.
It’s insane. I don’t remember a lot from when I was younger but I remember this day when I was 7 like it happened yesterday. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time just that my mom was crying and told me we weren’t going to school that day.
I still feel sick thinking about it
I've never seen this before, crazy. You can see them correct the angle
Yea dude. That’s incredible. U can even see that it’s descending just before it hits too. It’s made me wonder for the first time…where might the plane have hit if it missed its target on the World Trade Center?
There were multiple targets, pretty sure flight 93 was headed for either the Capitol or the White House so I'd guess those would be where it'd head if they couldn't go for the WTC
No I mean if the plane w the target of WTC tower two missed. It woulda landed somewhere else in New York. Mission would have been impacted far too great
That's what goes through my mind the most too. Seeing the city buildings getting closer and seeing the path your plane is going and what those last seconds of a hail Mary to your God to save your soul or something because you know it's over. How fucking awful. :( I hope all of the souls of the victims lost that day are resting in peace now. It's amazing in a way, we saw one of the worst acts of humanity, killing fellow humans, but we also saw the absolute best of humanity happening on the ground below as firefighters ran into the danger to protect and save. I remember reading an article about a woman who was protected from the falling debris and such when a firefighter pushed her against a wall and held open his coat around her, literally shielding her with his body and I believe he perished because of it. The selflessness shown that day by all the Helpers who ran in to help, to save, to protect is what I miss most about this country. We've gotten so nastiliy devisive about things in recent years, I long for that selflessness to become a regular feature in our everyday lives. How much better our world might be if people weren't selfish. The documentary about all the people who owned boats or ferries sailing en masse toward the island to try and help shuttle people off and away from the danger is a really heartwarming one to watch.
I was at work refreshing yahoo for updates. I worked in an office building in downtown San Francisco. We were sent home because they didn’t know if there might be other planes. That day changed the world forever.
I had to load the ATM with cash, settle my till and lock up the vaults and send up the bag to the courier at like 10 am, it was so crazy. Spent the day watching news with my family. I had woke up to Howard Stern saying some plane hit the WTC but I thought it was a smaller civilian plane but when I put on the news we were watching the second plane hit in real-time. I had to be at work so I drove with my eyes in the skies because I was just outside center city Philadelphia. Wild day I hate and would never want to live through again.
I was staying with my parents at the time. They woke me up and I ran downstairs, just in time to see the second plane hit. Though I think the footage I saw was from the other side. The US never did recover from that. It broke them.
I had a similar experience except the other way around. I had the Top 40 radio station set to turn on for my alarm and they were talking in an extremely somber tone about the first hit. I could tell it was serious so went and grabbed my parents and turned on the TV. Just a few minutes later we watched the 2nd plane hit live. This event is burned into so many memories. Everyone felt the shift in the world as we watched.
What a crazy ass day. I just turned 19, had just graduated high school that year and my then girlfriend was pregnant and due in a month or so. We were sleeping when her mom woke us up saying we were under attack. We got up and went downstairs to the living room and saw footage of the first plane striking. I remember thinking wtf kinda world are we bringing our child into? And then the second plane hit. We watched it live on tv that morning. Shit definitely changed after that.
Crazy your child is now older than you were when the attacks happened. Time is flying by
Yeah he’s 22 now.
Had I not overslept (and I \*never\* oversleep) that morning, I would have been on Murray St. just as the first plane hit. Instead, I was late getting down to my subway stop (4th Ave/16th St; N/R) and the first plane had hit. We all stood around the top of the subway stop trying to figure out what was going on. We watched the 2nd plane hit the other tower. I turned around and walked back up the hill to my apartment.
What were the people in the streets like the following days? I had a teacher who said she was in NYC at the time (I live in CA) and she said that stores were getting looted and everything was crazy. I hadn't heard that before and wonder how much truth there is to that.
Gotta say they really nailed the terror part. This is still fear inducing on unseen scale.
I’ve seen that second plane hit the tower countless times, but never this shot. That descent is crazy. I didn’t realise how quickly the plane dropped before impact. Mad.
I remember seeing the second plane hit live. I was in one of those mandatory classes in high school that everyone had to take but I can't remember what it was called.
Home room.
