My eighth-grade year was going to be memorable. Seventh was as close to hell as I could get without walking into Dante’s living room, and I wouldn’t let my final year at my new middle school end in flames.
Eighth grade held ordinary promise in September 2001: cool clothes, a cool crossbody backpack like the Olsen Twins had in Passport to Paris, and a new group of friends. Though, I already felt as if my life was totally over since I had gym class during first period—a teenager’s cosmic joke.
I was thirteen, and *NSYNC was my most significant focus. My family had moved to a new town the year prior, which meant a new school, and aside from hoping my life didn’t crumble under the sadness of leaving my friends and hometown, upholding the turf war against Backstreet Boys fans was my other biggest concern. The actual cosmic joke is the earth-shattering events that would transpire and change everything.
Where were you on September 11th?
This is the titular question nearly all Americans of a specific age range ask. Most of my peers were in middle or high school, discussing which videos made the top spots on TRL and whether they saw the recent South Park episode.
When I arrived at gym class, all I could think about was hoping anything would get me out of this so I didn’t have to sweat and embarrass myself in front of my cool new friends or my crush. I, unfortunately, fished my wish when, at about 8:50 a.m., an announcement came over the loudspeaker from our principal:
A plane has hit the World Trade Center in New York. Teachers, please usher students into classrooms with televisions.
The World Trade Center? I don’t know if I knew what it was then, having only been to the City once in fifth grade to see The Lion King on Broadway.
Our gym class, without changing, was moved into the new eighth-grade wing, which had opened only the week prior. Three classes gathered in a tiny classroom, huddled at desks and on the floor, with the Today Show returning from a commercial playing in the background.
As Matt [Lauer] just told you, we have a breaking news story to tell you about. Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City. It happened just a few moments ago, apparently. We have very little information available at this point in time.
Katie then introduced Jennifer Oberstein, a former associate producer for NBC who was now working in Lower Manhattan and witnessed the explosion caused by the first plane when it hit the North Tower. She breathlessly recounted the terrifying scene unfolding just ten blocks south in the Financial District, how big the fireball was, and how terrifyingly loud it had all been when the hijacked plane American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the building.
You can hear the scream of sirens in the background as Katie and Matt attempt to understand her account. Katie then asked Jennifer about the type of plane that hit the tower, as NBC was now receiving reports.
The confusion hit the classroom like a ton of bricks. An airplane? Teachers reminded the class that a plane hit the Empire State Building in the 1940s, but it was cloudy that day. And September 11, 2001, was warm, gorgeous, and what would become known as severe clear.
I distinctly remember one of my friends saying they didn’t think it could be an accident. I was doing the math: how could it not be an accident? It didn’t fully register that it could be something people planned despite having learned of other planned horrors throughout history. At the time, it felt like an irrefutable impossibility for someone to plan something that would happen on American soil.
The Second Plane
It’s almost impossible to imagine how slow those first ten minutes of the day were in that classroom. As middle schoolers, we did not fully grasp how huge this was, but it would only be minutes before reality began to set in.
At 9:02 a.m., the second hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower. I have a foggy memory of seeing another plane coming into the shot west to east. Several other classmates also recognized it and pointed it out. I’ve never wished to be so wrong.
I will forever remember the screams, cries, and abject horror emanating from the TV, adults, and classmates in that room as the second plane collided with the South Tower like a missile.
And now you have to move from talking about a possible accident to something that was deliberate here, Matt said soberly.
As the Towers Burned
The class sat in stunned silence for a moment before returning our attention to the mounted television screens. I remember taking notes with a brightly colored pen, my innocence scribbling away at the death and destruction airing on national television.
The day’s energy sped up to unbridled panic at 9:37 a.m. when it was announced by the news the Pentagon was hit by a hijacked plane, American Airlines Flight 77, which had taken off moments earlier from Dulles International Airport, a short 26 miles away.
Unquestionably, a large-scale coordinated attack was happening, more extensive than we could have imagined, and we didn’t know what to expect next. Will we still have a working government? Does this mean war? Is the president going to die?
