Do you remember where you were that day

[Lovingthesunshine88]

Do you remember where you were that day 18 years ago? 9/11

I was 13 and had just started high school i was doing swimming when PE teacher got called out, when she came back in she told us to get changed and make our way home if possible and said the world was under attack by terrorists.

Obviously this was scary to hear at 13 i hadn't heard of terrorism. I remember getting home and my mum watching it on TV in utter shock. I was such a sad day and still makes me feel sad 18 years on thinking of all those innocent people losing their lives

I was in year 10 at school, I remember my grandad picking me up from school that day (pre-planned, not because of 9/11) and telling me about it in the car on the way home.

I was probably a bit too much of a self absorbed teenager to really pay attention at the time. I still had enough innocence and naïveté that it didn’t really penetrate my sphere of existence. These days I would find it very preoccupying, I stayed up all night on the night of the Manchester arena attack, I was so horrified by it and felt genuine concern for each individual unaccounted for person.

I was at a conference in central London. One of the guys went out to take a phone call and came back in to say he needed to leave because there'd been a plane crash in America and he needed to check on his family members. We all thought he was overreacting.
I left at the end of the day and got all the way home on the tube without hearing what had actually happened. When I walked in my DH was watching the news. He'd seen it on the staff room TV at his school but the children weren't sent home.
It still surprises me to think that I didn't know the truth for a good 4 hours - no social media then.

I’m amazed at the schools in the U.K. sending people home.
I was in the building next door to the Prime Minster at the time. We didn’t get sent home.

I finished a shift at work and one of my clients said “have you heard that they’re bombing America?” and I thought it was the lead in to a bad joke so I was waiting for the tedious “Gotcha!”

Got home and everyone was in the living room watching the re run of the first tower. And then the plane crashed into the second tower and I can feel the horror of it sitting writing this.

I remember watching the people jumping from those unimaginable heights and half expecting Superman to fly in and save them. It sounds so stupid to write that but I really had trouble processing the horror of it.

I remember thinking that the terrorists must have landed the planes and forced everyone off because I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the idea of all those innocent people flying to certain death.

It was like the whole time I was watching I was trying to fit what I was seeing into Hollywood norms.

A few days later I went to see a film - it might have been Bicentennial Man - in the cinema and there was a scene set far, far in the future where the WTC was still standing. I cried uncontrollably then. I’d been too numb before but that image, so unexpected and suddenly so wrong, just opened the floodgates.

I sound like a complete idiot, but at the time it was genuinely difficult to process. I’m not sure why, as I grew up with Lockerbie, and NI was the constant background noise of my childhood.

Very outing, but, I was cabin crew on a beach in Cyprus and was told about the USA being under attack. I went back to my room to watch the tv to catch up with the world, and thought I was watching a movie on every channel ☹️ Unfortunately, it was all true 😢

I was 5, almost 6, in primary 2. I do remember it, even at that age. It was just so huge, I couldn't forget it. Came home from school and watched a building fall out the sky live on TV. Harrowing.

I had 3 year old twins and a 4 year old.
I showed them 2 minutes thinking they should have some kind of memory of such a day..... obviously not seeing the truly awful scenes.....I switched off pretty quickly when they reacted with excitement as though it was a Transformer type film😕

Vividly. I was 18.

I had moved from my home town to London a few months before and had come for a rare trip home - it was over 3 hours each way on the train but I wanted to see my mum, so I had organised a day return.

An hour or so before getting the train back to London we were walking through the town together and we made comment on the crowd of people outside the Sony TV shop who were watching some sort of disaster movie. We said how strange it was. Twenty minutes later my boyfriend in London rang to say they'd been evacuated (he worked for some sort of financial company) and told to leave for the day just in case. I had no clue what he was talking about, just wanted to spend the last bit of time with my mum.

When I got on the train, they announced we would go as far as we could but couldn't guarantee we would get to King's Cross because all terminals were limited or closed. Boyfriend rang again and explained. I spent the rest of the 3 hours signing up to BBC text alerts on my phone and trying to get my head around what was happening.

Boyfriend and I watched TV in bed all night. I just remember feeling like the entire day was completely surreal. I was a very, very naive 18 year old and had such little concept of the devastation that was occurring until it was spelt out in figures in front of me.

Yes I was in the UK, year 7. Got sent home early too. My parents were at home watching the news and we watched for hours in shock. I remember that day as the end of my childhood innocence. I cried and cried as I never realised before that the world could be so evil and people could do that to each other.

