20 Years Later.....09/11

[seano732]

Man, I cannot believe it's been two decades....I couldn't find the other 9/11 thread, but I remember how I felt that day, and looking around at things now......Feeling very melancholy at the moment. Raising a glass to all who were lost, especially the 343 of FDNY's Bravest.......RIP.

[mcski]

Great Frontline last night covering the event and subsequent years since

[seano732]

Great Frontline last night covering the event and subsequent years since

Yeah saw it, very well done……

[ill-advised strategy]

I always feel obligated to mention Van Bateman, who was the Incident Commander for the extended attack, and later had some serious problems in his life and did time in prison.

Also Larry Holst, a father figure to me of sorts, who dropped everything and went there from New Mexico to take part in the rescue efforts:
Here he is at ground zero:


While not heinously like so many others, a lot changed for me after 9/11. I felt a need to find some form of doing my part. I took a serious federal fire job, quit my ski shop job. A carefree, freewheeling, loose era of my life came to a close and a time of more seriousness and attempted responsibility set in.

[BmillsSkier]

I’ll never forget where I was, just like everyone else.

That other thread with the personal accounts of Maggots who were there in New York helped paint the picture for me of family friends and former classmates who were; 3 of which didn’t come back. My heart goes out to all of you who were so profoundly changed by that day, and to all of us for all our loss.

[Core Shot]

The ultimate red pill

Fuck bush
Fuck Cheney
Fuck Rumsfeld

Fuck all the sociopaths

[snapt]

I was in 7th grade, I had no concept of the the job the FDNY had. I'm now a FF and struggle to find words looking back on it. RIP.

[Viva]

I remember Pinner's thread: "Run for the Hills!"

[Core Shot]

[SumJongGuy]

I lived on Long Island for most of the 80s. Quite a few friends there who were working in Manhattan that fateful morning. You think DSL internet is slow today?? OMG everything everywhere was bogged down and failing that day. Couldn't connect to anything news related, even at work over a T-1 line. Cell phones?? Useless! I got to work early and was one of the first in the Chapel Hill, NC office. Everyone else called in sick (landlines were fine). Wife called when the 2nd plane hit and I asked her to start the DVR and just leave it running all day. I put 6 hours on a DVD. Still have it, but not sure why. Never watched it since it all gets replayed by the regular TV programming.

Thankfully, ALL my friends made it out of Manhattan OK or weren't there but I was pretty worried for a couple days trying to contact them all. Some know someone, or someone who knew someone that didn't make it.

Fuck Bush and the Big Oil crowd.. and double fuck the rebellious whack jobs and puppeteers who orchestrate and carry out such horrific acts..

[dannynoonan]

Wow. I don't think about this much, but as Seano sez, it just sunk in that it's been 20 whole years. I was pretty torn up that day, as so many were. Fuck.

[babybear]

I remember going to work early and then watching with everyone at the office. it didn’t really sink in then what was happening.
We lost a family friend, Jean Roger, who was a flight attendant on flt 11 from Longmeadow MA
Saw her parents this spring and we always feel a sense of guilt that we continue our lives. RIP to all ❤️

[seano732]

I have posted this before, but this was my experience.....

I was on shift in ABQ the morning of 09/11...We were busy that night before, typical ABQ shit, ODs, drunks, and a shooting.....I hit the rack around 0330. Our Rescue Lt. gets on the PA after the first plane hit:

"All Station 5 personnel to the front office, all Station 5 personnel to the front office....NOW"....
It was that last part that got me moving. We stumble in, and our R5 Lt. is glued to the TV, which is showing th e tower burning. WTF?! And then he says " My brother in law works there"........Wait, what, I woke up pretty fast after that. So of course we watched live as the second plane hit, and simultaneously our Rescue Lts phone begins blowing up. We are trying to process what we are seeing, our Captain takes the LT into his office, and my partner looks at me and is crying......We spent the better part of that morning running calls, watching the news, and trying to figure out if our brother's brother was alive or dead.....Turns out he overslept and missed his ferry to 1WTC.....He was on the next one and saw it all happen in real time. The fickle hand of fate. The Fire Chief came over the air(first and only time in my career), put us all on lockdown except for emergency response......And everytime we went out, people would wave, honk, and were flying the Flag.....And Now.....Everyone on the job stay safe. All the Mags that were there, blessings. Never Forget.

[AK47bp]

9/11 News was on just now and 6 year old daughter asks what happened.


Woo boy! Was not ready for this.


I said “well, 20 yrs ago some bad people highjacked 4 airplanes and…….”

Then I lost it, got chocked up and felt tears starting and had to stop. Can’t believe the emotions still inside that just creep up. I wasn’t even there.

Very hard to explain these things to beautiful innocent children.

Think I’ll try again next year.


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[Skistack]

Watched the Netflix doc this week. The 9/11 footage brought back some pretty raw emotions.

