story9418.xml

story9418.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-08-13

Even though my story might not be as tragic as actually being at the attacks, the events that happened on that day were very scary for me. For you see I lived in the city of Norfolk, Virginia: home of the biggest U.S. Naval Base, fear to be another potential target at that time.....
First let me talk about September 10, the day before the attacks. Everything was normal. I moved from Michigan to Virginia to attend Johnson and Wales University, a culinary school. It was a different time, a different world, we all seemed so innocent. The World Trade Center was there, the Pentagon was intact and the field in Pennsylvania was bare. It is funny because I don't really remember what I did on September 10, I do know that New York and Washington D.C. was the farthest thing from my mind. But the world as we knew it changed at 8:46 a.m on Septembr 11, 2001.
I got up at 6:00 a.m. because I missed school the day before and I wanted to get there extra early. I walked down to my friends room to see if he need a ride to school. We stepped out of our dorms into the warm summer morning. Everything was quiet, there was barely anybody on the streets. The morning radio barely had any news on it. But little did we know that in a few hours there would be nothing but news on. We arrived at school had lecture for about an hour and 45 minutes. Probably by the same moment we got done with lecture the first plane had crashed into the first building....
So we were dismissed for a 10 minute break and then we would go into production. It's funny because in the student union they have a television and I do not recall seeing anything about the attacks. I guess the news didn't hit airwaves yet. I think we were in production for about 15 - 20 minutes, I didn't see my chef instructor anywhere and I was wondering what he was doing. He walked in and announced the words I'll never forget "A plane just crashed into on of the towers at the World Trade Center". Personally I didn't really react as I should, first of all I thought he was talking about a one man plane and second of all weirder things have been known to go on in New York. My concern didn't raise until he revealed that it was indeed a commercial airline plane. But still I figured it gone off course or there was some reasonable explanation. So we half continued into production for a little while when my chef instructor walked into the kitchen again and said "the second tower just got hit". I was wondering what the heck was going on. Thoughts would come into my head. Who was there, what is your family doing, and other things. There was even one student who left school because both of his parents worked at the World Trade Center, I never knew who that student was nor did I hear anything else about the situation. By this time everybody was in a panic. Because news of the pentagon getting hit started floating in. That's when worry turned into fear. Like I stated before we were in the same city as the biggest Naval Base and by air we were only 15 minutes from D.C. So we continued to cook but I kept noticing some of the most important officials of our school gathering outside the kitchen. They were discussing something.
Finally my instructor came in and said "how fast can you clean up? There are rumors of another plane floating around and they think the base is one of the targets." We cleaned up and got on the road.
I turned on the radio as we got on the highway. There were miltary vehicles already on the roads. I remember because those were the first things that I saw. And that's when I heard, the first tower had collapsed. Me and my friend just looked at eachother.
To get to our dorms we have to pass one of the entrances to the base. There were military personal stopping vehicles asking where you were going and why? The whole city of Norfolk shutted down. The radio kept announcing places that were closing and that all military personal are to report to base. As we got to the dorms there was campus police around. We were not allowed to leave the building. I went up to my room and called my family and then I went out to the lobby and that's when I heard that the second tower had collapsed. A few hours later the crash in the Pennsylvania field was reported.
Like I said my story isn't the most tragic one but seeing those buildings going down and knowing that anything could have been the next target was enough to leave an imprint in my life and memory. Thank you for hearing my story.