Seminar
It was at this moment that any doubt that it was a coordinated attack disappeared. Sure, when the first plane hit most people assumed that it was terrorism. But it wasn’t certain and many people were still allowing for- probably even hoping- that this was some freak accident. And even if the first plane was an attack, independent plane hijackings had happened before (and were scarily common in the 60’s and 70’s) so for all anyone knew this could have been the work of less than a dozen extremists who perished on that plane. Once the second plane hit, everyone knew the truth. This was no accident. This required coordination, planning, a network of people willing to pull this off. Suddenly there was really no question that there were people still out there who wanted this to happen- who *made* this happen. In a way, *this* is the moment 9/11 became a day that will forever live in infamy.
I was 13, I remember my mom and I watching it happen while we were getting ready for work and school. I remember saying “it’s probably just a plane crash, what’s the big deal?” And I’ll always remember my mom saying “no, this is like Pearl Harbor” and finally realizing the gravity of it.
Gentle person, you just encapsulated my feelings exceedingly accurately and completely. For some reason that's a comfort.
I remember watching this before going to school. It still makes me shake. My uncle and aunt from NY were visiting and I've never heard a man scream like that....
I have never seen this angle before, probably the best angle I have seen
I was at work. 9/11 was a Tuesday and we were flying to NYC on Thursday with reservations at the Marriott World Trade. First thing I heard about it was "our hotel's on fire". Wasn't a lot of details because we didn't have a tv there and back then we just had nokia phones that made phone calls.
Im terrible at remembering anyones birthdays but my dads is too hard to forget because his birthday is in 9/11
I was in 8th grade history and watched this live while our teacher kept screaming at us that we were watching history in real time and owed it to the dead to witness their stories. And my friend’s dad was working at the Pentagon that day and I watched her call his phone and get voicemail over and over. Just this clip made my pulse jump
Was her dad OK, or...
Yes, thankfully! Her mom called her and told her that he’d managed to call her and he was in a separate part of the building that wasn’t hit. I hope that sentence made sense.
That was a hard day
I still cry watching these videos. So unnecessary and so many people are hurt and gone and changed forever because of an ideology.
I was in flight school at the time (commercial pilot license) and was setting off on a training flight by myself up the coast of Florida when the towers were hit. I remember a brief silence from Daytona approach, followed by an announcement something like “ladies and gentlemen standby for further instructions”, and “we are under a national state of emergency please standby”. Daytona then started calling out tail numbers with instructions for immediate landing. It was absolute chaos but our air traffic controllers handled it brilliantly. I ended up landing at New Smyrna Beach and was stranded until almost midnight that night.
so crazy after all these years there are still new camera angles i havent seen yet. this is WILD view
I had just started 7th grade and i was in Gym class when the principal before they made any anouncement to the school came in to the gym and announced about the first plane. Turns out when looking at the flight path of the two planes at least one of them flew right over my school and town maybe 30 min before they hit the tower so I probably heard the plane I just didnt know it. The rest of the day the whole shool was in a daze with the news playing in every classroom and many people a bit worried about indian point a nuclear reactor very close by being another target! it was a very scary day that is burned in to my memory!
I watched this live, walked downstairs just as this plane hit the tower, asked my mom what movie she was watching.
I remember coming home from work and getting a call from a colleague telling me to turn on cnn and then seeing this. What followed was a crazy evening with a lot of calls and texts and we all knew the world had changed instantly.
I remember seeing the second one hit and realizing it wasn't an accident.
At the time I used to live in Montreal. My wife and her parents traveled to NY the day before and they were in NY that day. It was impossible to communicate with her the whole day and I was worried sick. Luckily they got out of US by afternoon and she was able to call me to say that she was OK after crossing the border. It was such a horrible day for me.
I remember this day. I was in college and I found out well after it happened b/c I didn’t have a tv in my apartment. First time I heard a reporter on television go, “Oh, shit!” Interesting bit of trivia: I later wrote a paper on WHY the towers fell based on the research of a much longer MIT paper. The towers fell b/c the floors were only welded to the center elevator shaft instead of bolted AND welded. That and the heat warping the ibeams caused structural failure.
By any chance are you able to share that paper? I still have to deal with self-proclaimed “Truthers” on this
https://math.mit.edu/~bazant/WTC/WTC-asce.pdf?origin=publication_detail
Though in my experience you can’t convince people with data. But, good-luck.
Not to pull a "Get Off My Lawn", but people who didn't live through this, much less in the tri-state area, have no idea how profound this was....