It wasn’t long into President George Bush’s first term. The 2000 election was fraught with hanging chads and uncertainty. What was worse, Bush claimed he was an education president, but with a cabinet full of war hawks. The unspoken undertones of the day were that things would change rapidly, and mobilization was imminent.
One teacher noted this event was in equal or greater measure to our grandparents' experience of the attack on Pearl Harbor or the assassination of President JFK. The main difference is the incredible detail in which we witnessed the death and destruction.
Living in the southernmost part of New Jersey, I understood enough that there would be no interest to attack for any reason. But Philadelphia? Too many families, including mine, had parents working there. It wasn’t lost on me that the Liberty One and Two buildings, located in Center City, could be on whatever evil list of whoever was doing this. My dad and grandfather worked in high rises as union members. Both, thankfully, came home early.
What about the kids in northern New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut? How were they doing?
One Hundred and Two Minutes
It became abundantly clear I would never be the same when the news, occasionally in tight shots, showed the jumpers and the trapped victims of the towers. The shocking images of people dying in real time– I’ll never forget the horror or heartbreak. Even as pre-teens and teens, we absorbed the evil being played out, and silent tears streamed from teachers and students alike.
The victims of 9/11 were moms, dads, sisters, brothers, cousins, friends, and innocent people just going to work that day, and now we were watching them jump from 110 stories. How brave were these victims to choose their final moments of peace instead of it chosen for them? How evil for it to be televised for millions to watch.
Shots included struggling people waving their shirts out of the gash of the building. They were exposed to the intense fire raging around them, energized by thousands of gallons of jet fuel. I can’t conceptualize the sheer level of death and destruction they were surrounded by. The victims of those sections of the North and South Towers were the first victims. The pilots, passengers, and the people at their desks all perished violently and quickly, and those who survived the initial impact were thrust into the imminent reality of the totality of their lives.
The Collapse of the South Tower and Flight 93
The nine o’clock hour was barely over when the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., with 110 stories of steel and concrete falling into dust and twisted metal, taking everyone in and around it down. At first, the news did not report its collapse. Reporters jumped to “it appears the top of the building has fallen or another explosion occurred” due to the proximity of the reporters and the news helicopters around the site.
When the collapse was confirmed, the silence was deafening.
Not four minutes later, at 10:03 a.m., it was reported that a flight had crashed in a remote area in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania? How close to Philly? It turns out it wasn’t close to Philadelphia—but closer to Pittsburgh in Shanksville, PA.
Reeling from the extreme events, we prayed for the safety and sturdiness of the North Tower, the remaining burning tower. While we aimed for denial, it was becoming more likely to collapse as its twin in mechanical engineering did moments ago. Time was not on anyone’s side.
At 10:28 a.m., the North Tower at the World Trade Center collapsed identically to the South Tower, pancaking in dust and debris.
I felt hot and panicked. All those people were gone, not just in the tower but also in its surroundings. I oddly felt disconnected, too, since the events played like a movie—explosion after explosion, ending in destruction against a cerulean sky. What now? I certainly didn’t know.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the day. I don’t know if we went back to class or still sat together, and I don’t remember getting on the bus home. I do remember sitting at dinner that night, all hesitantly talking about the day and bursting into heaving sobs, my chest feeling as though it might cave in.
My feelings were as big as the towers once were. All those people! The lives of families profoundly changed on an ordinary workday at the Twin Towers, at the Pentagon, on Flight 93. No family was the same.
September 12th and Every Day After
“I will always remember the unity of September 12th” might be some of the craziest nonsense I’ve heard. September 12th may hold the false memory of peaceful unity. But in reality, was it? Is this something we convinced ourselves to lessen the deeply disturbed sadness we were processing?
Still, I remember profound sadness, uncertainty, the fog of war, and deep mourning—mourning the victims' lives, mourning the demarcation of pre-9/11 and everything after. I remember the continued panic. Would it happen today? What about tomorrow or any of the days after that?
The truth includes intense anti-Muslim and anti-Middle East backlash that began immediately. People were demanding to bomb the entire region, for Shikhs to remove their turbans, or civilians demanding to search backpacks of people on the day of 9/11. Sure, we were unified, but we were unified in horror, anger, and bloodlust for justice.