I was on the way back from some college open day thing and all the tubes lines were closing down. I came out at Piccadilly Circus, I think, and heard people talking about an explosion and just assumed it was in London and that’s why the tubes were down. Then I bought the Evening Standard - front page was just a picture of the WTC burning with a small amount of text inside because they just didn’t know anything really then. I do remember there was mention of an as yet unconfirmed explosion at the Pentagon. I got on a bus which just crawled along and we went past what I think was the American Airlines building which was quite literally ringed with police, standing shoulder to shoulder.

When I finally got home, mum was watching the BBC and we just spent hours watching that until I remembered that Sky had CNN so we switched to that, broadcasting live from New York.

Somehow, I don’t think I saw the footage of the first plane to hit until years later.

Even though I was 11 at the time, I know what pp mean about it being a change in the world. I wasn't blind to the idea of terrorism- my parents hadn't hidden the news from me as a small child and the IRA threatening London and wars in places like Bosnia and Kosovo were known to me- I knew awful things happened. The IRA especially had terrified me when I was little but I had very little knowledge about politics in the Middle East and to my 11 year old self, the world had seemed calmer for a couple of years... and then this happened.

I think the size and scale of it were what frightened me, and learning that there would be a war. I lost trust somehow- which I still haven't got back. I also now work with lots of military and so it continues to shape my work place, as I listen to their experiences in Afghanistan. They talk about lots of different war zones between them but Afghanistan unites them.

I was working at a UK airport when we heard about the first plane, we had a tv in the offices so switched it on and watched the rest of it unfold.

All aircraft were grounded as there was a genuine concern that the UK was going to be attacked too.

Our school didn't close early that day. I was in year 6, and I remember someone coming into the classroom to tell our teacher. Can't remember if anything was said to us. Went home and it was all over the TV.

Anyone suffered a knock on effect from this?

My brother had just become a paratrooper when 9/11 happened. He was only young at the time.

We all dreaded a war thinking he'd get sent away and he did he did 2 tours of Iraq and 2 in Afghanistan.

He's now 36 and is an alcoholic and has just been told he has the onset of liver failure he suffered really bad PTSD and turned to drink. He also has psychosis.

All those young men fighting a war some never came home in person some never came home in mind.

That day had such a ripple effect like throwing a brick into a pond the ripples keep coming even 18 years later.

I was working in a well known bakery, which had a shop opposite which sold TVs, so everything was being shown on the screen. Two boys ran into the shop saying "the White House has been bombed". All of us working never thought anything of it. I was due off shift, and my mum collected me. We had juSt sat down in front of the TV when the second plane hit. We sat and watched in disbelief for the next few hours. I was 16 at the time, and even now I can't watch documentaries where they play video recordings of people saying goodbye, or clips of people jumping/falling from the buildings. I literally sat and watched people die that day, I hate watching it now.

I was at work, someone had a radio on it and there was constant updates as to what was going on, went home and watched it all on tv

It's called lightbulb memory- you remember the tiniest of details.

I was 15 and at school. I don’t remember much being said about it but it was on the news when I got home and I remember finding the footage really horrible. We definitely weren’t sent home but we did have a minute’s silence in school the next day (Catholic school, some links with Catholic schools in the States).

@Lovingthesunshine88 i’m so sorry about your brother. The poisonous legacy of that day is so far reaching.

One thing younger people won't think of so much is that there wasn't really any social media. We had email and phones, TV and newspapers. But we were passively consuming it all, not crowdsourcing information the way it is now.

That relative 'slowness' made it even more awful I think, as we watched the same impact clips over and over. There weren't a thousand new tweets with a thousand more angles every hour to desensitise us.

I remember I was hoovering the living room and Sky news was on in the background I went out to the kitchen and told my dad we watched a few minutes and he said ‘this will be the start of WW3’ it was really chilling to think about that. I think the impact didn’t really sink in until the next day as there wasn’t so much social media or anything

Very vividly, maybe because I was 31. At home with my new baby and heard it on the radio and naively didn’t know the world trade centre in NY so turned on sky news and didn’t move again for about 4 hours. We lived in London so I rang my partner as I honestly felt like it was going to happen here too, I wanted him home. We watched it together and cried. My partner had a friend who worked in the city for Cantor Fitzgerald, he spent every day on the phone to his counterparts in NY, nearly all of them died, he was very affected.

I was 19 and in Corfu. I was on my first holiday without my mum and dad. They were really scared about me being out of the country. I didn't really understand it at the time but do now that I'm a parent.

It felt like a paradigm shifted that day.

Yes loving
I am very very sorry too for the effect it had

I was 11 and it was my first day at high school. I came home from my first day and my parents were home watching the news.

I had never heard of terrorism before, I was in shock.