On September 11, 2001 I was a very upbeat and idealistic young woman at the top of her game. I had an administrative assistant job working at a company I loved, I had no "body image" issues or major insecurities, and I was getting ready to
The following is my 9/11 account from a personal good ol' fashioned pen and paper journal of mine from 2001. My story showcases my naive nature of the time period and isn't particularly exciting or full of deep thought or philosophy. It just... is.
September 15, 2001
So much has happened in the last month... so much that was normal, until last Tuesday, September 11th.
In August (W.G.) surprised me with a beautiful white gold diamond solitaire 1 carat engagement ring - and a proposal (despite the fact the wedding is already partly paid for and we'd been unofficially engaged for about a year). I would like to write more about that, but I have another journal that it would be more appropriate in.
Here I want to write about last Tuesday (the whole day is cataloged from a newspaper clipping on the page previous this one).
What words could I possibly say that wouldn't sound superficial? I don't think anything I could write would ever do it justice.
It started out as a normal day. I was at my desk and E. (my direct supervisor) asked me to go down and get some paperwork that she left with N. on the first floor (in my old department... therefore I knew everyone down there already). So I took the elevator down and stopped at N's desk when another co-worker, K., said, "Deanna... did you hear about this?"
"Hear about what?" I asked.
"A plane crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York!"
"What? No way."
The first thought that came to mind was that maybe it was inclement weather and some newbie pilot had made a grave error in judgment. Here in Texas it was a cloudless and beautiful sunny day but I had no idea what the weather in New York might be like.
N. turned up the radio on her desk and just as she did we heard a female news reporter cry out, "Oh My God... OH MY GOD!!!" and a male reporter announced in shock that out of nowhere another huge airplane had turned around and crashed into the second World Trade Center tower.
"This was no accident!" N. (who is a native New Yorker and is super passionate even under the most normal circumstances) shouted. She, of course, was crying out what the whole of America and the rest of the world were just coming to realize.
Thanks to Homer Simpson's car being illegally parked at "1 World Trade Plaza" in a Simpsons episode ("The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson" - Simpsons' ninth season, September 21, 1997) I could picture the World Trade Center towers well in my head, and the image of planes crashing through them was inconceivable unless it was in a movie or something, some sort of Independence Day type flick. It took about ten minutes or so for the worst of it to sink in for me: It was Tuesday morning, a normal business day. Those buildings hold thousands and thousands of people. And at the point this started to sink in they were announcing that they had just learned these were hijacked commercial planes full of passengers.
"Terrorists!" N. screamed.
I took off toward the elevator to go back to my floor and immediately approached my supervisor and asked her breathlessly if she had heard what was going on (pretty much exactly echoing the girls downstairs). She hadn't. I filled her in and we tried to get on the Internet. It wouldn't connect... hard to imagine, right? So we scrambled around looking for someone with a radio on their desk. We found someone who had one, but he had not yet heard the news either. But others had and a crowd was growing in our office as we all huddled a while around the radio and then went off to talk amongst ourselves.
"A bomb just went off at the Pentagon!" someone cried.
"What is going on??? Are we at war?" I asked, even knowing then that I may have sounded totally brainless in my naivety but not much caring. Everyone was in some sort of shock at this point. I heard one guy say, "Well... it could be the Arabs, they hate us. Or Iraq or Iran, they hate us. Or Korea, they hate us..."
One of the office managers set up a TV in one of the conference rooms and I had to go back downstairs to do more work with N. so I didn't know until I returned. But downstairs work was the last thing on our minds. The bomb at the Pentagon as it turned out was a another hijacked airliner. And then: "One of the towers is collapsing!!!"
Collapsing? Those mammoth towers that graced practically every episode of Friends, The Sopranos, Sex and the City and who knew what else? Again... inconceivable.
Back upstairs everyone was gathered in the conference rooms. I saw a horrific live shot of people on the upper floors desperately standing outside of windows just trying to breathe or survive (I didn't yet see the jumpers, no THAT bit of fun would be replayed on all the news channels the next day) and in the very next moment I watched the tower collapse live. At first I didn't understand what I was seeing; I thought they were replaying the collapse of the tower I'd just heard about with the girls downstairs. I plopped down in a chair and (not even realizing I was speaking out loud) asked no one in particular "Is this really happening?"
Work was impossible. Every time I tried to get back to work something new was happening: the White House was evacuated, part of the Pentagon had now collapsed, another hijacked plane is ditched into a field in Pennsylvania, we find out these are American Airlines and United hijacked planes, my family calls, the airports close nationwide, the President speaks. I took my lunch in front of that conference room TV with the rest of the office and watched the replay of the planes slamming into the towers and the towers eventually crumbling to nothing in about ten seconds.
The office is right next to DFW airport which I half wonder is some sort of "target" being it is one of the largest in the U.S. Driving home and seeing nor hearing planes in the sky was beyond creepy. At home it is all we talk about that night and we were learning some horrifying stories from survivors on TV that are almost beyond comprehension. I only get to speak with (W.G.) on the phone.
Wednesday was a day of obsession. I had to bring a radio to work and have it on at all times trying to get the latest developments on the search for survivors in the rubble in any of the disaster sites and the new war we'd be preparing for. I'd listen until I got a headache or got so upset I couldn't take it anymore. But after an hour or so of silence I just had to have it back on. There were many survivor stories... I was more interested in that than the potential war machine. One guy had escaped from about the 60th floor of one of the towers. The stairwell, he said, was about 120 degrees already, and the survivor saw a fireman in about his early 20s struggling up the flights with his 50 lbs or so of equipment. "I have to get up there," the fireman gasped, "I have to save those people!" He was only on the 33rd floor stairwell at that point. Thirty minutes later the buildings collapsed. This was the first time I finally cried. And then the crying would not stop. For days.
Now it is Saturday and still I can't stop being immersed in the TV or newspaper. Today President Bush has declared us at a "new kind of war". The airports are re-opened finally but with billions of dollars in losses. The economy is down the toilet. Thousands are, of course, missing or dead. The future is scary. Somewhere I have read that Tuesday was "the day the world changed." Truer words could not have been spoken as I now have questions I never would have dreamed of just a mere five days ago.
1 comment:
I find it awesome that me, like you, mostly knew where the WTC was becuse of the Simpsons. :)
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