Never Forget

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Never Forget.

NEVER FORGET! 

R.I.P. OCScottie

Was sitting at a neighborhood diner with a few riding buddies when Vicky, our friend and server, came and told us about the first hit.

25yrs ago.

Damn, time flies.

And just look at how many have forgotten. 

The friends and family of these people never will...

A couple of buddies and I were having lunch in a North Texas Chili’s a few days after the US launched strikes into Afghanistan. The restaurant’s TVs were broadcasting frontline footage, so I look at my buddies, one from Pakistan, the other India, and said “We’re gonna have to fight our way out of here”.  Shout out to Faisal and Sunny!  

I was in high school. Classes froze and we all watch it live on TV for the rest of the day. When the second plane hit everyone instantly knew this was a terrorist attack and not a crazy accident.

I'll never forget that feeling, realizing that our country was under attack. 

Flight paths of the four hijacked planes used in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001:

1
7:59 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767, departs Logan Airport bound for Los Angeles with 81 passengers and crew of 11.

2
8:14 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767, also departs Boston for Los Angeles with 56 passengers and crew of nine.

3
8:20 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, departs Washington's Dulles Airport for Los Angeles with 58 passengers and crew of six.

4
8:42 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757, leaves Newark for San Francisco with 37 passengers and crew of seven.

5
8:46 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

6
9:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

7
9:37 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the West side of the The Pentagon.

8
9:59 a.m. The South Tower collapses.

9
10:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93 crashes in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

10
10:28 a.m. The North Tower collapses.

Was at work guys had Bob and Tom on and they got serious and said how a plane flew into 1 of the towers. Kept trying to figure out what was going on when the 2nd plane hit. We were all trying to make sense of what was happening. Asshole foreman was running around bitching at everyone, threatening to shut off radios. In the mean time every salaried employee is in the breakroom watching it live on TV. But I remember the fear for my children for what was going to happen. Later that night my 8 year old and me layed in the grass and looked at the sky, so weird to see no planes. NEVER FORGET. 

https://x.com/25YearsAgoLive

I remember -

A different perspective.

This was a year before my wife and I met. She was a single mom working to provide for herself and her 7 year old son. While she was at work e spent the day at the baby sitters sick and basically watched everything unfold on tv.

11 years later he is a Marine and a year later sent over there.

I was working for DOE. Tirzeh woke me up to, “you ain’t gonna believe this shit”, after the first strike. Destiny was about a year and a half. Before I walked out the door the second plane struck. “Fuck, this isn’t an accident”. 

Went and made sure I wasn’t needed for anything and went home to be with my family………

I was driving to the job site and had no clue.I was working at a new fire station in North Seattle. When I pulled up on site , several firemen and construction workers, including my boss were gathered around a small tv set. I was stunned / horrified when they told me what had taken place. I wanted to come back home but my boss worked us anyway. When I got home after work in the evening, and started watching, I was speechless. 💔

I was home in my office, my wife called from her work and said do you have the tv on ? A plane flew into one of the twin towers. My first thought was it was going to be a small plane and I thought "How can anyone be dumb enough to not see those towers" ? Turned on the tv and watched the second plane hit live, I realized we were under attack about the same time as everyone else. Called my kids and told them to get home and off the streets, told the wife the same thing, made sure our "Home defense" tools were ready and accessible, told the kids the same thing and spent the rest of the day watching TV and wondering what I was going to do "If"....  My wife called me back not too long after and said her work (School Bus Driver) was rather nonchalant about the whole thing and told her it was "business as usual"  No picking kids up early, no closing schools, just keep going about your job like any other day.  

I was living in and working  at a Powersports dealer in Orlando, FL at the time and was in the process of selling a Polaris ATV to a customer, I closed him with the statement that it was "made in America" and that was enough for him. It  was strange for me to be so far from N.Y. at the time because I grew up not far from there in CT. We all watched the news station and the internet footage. I swore that it was the start of WWIII.

A friend and I were sitting in front of the TV nursing bad hangovers after my 21st birthday party the night before. The channel we were watching suddenly switched to live news footage from New York just after the North Tower had been hit, it happened around 13:45pm UK time. A few minutes later we watched as the second aircraft flew straight into the South Tower. Couldn't believe what I was watching.

I was living and working in Mesa, AZ. I had gotten up to go to work and had the morning news on when it happened. I remember driving to work and thinking we're going to war. I got to work and they called a meeting and remember all the bosses saying get ready for some serious overtime. I'm a aerospace welder. We started ramping up for all work that was coming from the war on terror. The next few years I worked a pile of overtime.

I still remember it like it's yesterday,  Never forget...

I was a newspaper reporter in Arlington, VA and the Pentagon was part of my "beat." Many people think the Pentagon is in D.C. but it's actually in Virginia. I had just written a series of articles about renovations they had done to the building, which turned out to be right where the plane hit. My boss called me that morning and told me to head to the Pentagon, then called back and said go to a Metro station and try to find people from the Pentagon to interview, which I did. 

Then I went to the newsroom and took calls from reporters around the area and started putting together the front-page story for the paper. People were calling into the newsroom saying they saw a plane flying low near the Pentagon, but they wouldn't give me their names. Finally I saw the World Trade Center come down on TV and went back to my desk to try to put all this in words. I couldn't really process what I was seeing. It was a surreal and awful day. 

The next day I went to a press conference at a gas station near the Pentagon. The building was still on fire. I ended up interviewing some of the first responders, some of whom would start to cry talking about it. The Arlington Country police chief told me he had seen a plane flying so low he knew it would crash.

When I was writing about the Pentagon before 9/11, I wrote about the day they held the groundbreaking ceremony when construction began. The date of that ceremony was 9/11/1941. I had to go back and look to confirm it. That's just one of the many bizarre things about this event.

R.I.P. - Never Forget 🙏

Was at a trading event in Austin, TX. By the time the second plane hit we understood the world, our world, was forever changed. A trainer kept trying to get us back into class, which seemed strange or even caustic at the time but I think the poor girl simply couldn’t process what was happening. 

Later than evening we gather at the bar to digest the day’s events.  I had separated from the navy a few years earlier and one fellow trainee asked if I wished I was back in the service. Almost without hesitation I said no. Not for a lack of a sense of duty, but with full awareness that the men and women in uniform could handle the pending tasks.