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              <text>Grandmom had her semi-annual dental check up. While being examind by the dentist her assistant entered the room and excused herself and said there was a plane crash at the world trade center in New York city. At that time all went to the T.V. and watched with horror as to all the happenings of that day.

    Grandpop at that time was in the eye doctors office waiting for the doctor to arrive from the hospital where he had completed surgery for the day. While waiting people were coming in from different locations telling us about the plane crashes. There was no t.v. in the waiting room so we could not observe the happenings. To make a long story short the eye doctor never came  so I went to bring 
grandma home from the dentist and we went home watched t.v. andprayed that everything would work out for the world and all of us.</text>
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              <text>     I was at school on September 11th.At the end of the day,everyone was talking about bombing.I didnt understand.When I got home, I was  with my neighbors.They said that a plane had crashed into a buildin g in New York.That night, I finally understood what was happeningwhile I was watching the planes crash into the Twin Towers on television.While I was watching what was happening,i thought that nobody had died,but then i realized how many people died and i felt so bad.This is the worst thing that could have ever happend.

     My life has not changed much since September 11th, but I am afraid that this will happen again.i am afraid because i have friends and family in distant places.I am not only afraid for people I know, but nobody deserves to die.

     I think the display of bravery should be remembered. Everyone from everywhere was helping out. People that hated eachother were getting together to help. People were reuniting to remember. Everyone started to appreciate the fact that they were alive.</text>
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              <text>Well, we all went to bed on September 10th as we would have on any other night.  But the way i was awoken on september 11th was like no other way i have ever experianced in my life.  "Were at war.  Were being attacked" is all i could here my mom screaming from out in the living room.  Assuming my mom was just going crazy i went out to see what was the matter as most people would do.  Our cable had accidentally been cut on the day before (sept 10th) by the neighbor digging a whole so all we had was a poor reception that our old antenna could give us and i witnessed the horrific site of the plane crashing into the world trade center.  All i could think was "this can't be happening"  theres no way this is real.  I've grown up my whole life and nothing of this magnitude has ever come about.  I sat their in awe watching as they showed the replay over and over again.  I felt sorrow, fear, hate for who did this, and well nationalism as i had never felt before.  I wanted revenge.  I felt like i could do nothing but just watch this tv cause i couldn't believe what i was seeing.  but i knew i had to go to college because my classes hadn't been cancelled.   so i quickly got ready and the teacher after yelling at me for being late was totally in shock when i told her what happend.  To be honest she didn't even believe me tell after class when everyone out in the hallways were talking about it.  No one in class actually believed me.  They thought i just made up some pathetic excuse on why i was late.  I will never forget what happend on September 11th.  It was almost as if my generations inocense had been stolen by some mysterious figure that we had no idea whom he was.  People have compared this to the event of the JFK assassination on the previous generations, or the events of Pearl Harbor.  How could this be.   Pearl Harbor was an attack on our military base.  September 11th was an attack on the innocence, honor, FREEDOM of America.  Since september 11th i've come to the realization that America can be just as vulnerable as any other country and that our country is actually still the strongest in my mind.  I couldn't believe the massive amount of support everyone has put into trying to save as much as they can from New York and the Pentagon.  So god Bless America.
Tom Lincoln
Aurora, IL
SCAT3710@aol.com</text>
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              <text>September 12th 2001
Narrative of Tuesday Morning, September 11, 2001

I came up from the subway onto Wall street and into a blizzard of paper ? millions of sheets falling from high in the sky. A few were singed, but most simply floated here and there on the currents and eddies among the building.  For a moment I thought it was a tickertape parade, but they?re held on Broadway, two blocks to the west.

High above the paper was a broad plume of smoke across a blue sky.  Someone said it was coming from the World Trade Center, and that it had been hit by an airliner.  It seemed unlikely ? perhaps a Cessna or a helicopter.

My temporary office is to the east, at Wall and Water street, but instead I walked north and west to the WTC plaza. All along the way the strange weather continued; paper was swirling in the streets, now with many sheets partially burned.  I crossed the little park at the south east corner of the WTC plaza, Liberty and Church streets. The park is a block-long series of red brick paved terraces planted with trees. There are broad stone and steel  benches scattered around, and a low border of ship's chains.  I crossed the park diagonally and emerged from behind the large office building (1 Liberty Plaza) on the northern edge that hid the towers from view.  I can?t remember any more paper falling that day, although it must have continued to fall thick and fast. The upper floors of the northern tower were in flames, spectacular, improbable, cinematic flames.  Six or eight floors blazed, apparently  filled  completely, or nearly completely, with an orange glow that billowed out in huge puffs ? not at all the flames of a normal building fire. An ordinary building fire is mostly smoke, with tongues of orange fire lacing through it; huge balls of flame poured out of the tower ? billows of flame that rolled out into the sky.  