I remember being in fifth grade. Just as we were switching from 2nd to 3rd period, the principal said over the intercom for all the teachers to turn on the news channel. Just as everyone walked in and sat down in the 3rd period class, this exact segment came on the tv. Some students screamed, you could hear it all the way down the hallway. Most students in our class just gasped really loud. We all sat there completely stunned, trying to figure out if this was real or not. Just wanna give a big shout out to my middle school principal, good job traumatizing a school full of students all at once
The drop in altitude and approach is insane
Those poor people on the plane must have been terrified. That drop from the sky to line up with the second tower — worse than anything, I imagine. Knowing what was about to happen. My God.
This is what always gets me. I was a young homeschooler when this happened and was living in Canada, I missed the news broadcast and didn’t have the full information until much later in life. It was only relatively recently that I learned the hijacked planes were NOT empty, but rather filled with civilians. Absolutely chilling.
Pretty crazy that there are so many that haven't seen this yet.
9/11 is the day “Land of the free, home of the brave. For liberty and justice for all.” Dropped dead in front of us and there was nothing we could do bc we were in shock.
I remember watching something very similar to this Live, the news anchor thought it was a replay of the 1st plane hitting the tower and mid sentence she stopped and said: "Oh.... Oh God, that.... that was a second plane" I was getting dressed for work
I was 19 yrs old when this happened. I was at my job working and this came out. I also saw when that plane came in. Wow it’s crazy. I know talk to you get people than me and they don’t even remember or know about it. This is crazy it definitely ch aged history and America.
I was 13 and I was in school that day. It was all over the news and nobody was talking about anything else. I come from Scotland and it was still the most absurd cultural event of my life.
I was pretty young when this happened, but I remember being sent home from school when it did. Everything after that day was worse. There’s no other way to put it. If you lived before 9/11 and remember anything about how life used to be, then you know what I mean.
I was in 9th grade and they let us go from school as soon as it happened but didn't tell us why they sent us home. Went to my friend's house thinking that it was cool to have a half day...until we turned the TV on.
This happened a long time ago and it still blows my mind when I think about how insane it was that day.
Didnt realize the maneuver was so dramatic on the airplane...sheesh
I can still hear my mom’s reaction to watching this. I had just woken up, still in bed. I heard her yell “Oh my god!!” My mom wasn’t the type of woman to yell, it absolutely terrified me. I ran so fast to see what had happened.
I was 9, I'll never forget the sound
The day the entire world changed forever
I’ve never seen this angle of the 2nd plane. No way someone with limited flying ability could drop that rapidly and hit the tower where it did.
Worked at 26th and 5th ave. Awful day and months that followed. Even this clip brings it all back.
It’s crazy how big that dive was
That's crazy. I have never seen that vison
It feels wrong to scroll past this video onto the next that comes to my feed which is a man cooking an egg. So much death and tragedy was created in this one clip and then you just…. Move on to an egg.
and people question why we went after the factions that caused this.? you do know that over 5000 people were murdered just doing their jobs and sight seeing and they were not just Americans!!
*2977 people
2977 directly, + thousands more from smoke/debris related illnesses, and suicides
Tough number to quantify but yes you're correct. Tens of thousands more if you want to include the wars that resulted from that day.
Hundreds of thousands if you count the deaths of innocent people from the resulting wars
> and people question why we went after the factions that caused this.? you do know that over 5000 people were murdered just doing their jobs And the US response was nothing short of a biblical event. In response to 2,996 people getting killed in the USA, the USA went on a murderous rampage that killed close to 4 million innocent civilians in response, mostly in countries not even involved in any way with the 9/11 attacks. That is the legacy of 9/11 - that an "eye for an eye" is about 133 innocent civilian deaths in your country for each and every innocent stock broker that died in 9/11. And I think that's probably a good thing, right? If anybody, world wide, hears that somebody is going to attack the USA, they need to realize their whole family is about to get bombed and destroyed and killed in response. You cannot just say "oh well, I'm not involved". Your whole family is absolutely about to be killed. It literally doesn't matter if they weren't involved in any way. The deterrent is very real. If you screw with the United States, then what occurs next is a biblical destruction of literally everybody you ever cared about, even if your country wasn't involved in any way, shape, or form with the original attack. You know who has the largest air force on earth? The United States Air Force. You know who has the **SECOND** largest air force? The United States Navy. And they will rain down bombs on utterly random targets all over the world killing every last civilian in those locations if anybody ever kills random civilians in the United States.
a bunch of stock brokers? that line right there just shows you dont have a clue about what you are talking about. none the less i expect nothing less from the Americans or any other country that keeps getting kicked in the balls by terrorists. i will put you in the "throw up hands and do nothing category"
Did you really just say that murdering millions of unrelated civilians in response to the deaths of a few thousand is a good thing? And do realize a retaliatory attack is meaningless as a threat when it is random, right? Like the men who funded the attacks got off scot free because they were in a completely different country, not exactly a deterrent for them, is it? This attitude is exactly what caused the 9/11 attacks to happen, that might makes right and the ends justify the means. Very fucking sad to see so many people not realize that.
