story10990.xml

story10990.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2004-09-12

It?s strange what I do and don?t remember about September 11. I had been living on Kadena AFB, Okinawa, Japan for about a year. Okinawa gets typhoons about as often as Florida gets hurricanes, and on September 10 typhoon Bart hit the island. It wasn?t any ordinary typhoon, it was a super typhoon. The whole base had been locked down for all of the 10 and the 11. Because of the lockdown, school was cancelled. I was in 8th grade. I slept in that Tuesday morning, and don?t really remember what I did all day. I was watching TV about 8:30, maybe 9 o?clock that night and my dad came in my room to watch with me. He took the remote and started flipping through the channels. We watched a few minutes of one of the Star Trek movies, and then he continued to flip. Because we lived in Japan, with the exception of live news channels like CNN, all the American television programming is delayed by 2 weeks, because it is shipped from the US. My dad flipped past CNN but then flipped back. There was a building that was smoking from the top, and he said something about the World Trade Center. We sat and watched for about five minutes, trying to hear what the reporter was saying had caused the fire that was obviously in the building. As my dad and I watched, we saw a plane flying directly towards the camera. We sat and watched as the second plane hit the second tower. My dad?s jaw dropped, and he nearly fell off the bed. He called my mother into the room and told her what had happened. He ran to his room and told the base commander to turn CNN on, that New York was under attack. He called a few other people and then came back to my room to watch for a few more minutes. I was then told not to worry about it and to go get my shower. I took as quick a shower as I could.
When I got out, my mother told me that the Pentagon had been hit as well. My dad had been working there just a year before. We still knew people that worked there. He works there now. My whole family lives right in Springfield, so close to Washington. I stayed glued at my TV and watched as both of the towers collapsed. They replayed the hit and collapse at least five times each in the span of an hour. At about 10:30 I was told to go to bed. After about ten minutes of sitting in the dark, I turned my TV back on with the volume up just enough for me to hear it if my head was two feet away from it. I don?t know how long I watched, barely able to hear it, but my mother came in and told me to go to bed. She would tell me if anything else happened when I woke up. I don?t remember if I had school the next day. What I do remember is that the American TV was delayed by two weeks.
As we watched all the events unfold on CNN and a few other news networks that we got live, we saw delayed programming on all the other channels. So two weeks later, it was as if everything was happening again. You couldn?t turn on Fox or MTV without seeing the same reports, with the shocked reporters from two weeks before. Everything we already knew had happened was happening on TV as if it was just happening that day. It was horrible. It was as if we were living the previous two weeks again.
My father was working around the clock for days. The whole base was locked down, even after Super Typhoon Bart left. There was great tension in the air, because we were on an Air Force base. Even more because we were the biggest base in the Pacific. Thankfully, none of my family was injured or killed, even those that I knew who worked in the Pentagon.