It’s a good recap of the events leading up to 9/11 and how much we fucked up after.


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[AK47bp]

I have posted this before, but this was my experience.....

I was on shift in ABQ the morning of 09/11...We were busy that night before, typical ABQ shit, ODs, drunks, and a shooting.....I hit the rack around 0330. Our Rescue Lt. gets on the PA after the first plane hit:

"All Station 5 personnel to the front office, all Station 5 personnel to the front office....NOW"....
It was that last part that got me moving. We stumble in, and our R5 Lt. is glued to the TV, which is showing th e tower burning. WTF?! And then he says " My brother in law works there"........Wait, what, I woke up pretty fast after that. So of course we watched live as the second plane hit, and simultaneously our Rescue Lts phone begins blowing up. We are trying to process what we are seeing, our Captain takes the LT into his office, and my partner looks at me and is crying......We spent the better part of that morning running calls, watching the news, and trying to figure out if our brother's brother was alive or dead.....Turns out he overslept and missed his ferry to 1WTC.....He was on the next one and saw it all happen in real time. The fickle hand of fate. The Fire Chief came over the air(first and only time in my career), put us all on lockdown except for emergency response......And everytime we went out, people would wave, honk, and were flying the Flag.....And Now.....Everyone on the job stay safe. All the Mags that were there, blessings. Never Forget.

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[warthog]

Mike Vaccaro, sports writer for the NY Post is an alum of my college.
Here is what he writes every year on this anniversary:

I've written close to 5,500 columns in my career, none anywhere as personally meaningful as this, written the morning of 9/12/01 when I was still at the Star-Ledger. I re-post it every year, and had to type it all out a few years ago because it's no longer findable anywhere on the Web. My heart ached with every word, same as 20 years ago.

A GAP IN THE SKYLINE

By MIKE VACCARO

Under the black umbrella of night, the city seems to rest peacefully, betraying nothing of its bruised soul. Sitting across the river, just past 5 in the morning, the flickering lights of Midtown seem to wink at Pier A Park in Hoboken, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building and the rest, lined up like quiet sentries.

The skyline flattens after that, moving from left to right as you look in from the Jersey side, before the great buildings of the financial district bring it back to life, just north of the waterfront. The Travelers Building, with its bright red neon umbrella. The Woolworth Building. It ends there, and under the cover of darkness this doesn't seem so odd. A thick fog smothers the southern tip of Manhattan island. For now, you can live with that illusion. It's often foggy down there.

Until, at 5:34 a.m. on the Morning After, as the first streaks of sunlight inch over Long Island, then Queens, then the Bronx, finally backlighting Manhattan. And the lie is exposed. This is not a fog rising up out of New York Harbor, obscuring the great towers whose shadows have covered so much of lower Manhattan on so many sunny mornings these past 30 years.

The dream is over. The nightmare lives on.
It is the first day of the rest of our lives.

"It just makes you want to cry, doesn't it?" asks Bob Celeste of Clifton, a roofer who's got a job in Hoboken that starts later in the morning. He sips coffee from a Styrofoam cup and wonders if anything can fill the emptiness that echoes in his heart.
Or the cavity that dominates New York City.

"Look at what they did," he says. "Look at what they did to us."
By 6:15, the darkness has vanished and the people have come, joggers who've altered their path for the morning, walkers who would always stop for a smoke by the river's edge, peering out at the magnificent city and its epic lineup of skyscrapers. It has long been New Jersey's special gift that we could admire this steel kingdom from such a close distance, just across the water, our little toy.

On this morning, for the first time, it feels like our own unique curse.

"It's awful to see," says Edgewater resident Mike Rock, Celeste's partner, "and yet you can't turn away."
Nobody could. Not as morning dawned on the ruined city, and on the devastated country. Make no mistake, when the black-hearted lunatics assaulted the World Trade Center, they didn't only puncture a hole in New York. Friends call from everywhere now, sharing stories of the towers. They feel genuine sorrow for the families of the dead, yes. They ache for the children orphaned by madmen.

But they hurt for themselves, too. The towers meant that much to them, even as visitors. And mean that much, still, even as the dust of their remains drifts slowly across the river, covering Jersey City as the sun makes a final push above the horizon.

In Vero Beach, Fla., the other day, a longtime New Yorker, a child of its streets, a product of its neighborhoods, walked into a restaurant named Too-Jays. On the wall hung two pictures: one of New York in 1960, when the Empire State Building ruled the skies. One from 1980, long after the towers had taken over. This man worked his entire adult life in New York City, maybe three blocks from the World Trade Center. He took a proprietary interest in it from the start.

"I saw it go up, right from the ground" my father told me Tuesday, in a shrunken voice tamed with shock. "And today, I saw it go down. Right to the ground."