The flames were perhaps 800 or 900 feet above the ground, and the foot of the tower perhaps 500 feet away, yet they were gigantic, utterly dwarfing the human scale. Terrified people in the floors above looked out and hung out from windows just above, barely noticeable in the vastness of the scale. Windows were shattered in floors above the flames ? the people seemed to be seeking breathable air, or trying to escape heat; it was impossible to tell.  The flaming floors, and the relatively undamaged portion above, clearly still filled with people made up only perhaps a fifth of the building. Everything appeared to be intact.

Few people on the ground seemed upset ? a couple of hundred of us stood across the street transfixed by the spectacle, but most of us were oddly calm, as if watching news report of some distant disaster.  A pedestrian falling on sidewalk or a minor traffic accident produces as much apparent alarm. There was little talking, no screaming, no ?Oh the humanity.?  Among some, a snow-day mood was evident.  Perhaps we were unable to feel, unable to imagine what to feel, at seeing those clinging to the windows leap, or pass out, or simply fall, and tumble slowly to the ground. It takes a long time to fall so far - plenty of time to see who they are, wonder about what they might be thinking and wonder if they are frightened.  At the scale of the WTC, a sense of unreality is a nearly seamless defense against horror.

I don?t think any of us ? there weren?t very many at that spot, directly in front of the northern tower at the corner of John and Church ? heard or saw the second plane approach from behind the unharmed second tower.  Certainly I didn?t. When the face of the second tower exploded it was flabbergasting ? there wasn?t the slightest hint until the glass and the metal facing ribs bloomed out riding the front of an immense fireball ? a mass of flame that seemed to form a roof across the whole plaza, closer the ground than the flames of the first tower, and immensely larger ? smaller than, but similar in scale to that of the buildings, which was almost geologic.  We were at the corner of a side street two narrow blocks below the northern edge of the tower and no one had to be told to run, or which way ? there was nothing to hide behind.  We sprinted, young and old.  Several people fell, and those behind simply leapt over them, but the ugly panic one reads about wasn?t seen on that street.  For everyone that leapt over or ran around, at least one other stopped.  A tiny woman tried to pull a very fat black woman in a pink dress to her feet, hopelessly outmatched.  I grabbed too and we hauled her up and drove her before us.   Then an slender older woman sprawled face down a dozen feet ahead, not even struggling to get up. A man leapt over her and kept going.  With the famous strength of panic, I simply grabbed her by the waist and literally set her on her feet screaming at her to ?run her ass off? and shoving her rudely.  I could feel the mass of glass and steel coming after us ? the fireball seemed to stretch forever, but the debris never reached us.  Every one made it safely to the corner.

The second building was now in worse shape than the first. The destruction was slightly closer to the ground, about 2/3 of the way up, and the billowing flames enormous. The first building seemed only to smolder in comparison.  Large quantities of material had been ejected from the building across the plaza.  Firemen still streamed toward it ? brave men, for the second tower was raining glass, steel, people, and the contents of half a dozen devastated floors  down on the plaza.  Few people seemed to be coming out ? certainly not crowds.  I was looking for the flood of people one sees when a baseball stadium empties; this was a trickle, no greater than the numbers of firemen converging on the doors.

I went south again to the park at 1 Liberty Plaza behind the row of building that face the towers and screened them from view.  Back at the southern edge of plaza it was instantly evident that it was not a bomb but another plane that had struck the tower: on the southern face of tower two was a clean, almost round hole six to ten stories high and wide  that gaped on level with the blown out north and west faces.  On opposing sides of the hole, tilted sharply from horizontal, were long slices where the wings had struck.

There was nothing to be done to help ? hoards of firemen and police were arriving. There were few obvious injured ? bodies littered the plaza, but the officials outnumbered the fleeing.

I moved back past Broadway, still directly opposite the towers, but behind a couple of blocks of buildings, watching the disaster from a distance.  I chatted with a distinguished looking and confident man who pooh-poohed the idea that the tops might collapse.  I told him I remembered the old west side piers that burned ? the steel looked like a mass of cooked spaghetti, but he was quite sure the WTC was built to withstand a fire.  He said that much jet fuel might burn for hours. That much was believable.  If there was to be a collapse, I pictured the tops falling off, like ice cream off a cone. Many people were horrified, but few were alarmed for themselves. Some still seemed almost gay, as if this, at last, was something really different.

I decided to leave, and walked further back, across the island to Water street, still directly opposite the plaza, but half a dozen blocks away. The pedestrian walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge, a few blocks to the north, is the surest way to get across the East River. From Water Street, one could see the top third of the towers ? enough to see the northern tower burning. The burning portion of the Southern tower was obscured by buildings. Incredibly, cars and delivery trucks still drove in the direction of the towers, going about their ordinary business as if nothing out of the ordinary were occurring. A UPS driver honked, looking irritated, and turned West directly toward the WTC. 