This isn’t without understanding. Of course, we were angry and upset, rightfully so. But I don’t think it’s fair to say we were immediately peacefully unified. To be honest, it’s felt destabilized since then. Everything tinged with a need to prove the terrorists wrong and never properly mourn the lives lost, mourning our lost version of our peaceful lives.
When the slogan Never Forget came onto the scene, I couldn’t help but scoff. Who the fuck would or could forget something like this? I haven’t stopped thinking about the events of that day in some capacity since then. The question is, do you truly remember? Have you been honest with your pain?
It’s in my heart and mind every time I go into the City, every time I go to the airport and every time I engage with a piece of media from the early 2000s. It’s present when I see the new World Trade or Freedom Tower. I feel it when the temperature is just right at the end of August and the beginning of September with no clouds in the sky. I’m even reminded when I order French fries, not freedom fries. It’s in the way our privacy was changed forever in the name of fighting terrorism. It’s never gone away, and it feels obtuse to claim otherwise.
Much Later
In 2013, I was working for a municipality in South Jersey. At the time, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was releasing evidence collected from 9/11 to be reclaimed for memorials in towns nationwide. The township was gifted a large piece of twisted metal since one of the victims, Co-Pilot of Flight 93 LeRoy Homer Jr., was a resident.
Since 2001, I felt a profound sense of misunderstanding of the day, thinking the adults in all the other rooms I’ve been in understood it differently or better than I did with the eyes and sense of a grown person vs. a child.
I didn’t believe it was fair for me to maintain my 13-year-old sensibilities about the day any longer, and I made it my mission to dig deep to dedicate time and energy to understanding what the victims and survivors experienced—the true nature of the pain and horror.
I’m not insinuating that I didn’t live or experience my life. I leaned into the joy I was afforded by not being a direct victim. But I felt strongly about learning about what truly transpired.
In pursuit of honoring the victims for the memorial, I watched 102 Minutes That Changed America, a collection of videos captured on Sept. 11, edited together for real-time storytelling on the ground and around Lower Manhattan.
Every single person that day had sobering, frenetic thoughts. The film's first shots, captured by NYU student Caroline Dries, showed the destruction of the North Tower just eight blocks west in a head-on view.
The camera created a barrier and plausible deniability in real time as her roommate asked, "What is that?!” What is what? Caroline asks in stunned disbelief. Her roommate responds in near tears, “What is it that’s falling that’s heavier than a piece of paper but isn’t a chair? Is that a person? Oh my god!”
Dries’s real-time processing mirrored that of my own. “Who’s to say that’s a person, though? What if it’s a piece of furniture?” She asks almost incredulously— unable to conjure the totality of the scene unfolding in front of her— all this only seconds before the collision of the South Tower.
In the film, part of which was taken from Times Square 3.5 miles north of the towers, one man exclaimed in horrified relief and said out loud, like some sick joke, that he was meant to be in the North Tower right around 8:00 a.m. but overslept after staying up late watching Monday Night Football.
“Monday Night Football saved my life.”
Later in the film, an older man in his sixties, covered in an impossible amount of dust and debris, darkly laughs, exalting his survival and noting that he can still run, even at his age. New Yorkers remaining darkly optimistic in the face of horror is admirably on brand.
The documentary didn’t provide a big enough picture. I couldn’t learn who the victims were from documentaries like 102 Minutes, so I read every article I could.
I read about Rick Rescorla, a man of incredible foresight, a former British Army Paratrooper and commissioned officer for the US Army during the Vietnam War, and an employee in the South Tower. Rescorla took note of the danger from the initial attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and trained Morgan Stanley employees to exit the building with precision in a similar emergency. He saved 2,700 lives the day he lost his.
I learned about Welles Crowther, who became known as The Man in the Red Bandana. Crowther was in the South Tower working as an equities trader but had been a firefighter and jumped into action without hesitation, serving to save the lives of those around him. The survivors went on to talk about Crowther and the gift of life he gave them while not surviving.
I absorbed information about Jeremy Glick, a New Jersey resident and Flight 93 passenger, on his way to San Francisco for a work trip, which he reluctantly agreed to. Glick, Thomas Burnett, Todd Beamer, and Mark Bingham conspired to take down the terrorists. They had the presence of mind to vote on waiting for a remote area to reduce further harm.