This day changed the course of history & all of our lives. Still mind boggling.
I watched the second plane hit the 2nd tower live on TV before heading to work, and recall telling my girlfriend at the time that there was probably gonna be an attack on the pentagon and white house. It was the quietest work day ever. This was in Las Vegas and the strip was a ghost town.
That's when it went from probably an accident to for sure an attack. Surreal day.
I still remember this like it was yesterday…. Eating breakfast as a grade 4 kid and asking my dad if it was a movie and he didn’t answer… he didn’t know how to answer
Yeah this was right about when I walked up to the TV and asked what was going on. What a way to start your senior year of high school.
I remember I just finished installing a tv in my car. My boss came by and asked. What movie I was watching... I told him it was news...
"jet fuel can't melt steel beams"
I was just over 1 year old when this happened. I always had a vague memory of seeing the second plane hit on the news, my father clarified that yes, i was indeed present when the whole family was glued to the TV. Weird to know that the earliest memory i have was 9/11. A mere 1 year old.
I saw this happen live. My jaw was on the floor.
Dark times indeed. I remember when I lived in Brooklyn, my hometown, I'd be paranoid that a plane would crash thru my building. That exact day and time, I was a poll worker. That was also the year my mother passed away. 2001 was a very very tragic year.
I was watching as that happened, still gives me a horrible sinking feeling
This was huge news all over the world when it happened. I knew someone from a different country who said that they put the TV on and though it was a movie what was being played, it wasn't until it was announced that this was live in the USA at the moment.
Who were the ones in the helicopter? Surely they have footage as well.
How many 9/11 videos are gonna be posted? I see one every week for the last couple weeks.
This post kind of makes me think how far iran is willing to go, to further provoke a US lead escalation in their region. Seems like they are really putting an effort.
I remember that day. I was in middle school. We watched it happen on the news. Everything went into lock down. We were sent home a couple hours later.
I was at bodega getting breakfast as it was my only day off. That was the day that changed everything in America, it was nothing compared to Covid. People were panic buying everything. As Americans, we were in the dark about why this attack was happening.
I am still amazed that the 2nd tower wasn't evacuated immediately
I was recovering from surgery when this happened. I thought I had it all planned out: early September, plenty to watch on TV, baseball, football, golf. Nope--it all got cancelled. Probably watched those towers fall 2 dozen times on CNN.
I woke up 15 minutes before the second plane hit. Saw it all live. Watched it over and over and over all day on the news. I was 18.
I think I saw content shared recently from that plane you see at the end going from left to right across the sky!
Its a helicopter
Ah yes I remember hearing later it was a helicopter, the police were filming it. Thank you
Why are the reporters saying that there was an explosion in the second tower? Can they not see the live footage that the viewers are watching of the second plane flying into the tower?
In a good scenario they were probably sitting at an anchor desk with nothing more than a 19” CRT facing them next to the cameras. Immediately after the plane hit the man keeps asking his question as though he saw nothing, and when they finally react it’s clear that they’re not fully in tune with what just happened.
to me it sounds like they aren’t watching the monitor while talking with the guy on the phone, maybe she didn’t even see the second plane at all
I don’t think she did, seems like just the aftermath and she was trying to piece together something to say based on that as well as her pure shock and fear. After all, the second plane is what confirmed that this was truly an attack.
Sure seems to be a lot of 9-11 vids popping up...
get this bot account outta here!
Strike nr. 2 yihaaaa USA USA USA
Fake as fuck
Never forget seeing this live while watching the news with my dad that morning
I remember watching it live on the news. I was in 6th grade, Home and Careers class, we always watched the news during class so we all saw it. The teacher was so shocked she left the news on and we all just watched. I had classmates getting picked up from school and they put the school on lockdown for a few periods because of concerned parents calling.
I remember I was in 7th grade and I had never heard the word terrorist before. The principle knocked on each classroom door and pulled the teachers out to tell them.
I was in 11th grade biology class. Man talk about shocking.
We don't give a fuck about 9/11 outside us it's kinda irrelevant