For many more minutes I stood watching from there. A woman approached and we talked about the disaster and watched.  She told me she worked at Goldman Sachs further downtown at 1 New York Plaza - directly across from my own home office, as it happens. Mostly we watched quietly. Then as we gazed at the most awful thing we?d ever seen, the southern tower simply sank from view; it didn?t fall over, it just sank.  An immense plume of dust and smoked erupted in its place, but it immediately followed the tower below the buildings, sucked down as fast as it had bloomed to fill the vacuum left by the sinking building. The sky was clear where the tower had been.  

In seconds, far up John Street the mass of dust reappear as a solid wall rushing forward, filling the street, overtaking and instantly obscuring the pedestrians fleeing toward us.  The air ahead of the cloud was crystalline, then people simply winked out as the cloud overtook them.  The dust was so dense that it was as opaque as wallboard.  The cloud came down the street like a piston, swallowing the terrified people fleeing it, coming faster than a car would travel. Attempting to outrun it was absurd, but that was most everyone?s instinct.

Drivers stopped at the traffic light tried to cross the intersection, despite the blocked traffic ahead. Several of us beat on their hoods and yelled to stop them from blocking the intersection. Successfully, surprisingly: they drivers fled, not even closing their doors.  When the cloud swept over the intersection, it was opaque, but only for a few minutes. And just around the corner the air was almost transparent again. I pulled my shirttail over my mouth and nose and shouted for people to come, and many did. We ducked into a garage where the air was breathable.

In minutes it cleared sufficiently to see ten or twenty feet.  I ran back out, and people were stumbling out of the obscurity choking and gagging.  The radius of vision was only a few feet.  I ran into the cloud, my face covered with my shirt.  A pretty Asian girl wearing only her underwear ran into my view.  She shrieked on meeting me in the gloom.  She couldn?t be led, or even told ? she just shrieked and shrieked, recoiling from my approach and even my words. But in her fright she ran in the right direction, so I just let her go.  Everyone was filthy, but her panic was exceptional. A few were stunned, but most were remarkably cool and understood instantly when told where to go. One woman, dusty white from head to foot, seemed genuinely puzzled and a little annoyed to be taken for someone who might be in need of directions. Very New York.

It cleared rapidly ? mostly it was dust, not smoke, and it simply fell to the ground or blew away.  A young man, maybe thirty years old, was also running around dragging people into lobbies and shops.  We introduced ourselves ? he was Angelo ? and ran together up John Street into the cloud, toward whatever was left of the WTC.  

We stopped for a few seconds and he tore off the sleeve of his Tee shirt and gave it to me for a mask.  The Tee shirt was hard to tear straight, so he opened his Swiss Army knife and cut it with scissors.  We stopped again to loot an abandoned hotdog stand of a crate of cold Poland Spring bottled water, and carried it Jack and Jill style toward the towers. We opened the cooler and filled a milk crate with bottles.  For an awkward moment I fumbled with some money to leave and Angelo laughed out loud.  Along the way we passed out bottles right and left to crying choking people, or squirted their eyes clear and hustled them into doorways. Many were unable to see, their eyes caked with powder. People seemed not to think of the most obvious thing ? that it wouldn?t be so dusty inside and that the air would clear quickly.

We made it back to the park at the Southwest corner. The water supply was gone twice over.  Hotdog stands across the island suffered at our hands.  At the park there were a dozen firemen and many pieces of equipment, windows smashed, doors hanging open.  The firemen were just milling around dazed and leaderless.  Some of their crew were missing; most were missing, gone into the tower, but some of those left behind with the equipment were said to be missing too. The park was piled with debris, dust and trash as high as the benches in some places, as high as the hoods of cars in others. The fire trucks and police cars were badly battered and windowless. The long stainless steel ribs that sheath the towers were scattered everywhere. They?re big, about sixteen inches square, and a dozen feet long: stainless steel sheet bent into a sleek cover for the vertical ribs of the building. It takes two hands to pick one up.  The wind born debris had pushed most of the trees over to about 45 degrees.  The stainless steel sheathing was piled in heaps along with tons of paper, steel and concrete. The dust was ankle deep in some places, feet deep in others, and everywhere, huge amounts of paper. Tons upon tons of forms, manuals, letters. Everything was under mounds of gray dust.  

A few firemen made a desultory attempt to look for their crews. They knew most had gone into the towers, but some were believed to be closer, perhaps buried, perhaps hiding or just separated.  No one articulated these thoughts; the guys were just ?somewhere?. Angelo and I shouted and picked among the wreckage, calling for anyone who could hear us to make a noise, yell or bang, sing out.  But there wasn?t a sound from the debris around us. On the south side of the park was an eight foot plywood construction fence in front of an old fashioned office building. Against it debris, paper and metal from the building were banked deeply, packing the areas between pushcarts and abandoned emergency vehicles, some with their motors still running. There used to be a narrow lane there, but you couldn?t tell beneath the debris.  Everywhere it was deep enough to hide an injured or unconscious person.