I learned of Sheila Moody, one of only three survivors in her area in The Pentagon, who was sitting down to her second day on the job when she heard the screams of Flight 77 crash into the side of the building where she was working.
"The physical scars will disappear, not completely, but they will fade," Moody said. "The mental scars are just something I deal with day to day."
Have you heard of the Stair Surfer survivors from the North Tower? Pasquale Buzzelli was an engineer working for Port Authority. He even called his wife, Louise, to tell her he was okay. She knew he wasn’t out yet and watched the tower collapse with him inside, all while pregnant. Buzzelli made peace with death, was rescued hours after the collapse, was treated for a broken ankle, and sent home that day.
I read about the doctors across the region, from D.C. to Boston, anticipating hundreds of thousands of victims, but no one showed.
Years later, I visited Chelsea Piers ice rink for a hockey game, where I learned how the complex intended to act as a triage and house the remains of the departed as a temporary morgue. It was never needed.
What about all of the firefighters and first responders of 9/11? The NYFD had such a high casualty rate that they had to promote who they could to keep things moving immediately. The NYFD had several Legacy Families, with fathers and sons working in the department, often at different ladders. Sons would lose fathers and have to work The Pile, and vice versa, with mothers losing sons and wives becoming widows.
I watched the Naduet Brothers documentary, which chronicled the day from the perspective of Engine 7, Ladder 1, Battalion 1 in Lower Manhattan. They were among the few who captured the first plane hitting the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. At one point, the brothers thought the other hadn’t made it. One of the pillars of the documentary, Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer, lost his brother, Kevin Pfeifer, that day.
For years, I re-watched the news coverage As It Happened, played by MSNBC, before they pulled the coverage.
We submitted the information to the project with a better understanding of the victims and survivors. The research provided needed clarity and ensured my work wasn’t a performative task but truly an act of remembrance.
The town’s 9/11 Memorial officially opened in late September 2014, complete with a 13-foot steel remnant from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
The Only Plane in the Sky
In 2019, author and journalist Garrett M. Graff published The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, an incredible collection of news stories and information, interviews, and first-hand survivor accounts combined to paint the complete picture of September 11, 2001, beat by beat.
The print version will have your attention from page one. Still, the audiobook will capture your undivided attention with 45 voice actors, audio from the planes, radio chatter from first responders, 9-1-1 calls from the towers, remarks from President Bush, and more. Most of the victims mentioned above are remembered in detail—their days are recorded forever as told by their kin.
I reread it every year. I stand by its integrity as an essential piece of history.
The day deserves pause to remember the countless lives lost and the families hurting 23 years on.
All the Days After
September 11, 2001, may evoke deep, visceral memories in people, especially when the sky shines like a sapphire in the waning summer warmth.
It’s also true that we, as a nation of countless communities, rose to the occasion to care for our brothers and sisters in the fallout of 9/11. In the wake of the tragedies, people donated water, trucks, and endless food, time, energy, and resources. Firefighters, first responders, and journeymen donated their time and patience to assist with the long cleanup of Ground Zero.
The World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan is alive again, but different. The echoes of the souls lost on that day live in people's minds and are etched into the busy city landscape.
The recovery efforts live on as pieces of September 11, 2001, are discovered many years after. In 2013, a piece of landing gear was found wedged between a building and a mosque. Victims are still being identified with DNA analysis; 40% of victims remain unidentified. Full care for the 9/11 first responders has not been achieved.
I have to assert a significant amount of patience when I pay respects to the victims at the two reflecting pools at the site of the fallen towers. Maybe it’s the passage of time or the rise of social media, but I wonder if it clicks that they’re standing at the site of a mass grave. Thousands of people were never recovered, the souls of those lost woven into the city landscape.
We are not an amalgamation of our pain. Our pain can and will still exist in the halls our hurting hearts. Acknowledge it. Honor it. Persist.
If you’d like to learn more about the 9/11 Memorial Museum and how to support the victims of 9/11 at all locations, please visit https://www.911memorial.org/.
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