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I was a freshman in college at the time. We had only been in school about 2 weeks, so everything was still really new. I had classes all morning. I remember walking between classes and hearing a guy on the pay phone saying that all of the airports were shut down. I thought I just misheard it. I finally got to my 12 o'clock class and heard the news. Class was dismissed and I spend the rest of the day in my friends dorm room watching the coverage.
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I was in my second week of high school, and my school is just a few miles from the Pentagon. I remember I was running the mile in gym class and thinking what a beautiful day it was. Then one of my classmates, who arrived late because of a doctor's appointment, told us what had happened. We spent the rest of the day in shock, watching TV, unable to comprehend what was happening so close to where we were sitting. There were so many rumors going around that more planes would head for DC, where both my parents worked, so I was really scared for them. They basically had to walk home from work, although my dad eventually had a cab driver stop to pick him up. My dad told him he didn't have any cash on him and the driver said, "Get in, don't worry about it," and drove him home. One of my classmates' dad was on the plane that hit the Pentagon and my now-MIL was working in the Pentagon, though thankfully was on the other side of the building. My school bus drove past the Pentagon every day and it was hard to see the destruction.
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I was still in middle school, and I remember another teacher coming into our room to tell ours what was happening after the first plane hit. We pretty much spent the rest of the day watching the news. I was young enough to still be pretty naive about what a huge impact this would have on our country. That changed as details about the terrorists came out and much of the country started acting fearful of Muslims and showing hatred for them. I'm grew up right next to the city in the US with the highest proportion of Arab Americans, so I've seen too many friends and their families become the victims of hate crimes. You wouldn't believe the things people will say and do to an innocent young teenage girl because she happens to be wearing a hijab. It's all just awful - on this day I have trouble not going back to the stories of all those who were lost on 9/11 and just crying for the terror they must have felt in their last moments of life, and for their families to have lost someone in such a traumatic way. And all of the ugliness and hate that has gone on since then on both sides...it still feels so raw at times. I wish we could just wipe evil from the world. I wish it was that simple.
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I had a strange experience. I had just arrived in Paris for my junior year abroad and my French was not very good. I remember hearing "New York" and "Washington DC" over and over on the radio when I was in a few stores, but I couldn't understand anything. A few hours after the attacks I was at an Internet cafe checking my email and I had messages from a friend in NYC and my brother who was a freshman in Washington DC, and that's how I learned about it. I sat at the computer and read as much news as I could and cried. I didn't have a TV, so I never saw any of the news reports or videos until a year later when I was back in the US on the first anniversary of the attacks. It was shocking for me to see the replays of the clips since it was the first time I had seen them. I don't think there was much internet video back then. I felt like everyone but me had already seen the biggest blockbuster movie. But also since I lived that whole year in a different country, I was very surprised at the change in the US when I returned. France was definitely a very supportive nation to the US and there was heightened security in Paris for months, but since it didn't directly affect the city, it wasn't on the forefront of daily life after a few months.
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