We couldn?t see the remaining tower at all, or even the edge of the plaza catty corner across the street. Just across the street the true rubble pile seemed to begin, but it was impossible to tell in the dust ? one seemed to see part of a building in the cloud, but only as a dark mass looming.   The visible world was tiny ? only fifty or a hundred feet in radius.   

The first tower still hadn?t fallen, nor could we be certain that it would, but we were very aware of its presence in the gloom.  We deployed ourselves under the assumption that it would fall. The first crash had demolished the park ? later it would be clear that it had damaged 1 Liberty as well, but the building had withstood the first, nearer tower?s collapse and it seemed an acceptably safe place to be should the second tower fall too.  The remaining tower had burned near to the top ? it seemed unlikely to fall far enough from its base to land on us as a mass.

Light from the fires filtered through, but only as a glow ? nothing was visible.  The destruction around us made the danger of a second collapse clear enough.  A young man, oddly clean and casual, walked down the lane by the park.  Not looking for injured, or on some mission - just looking around, as if inspecting a piece of property.  I shouted to him that the other tower could still fall, and that he mustn?t go in front, but instead stay shielded by the building, and yelled to him where to hide when it did: there was a head-high wall and a long colonnade of I-beams supporting the overhanging second floor of One Liberty, each column large enough for a person to squeeze in between the flanges and be shielded from debris from the front, and shattered plate glass from the side. But he pointed to the wall next to him as if it offered plenty of protection. Apparently he didn?t grasp that it was just the glass wall of the lobby, adjoining the front wall, also glass.  Then he just shrugged and continued around the front of the building onto Church Street facing the towers.  I didn?t see him again.

I lost sight of Angelo.  Seconds or minutes later the sliding, roaring sound of the second collapse began ? there was a deep trilling sound under it, like the rolling of a Spanish ?r?.  It was the scraping sound that a dump truck of gravel makes when it unloads, but infinitely bigger.  I dashed for the colonnade.  There was no one else in sight, and no time to look around. Instantly darkness swept over from the plaza. It was inky black ? shockingly black to a city person, as black as a moonless night in the country.  The roar of the collapse died down in seconds, but the air was so thick it seemed to resist motion through it.  It fell so thickly that the air had weight. My shirt pocket got heavy with it in seconds.   I started to draw a breath through the mask/respirator, which had somehow lost its patched up T-shirt filter, and I got a thick mouthful of ash and sand.   I felt for the glass wall, inexplicably not broken, and felt  my way down it to the revolving door, which was fortunately not jammed.  Inside the triangular opening, light was faintly visible within.  

A few people were in the lobby, all of us panicky, but we determined that to stay was pretty safe, and to leave almost impossible until the dust settled.  The last dust had become passable in minutes, but this was far thicker.  

But within five or ten minutes it was clear enough that an improvised T shirt mask enabled me to go outside with a bull horn and begin calling to people to come to the sound.  But after several minutes no one had come.  I literally stumbled over the dropped respirator and patched up the filter with more T-shirt.   There was nobody to look for, and the North was impassible, so I headed south.  It was still dark as night, although it was still mid-morning on a day of clear blue skies.  

Below the WTC on West street, a block below the covered pedestrian bridge across the highway, firefighters, police and emergency crews were gathering.   The road ahead was blocked with scores of burning trucks and cars.  Everything was deep in ash ? several inches covered the tops of cars and walls.   Sporadic explosions of gas tanks and car tires made everyone jump.  A man was walking around poking at suspicious lumps under the ash and marking those that appeared to be parts of bodies with traffic cones and tape.     An office telephone, handset and all, lay in the dust, its lines spun round and round the sleeve a man?s sport jacket.  A little later the man came and marked it with a cone, for the jacket turned out not to be entirely empty.

Nearby one of the airplane wheels lay, tire and all, along with some of the attached gear, torn off in mid-axle.  The tire was burst, but whole. Up the road, less recognizable if you hadn?t seen the whole one, lay another, bare of rubber and smashed. They must have come from the plane that hit the North tower. Pieces of sheathing, an airplane door and thousands of unidentifiable bits and pieces lay every where, blanketed by dust.  In the middle of the highway is an underpass to nowhere ? it emerges again a hundred yards or so down town. Three policemen were shuffling down the road into it, kicking through the dust in line looking for a service pistol one of them had dropped when fleeing the flow of dust.  A woman yelled down to them from the upper roadway to knock it off and go do something useful. The looked sheepish and left, despite the evident lack of anything to do until the burning wrecks were extinguished.  It did look a little foolish.

I waited an hour or two for the flames and dust to die down enough to do something useful, but they sprang up again, and again, and the adjacent building seemed in danger of collapse, so everyone moved further back. I killed time dragging some of the bigger chunks of sheathing out of the streets so vehicles would be able to pass, but it was pointless work.  Little fires burned unattended all around.  Window were blown out of the surrounding buildings to a height of perhaps twenty stories. The numbers of official relief people had grown to the hundreds and no prospect of doing anything useful appeared likely for many hours.  Too much fire and smoke, and too many chunks of adjacent buildings still falling into the cauldron of the plaza and surrounding blocks.  I headed up the street away from scene of the disaster.