The hurt was evident. The loss was palpable. For these were buildings we could count on, rely on, forever, we assumed. One of the towers measured 1,362 feet, the other 1,368 feet, and when they were first built, their size was the subject of laughter during a news conference held to christen them.
"Why two 110-story buildings?" one interrogator asked Minoru Yamasaki, the Trade Center's architect. "Why not one 220-story building?"
To which Yamasaki quipped: "I didn't want to lose the human scale."
And the irony is this: He was telling the truth. They never did.

"I look down to that side of the city, and all I want to do is cry all over again," says Jodie Freeman, who lives on Manhattan's upper West Side but stayed with friends in Teaneck Tuesday night. She is sitting on the upper level of a nearly empty ferry chugging from Weehawken to the 38th Street Terminal. The sun hangs low in the sky, reflecting off the downtown buildings, offering an awful orange hue to the ever-billowing smoke.
Jodie Freeman can't help herself. She does cry.
"Those poor people," she says. "This poor city."

She leaves the boat, staggering into the loudest city on Earth, whose streets lie eerily hushed on the Morning After. The sun shines brightly. The sky is an achingly beautiful shade of blue. Not a cloud in the sky. Unless you count the one all the way downtown, the one slowly making its way west.
The one that shrouds a nation's soul, still. And always will.
-30

[JimmyCarter]

All the offices in Boston emptied out around the same time into the streets. You had thousands of people kinda milling around, trying to figure out next steps and where to go. Suddenly you hear a plane overhead and the whole crowd goes completely silent and starts looking up at the sky. Completely surreal.

[yeahman]

Can't watch any of the 9/11 shows, or read any of the 20th anniversary articles... I just lose it. I visited the WTC memorial a few years ago and it was pretty powerful. A few weeks ago when we were in New Jersey my MIL took us up to the Eagle Rock Reservation overlook where people stood and watched Manhattan burn across the Hudson that morning. There's a memorial there too, with all the names engraved. It was a hazy day when we went so New York was barely visible but here's a few pics, including steel from one of the towers. Lots of New Jersey people lost their lives that day..

[mcski]

My wife got a work call unreasonably early that morning. When she hung up I asked who it was calling so early. It was her boss’ plane service calling to say they had to cancel his flight because airspace was shut down. I said incredulously, that makes no sense. They don’t shut down US airspace. I got up and turned on the TV and realized oh fuck, they really did shut down all airspace. Jaw dropping for sure

[dannynoonan]

Some things I remember from the day:

-my flip phone blowing up but I didn't see it for a good while, shit was going DOWN and I had like 20 vm's/texts about are you okay, I'm okay, etc and I was all what the fuck is going on here??? I was far away from the action. Got home and turned on a TV to see.....

-hearing "holy fucking shiiiiiiiit" on live tv when the first tower went down, and repeating it verbatim

-seeing people jumping out of windows from what, 50, 100 stories up? Also on live tv. And breaking down in tears from that, just bawling, solo in my apartment

-Later, after everything settled down, getting a call that night from my dad, which basically went, "hey are you sitting down? Ok. Your (older sibling) was on one of those planes (pentagon/77).... I can't do any more of this can you please call so-and-so to let them know...". Fuck. Just, fuck.

[seano732]

Some things I remember from the day:

-my flip phone blowing up but I didn't see it for a good while, shit was going DOWN and I had like 20 vm's/texts about are you okay, I'm okay, etc and I was all what the fuck is going on here??? I was far away from the action. Got home and turned on a TV to see.....

-hearing "holy fucking shiiiiiiiit" on live tv when the first tower went down, and repeating it verbatim

-seeing people jumping out of windows from what, 50, 100 stories up? Also on live tv. And breaking down in tears from that, just bawling, solo in my apartment

-Later, after everything settled down, getting a call that night from my dad, which basically went, "hey are you sitting down? Ok. Your (older sibling) was on one of those planes (pentagon/77).... I can't do any more of this can you please call so-and-so to let them know...". Fuck. Just, fuck.

Wow vibes to you and yours Danny. So sorry. I will Never Forget.

[MTT]

I remember where I was and what I thought It was the months after that changed how I looked at my country and my place in it
I was 40 years old
We got together and created the DHS. And fisa courts

I don’t feel free or safe
Bla bla bla

[dannynoonan]

I also knew a guy, more friend ofa friend type, who was ems/fire I forget which, who went straight up there and worked something like 96 hours straight on the towers trying to rescue people. Totally selfless. I hope he's okay, I've started to see some buzz around first responders and their health impacts after.

@Seano and your brothers n sisters, thanks so very much, for what y'all do and did, then and now.

[bennymac]

“We’re the only plane in the sky” -article about Bush and Air Force one in the hours after the attack

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...the-sky-214230

——

“The Real Heroes are Dead”

Long form article but it is required reading

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...eroes-are-dead