A couple of blocks away an old man was picking his way though the trash and debris.  I had a last bottle of water in my pocket and I offered it to him.  He said no thanks, he was fine, but could I direct him to an address on Liberty street.  I laughed and said I didn?t think he?d have to go to work today, that everyone had gone home.  But he told me he was a security guard there, and that it was necessary to report, especially now.    He?d been there many years, but in all the smoke and trash he couldn?t find it.  Neither could I. We had to ask a cop. 
 

 

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              <text>  I do not watch TV and did not know that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I was sleeping late Tuesday, September 11, my daughter was with her grandmother, on an airplane headed for Paris. I awoke to a huge "BOOB" sound, it was a deep, terrifying sound. My five level building shook, the windows shook, car alarms in the parking lot started to go off. I went out side, into the parking lot and saw black smoke rising from the Pentagon. I was told that a plane had crashed. 
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    Later, I watched the World Trade Center buildings collapse on the news. It was a horrifying scene.</text>
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              <text>I was at Ft. Gordon for additional training for the United States Army Reserve.  As I sat waiting for the PX to open, a soldier came up and asked if I had heard about what had happened.  I was clueless about what he was talking about, so I said no.  He told  me that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center building.  I didn't take him seriously at first.  The barber opened up his shop early and turned the tv on.  What we saw was just uncomprehensable.  We saw the first tower enveloped in thick smoke.  Then we couldn't believe what happened next.  It was another plane, and I stood in absolute shock as it flew into the second tower.  I was on active duty in the Army for 15 years.  I've been through terrorist threats and bombings before, but that was in Germany. It was also at a time when it was a daily occurrence there.  Never in a million years did I think that something like that could happen at home.  I was frightened and not ashamed to say so.  I was hundreds of miles away from home and my family, and never felt so alone in my life.  I called my husband immediately, and then my mother.  
Ft. Gordon was immediately shut down, and all training suspended.  In a dayroom meant to hold maybe 25 soldiers, there were 50 of us glued to the tv and waiting to hear from President Bush.  We knew what the attack meant to us, and we were prepared to go and get those who dared to hurt us in this way. And it felt good to know that we were not alone in that feeling.
I will never forget that day, and continue to do what I can to ensure that others don't.  And although I did not know any of those who perished, I still cried that day and again a year later.  And it only served to strengthed our country, and that is our greatest victory.
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              <text>My only daughter and I were together in the car headed back home after running an errand to plan my husband's birthday celebration when the radio newscaster said "A plane just hit the world tower in New York City".  We listened attentatively but I just figured there had been a terrible  accident.  As the news on the car radio continued, we abandoned our plan to get items for the surprise party.  It was his birthday.  We quickly drive home to see what was happening on the television.  When we arrived home, my husband was still asleep.  He had taken off from work and planned to sleep most of the day away.  His plan was ruined.  I woke him up and told him about what we had been hearing on the car radio.  When we turned on the television, the second tower had been struck.  I began to pray.  I remember thinking, "we are under attack and the only one who could help us was GOD".  It was obvious that the incidents were not accidents by this time.  We hovered over the news, glued to our television set taking in all this devastation.  One report after another announced the death of many INNOCENT Americans.  My heart ached for the victims and their families.  Being a retired Police Officer, I imagined what it would be like trying to help that many people to safety.  When reports said that firemen and police officer went into the buildings to assist people with getting out, My heart sank.  I knew in that moment that many of them would never come out.  I cried as I watched the buildings collapse.  Anger filled every fiber of my being.  I thought about my two grandchildren at school and told my daughter we had to go and pick them up.  For some reason, I was in New Orleans and didn't feel safe.  We drove to the children's schools and picked them up.  They were only three and eight.  We were unable to explain how such a Horrifying thing could happen.  They were confused and asked repeatedly if they were going to die.  This made me more angry.  The eldest child wanted to go home and not come out.  We told them that it was Pa Pa's birthday and we would celebrate enlight of it all.  Instead of running home, we went to the store to purchase a cake and ice cream.  Everyone was talking about the horror Americians were watching unfold. After making our purchases, we returned home and prepared the worst celebration I had ever arranged.  We couldn't stay focused. We shed many tears.  For the next several days, we tried to get back to normal.  I couldn't eat or sleep.  I didn't want to turn the television off because I felt it was the only source of information which could alert us if our city was attacked too.  I will never forget how afraid we were.  We would like to tell the families that were affected that GOD lives and he will see them through.  Although we knew none of the victims personally, we feel their pain.  The pain continues until this day.  We will never forget, we will not go away to hide and we will continue to thrive as a nation.  The sacrificial blood shed on September 11, 2001 created a resurgence of true LOVE for America and it's Citizens.  All of them.... Valinicia Washington and Family.</text>
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              <text>September 11th was my eighteenth birthday.  We were supposed to be leaving the SeaTac airport the next morning, my family and I, to fly overseas to Japan for a vacation before I started college three weeks later.  I had stayed the night at my friends as it was the last time I would see many of them for a long time since we were going our separate ways after graduation.  
We woke up on the morning of 9/11 to the phone ringing for what seemed like hours.  My mother had called several times to tell us to turn on the tv and watch the news.  We did as she asked, having no idea what was going on, but hearing the panic in her voice.  My friends and I were confused.  Who did this?  Could this happen here in Washington?  What would happen now...are we going to war??  
I remember going to work that day.  I had always enjoyed work, but today things were different.  Three thousand miles away, things were solemn.  It was as if this had happened in our hometown.  Radios were up full-blast as people wanted up to date information on what was happening.  
My parents had taken my friends and me out to dinner and as we sat and ate, celebrating my birthday, the three televisions in the room where we were eating were running continuous footage of the attacks.  Eastern Washington is a very patriotic place and I had been raised really, truly loving my country and my freedom.  My family, on both sides, is full of retired marines, navy and army personnel and that had always made me very proud.  All I could think was that if this attack had killed thousands, how many people were affected because the casualties were their sisters, brothers...husbands, wives...their children?? 
But the most touching thing of all, was hearing stories on the radio and reading in the paper the acts of patriotism that went on because of all of this chaos.  Hearing of how the passengers on flight 93 fought back and probably saved hundreds of more lives from being victims of terrorism.  I remember hearing on the radio of a lady who stood for 18 hours on a busy corner holding an American flag.  If you drive in Washington down I-5, to this day, there are still people who hold up signs and American flags on the overpasses near Ft. Lewis, WA.  
And now, here it is, over three years later and no one has forgotten.  On September 11, 2001 I would have never thought that I would have been directly affected by the events of that day.  But in November of 2003, thirty of my friends left for Iraq to fight in the "War on Terror".  They were part of the Stryker Brigade stationed out of Ft. Lewis.  After twelve months of writing letters and sending care packages whenever my income would allow it (I'm still a poor college student) all but one of them made it back safely.  I'm so grateful to have them all back, but there are still hundreds of thousands of troops over there.  Please keep them in your thoughts.  I know I will never forget 9/11 and its aftermath.  I hope you won't either...     
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              <text>     I witnessed September 11th in my homeroom at the Marlborough Middle School.  I remember one of my friend's coming up to me in the hallway and telling me what had happened, but I didn't believe him.  He had told me that two planes that were hijacked crahed into the World Trade Center. But then I started to see some of the teachers turning to the news channel to see what was going on.  After that, some of the teachers were just taking it easy on the classes and trying not to get angry with students.  I was starting to feel a little sad after that, and I just reflected on my actions towards the other kids and started to appreciate my friends more.  When I went home, I saw the news and my parents also told me about it, and i started to feel more sad after that.
     My life definitely has changed because of September 11th.  My feelings towards other people have changed like to my friends and family.  I started to love and appreciate more people around me, especially people close to me.  I started to respect more people and not just take my friends and family for granted.  I also noticed that I should appreciate the world more and not trash it or pollute the streets and waters.  I have become a better person now and started to be more respectful and appreciative.
     There are many different things that I think should be remembered about September, 11th.  One thing I think should remembered is the fact that Osama bin Laden was the one who planned all this.  I think we should remember all the firefighters who tried to save other peoples lives by risking theirs and honor them for their support.  The other thing I think should be remembered is all the people who were in the World Trade Center and all the people in the planes who lost their lives because of this tradgedy.</text>
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              <text>September 11th is a day i will NEVER forget as a child. I was in elementary school at lunch. We were all having fun but left to right parents were coming up pickin up their children. I thought ot myself, whats going on. My next door neighbor came to get my friend and i, we asked him whats going on. i didnt understand as much i was too young. When i got home my grandmother said your mom is at work and she cant leave. i questioned, why but all she could do was cry. I went in the kitchen and saw a tall building get crash into by a plane. i was terrified. I was now scared and wanted my mom but she couldnt come. I found out this was in new york and was the same week my friend and her family went to go visit. there first goal was to visit the twin towers. I began to cry my heart out to the lord. luckly her flight was CANCELLED. Due to delays. God watched over them but somethings happen for reasons and some you cant stop. those people that hit the towers were MENTALLY SICK.  Now im 13 going on 14 and yes i was 8 years old when it happen but  i will never forget. thousands of people died for no reason. Those terrioiest tried to scare us, but sad to say 50% of it worked but i have hope those BASTARDS will get what they got coming towards them. Tonight is September 10 the day before, and i dont think ill sleep because im sacared. Scared of what will happen. Its been proven Anything can HAPPEN. But i hold everyone i know and dont in my prayers. For our sake we dont want history to repeat itself. yes i said history because history is something you will never forget. You cant blam this all on bush even though he had somthing to do with it, we still have to remember we arent always gonna be safe.
  I dont have much of a story but ill never forget!!!!!!!!!!. now i love my little sister, sometimes she gets on my nerve but i got a bad feeling that  most ofher life and most of mine is gonna be HELL!

I THINK ON THAT DAY evryone didnt have a dry eye.</text>
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              <text>   I had just broken up with my boyfriend. The cat pooped on my sweatshirt. My mom had flown out to Portland the night before and forgot to give me any money to sustain myself. I grumbled my way to school and tried to think of reasonable excuses to explain my lack of English paper to my teacher. These things mattered. They make up the life of a high schooler. I sat through gym (I sat because my clothes were conveniently still in the dryer at home) and bought a biscuit and some chocolate milk during the break in between first and second period. Break passed just like any other, the bell rang when it should have, right around 9:20. I walked into my second period class, English, excuse ready (a good one involving an anonymous friend and a borrowed disk), biscuit and milk carton in hand, and noticed some strange file footage from some conflict being played on the classroom TV. 
    I turned to the girl next to me, "When did that happen? Where is that?"
    "It's happening right now. Those are the Twin Towers."
    And September 11th was more than just another day. It was now "that Tuesday" forever engraved into the memories of countless Americans. 
    Suddenly my life was about as trivial as certain board games that don't mean anything. 
    There's no reason for me to recount the things I saw on the endless news reports that day...we all saw them. After the Pentagon became involved, though, everything that had already been drastically changed had been drastically changed again. Seeing as our school is one of the top public choices for children of Pentagon employees to attend, this was a huge deal that remained unacknowledged until an intercom announcement said what was quite possibly more ridiculous than the event itself.
   "There's been reports of a third plane striking the Pentagon. There are no injuries as of yet."
   Like anyone believed that.
   Phone calls were made in frantic voices usually reserved for betrayals by best friends and students were excused from classes. I just wanted to go home so I could think. 
   I stuck it out the rest of the school day and went to my friend's house to call my grandfather, who gives tours of the Capitol on Tuesdays. 
   "Everything's alright around here. I made it out before the traffic got too heavy."
   I called my mom, who would end up being stranded in Portland for the next week and a half. I Love You's were whispered and shouted, meaningful and constant.
   My big brother picked me up from my friend's house, he had shaved his own head and missed a spot in the back. He and I decided to go to a spot in some woods to take pictures. When we exhausted our words and sat on a log, the full impact of the day had hit me. The sky, normally loud and busy with the traffic of two nearby airports, were completely silent and empty. I cried for the first time that day. It was the most depressing, devastating silence I had ever heard. 

   Since "that Tuesday", it's been harder to get worked up about the things that used to matter. Time is precious and so are the relationships you create during it. My peers and I have unavoidably been jaded because of these attacks. Boyfriends dump girlfriends, cat poop washes out, and money's only as important as you make it. In the end, it's not the kind of life you have, it's what you do while you're having it. </text>
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              <text>September 11, 2001:  My office is in Staines, a town near Heathrow Airport, in England. It was my lunch break and I went out for a walk in the town with no particular aim other than to have a break.  On the spur of the moment I went into Dorothy Perkins, a ladies clothes shop, and a T shirt caught my eye - it was grey with the stars and stripes flag on the front - the stars were silver metal and the effect was eye-catching.  I have visited USA many times and love the flag, so I bought the T shirt.  

On returning to my office I was greeted with the news that the first tower had been struck.  My colleagues and I watched the TV screen in our Board Room with absolute disbelief and horror as the nightmare unfolded.  I had visited New York in 2000 and had been to the top of the WTC, so the experience seemed quite personal to me and I could not help imagining the scene as if I was there, too.  

I then remembered the T shirt and, on looking at the till receipt, saw that I had purchased it at UK time 13:43, USA time 08:43 - a matter of minutes before the first plane hit. I find this coincidence hard to understand. 

Naturally, I wore the T shirt that day and frequently thereafter and was glad to have this symbol to express my sorrow publicly.</text>
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              <text>I would first like to extend my deepest sympathy to all the families of the victoms and the survivors of that tragic day. May God bless you through this all, and always.   I was sitting on the couch talking to a good friend on the phone, just waiting for my 2 year old to wake up and start the day, when my husband, who works at American Airlines, O'hare called on the other line to tell me a plane just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. I quickly turned the t.v. to CNN and sat there in complete disbelief. I clicked back to my friend and told her. Moments later we both listened to the report that a second plane hit. Then I was scared. I hung up with my friend to call my mom in Florida. She turned on the t.v. and saw the reporting and we just sat there in silence watching. We occasionally would say "unbelievable" or "I can't believe this is happening." I then hung up with her to make and recieve more calls. I still remember watching the 1st tower fall and then the 2nd . I jumped up from the couch and just paced back and forth in total disbelief. You have a panic feeling within you. I was a long way from New York, but it might as well been the other side of my town, I was terrorized, I was scared for mine and my families life. When would it stop? My husband works at a major international airport, would they be next? All those people injured and/ or parishing that morning, those were OUR COUNTRY'S PEOPLE! That is what pulled everyone together, it could of been any one of us. And we were NOT going to let the terrorists who did this win!
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              <text>I woke up, turned on the news, and saw on KXLY, what had happened, I thought at first that a plane had just flown to low, and then bam, there it was the second plane, and I knew that it was bad real bad, so I called my friend Mike Braughtagan, in Man hatten, and no answer, I started praying Lord, help those trapped in the floors above to get out without any harm, but,just stop and think 5000 peoples lives were taken from them on that terrible day that will live in infamy, I am planning on making a memorial wall with all the names of those who lost their lives, and delivering it in person, after they rebuild the new twin towers, and I myself will place it at the front dorrs of the new twin towers
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              <text>Jason Buffington

					


Attack on America


	On September 11, 2001,  I was at Barker Central School. A school in a little town near Lake Ontario, way out in the "sticks." The plane collision happened during second period while I was in gym. I first heard about the crashes during 3rd period art.  The television was turned on and it showed a building blazing with smoke.  As we all watched, another explosion happened in the building next to it.  At the time I didn't know that a plane had hit it, I didn't know a plane hit the other one either.  Eventually as we watched, both of the buildings crumbled to the ground.  At the sight of 110 stories of rubble, it shocks everybody to know that Thousands of people died.  More than 3,000 people died during all this.  The planes that hit the World Trade Centers were hijacked by terrorists and flown into the buildings.  One other plane has also flown into the Pentagon.  And another had crashed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After I got home that day my parents hadn't really heard of the crashes. They knew that planes had hit the World Trade Towers but nothing else. I filled them in about the whole deal and they continued to watch the news. We continued to keep up with the information that was being posted on the news for about a week. One week later there are a lot of families and friends still in shock of what happened. Since then the United States has improved the airport security and general awareness of suspected terrorists. The United States still receives threats in our country towards other terrorist actions to this day.  We are now at war with terrorism and still sending troops over to the Middle East, Afghanistan, and wherever terrorism still exists. We will continue to be at war with terrorism until it exists no more. Ten months later the United States have not shown their pride and nationalism in our country, the nationalism has slowed to where hardly anybody cares.
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              <text>It was around 6 a.m. something (not a morning person) and my phone rang.  It was my best-friend, Carol, with this strange sound to her voice telling me "turn on the T.V. something is wrong with the world."  Sure, okay and what were you drinking last night."  

I turned the television on just seconds before the second plane hit.  I have never been so awake so quickly.  Seeing the second plane hit torn through me like it did the Tower.  I began to shake, cry and wondering WHY?  WHO?  WHAT THE HELL IS THIS GOING ON?  WHO WOULD DO THIS TO AMERICA.  Yes, I am aware of the hatred some have against us, but to do THIS?  It has to be a "madman."  It was!

Watching as the Towers melted down all I could think about is MY GOD, THERE ARE PEOPLE LOSING THEIR LIVES.  CHILDREN, WIVES, HUSBANDS, BROTHERS, SISTERS, FAMILY LOSING THEIR LOVED ONES.  As the world watched in devastation, HELPLESS!

But as we know who and how we are; "WE THE PEOPLE OF USA STOOD POWERFUL AND STRONG AND MOSTLY 'UNITED.'  No one was going to take our integrity and pride away with such "stupidity and evilness."

It was a day I couldn't wait to get to work (for once).  When I did, I walked in to see looks on faces as mine looked.  Disblieving, shock, terror and SORROW!  

Today, being the first anniversary of this devastation, I was in the same state of mind as one year ago.  BEWILDERMENT AND GRIEF FOR ALL THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE WE LOST, NOT JUST THEIR FAMILIES, WE ALL LOST!

Watching the news and around the world honoring USA and this event made we know once again how good the world can be and out of this tragedy WE ARE ALL HOLDING HANDS IN UNITY.  September 11, 2001 was the day WE BECAME ONE!  Let us never, never return to yesterday because what we have become is THE GREATEST!

I BEG, PLEASE, LETS NOT LOSE THIS INSIGHT GOD HAS GIVEN US TO REMAIN THE GOOD, DECENT PEOPLE HE MEANT FOR THE WORLD TO BE.

AMERICA, I LOVE U. WE ARE STRONG, POWERFUL AND WHEN "SHIT IS THROWN AT US, WE KNOW HOW TO MAKE A BOND THAT'S INVINCIBLE.  THAT'S WHAT WE ARE!!!!!

GOD BLESS US AND KEEP US SAFE.  AMEN</text>
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