September 11 Digital Archive

story30.xml

Title

story30.xml

Source

born-digital

Media Type

story

Created by Author

yes

Described by Author

no

Date Entered

2002-02-02

911DA Story: Story

i had a 9:00 class that morning, so i didn't find out until just after 10:00. so i'm walking out of krug hall, where my class was (ironically enough, the class was called "social movements and community activism"), and i'm talking to a guy in my class about our group project that's coming up. he gets a call on his cell phone and i hear, "WHAT?!? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?"
"two planes just flew into the world trade center and one blew up the pentagon," he says to me with eyes like dinner plates after finishing up on his cell phone.
we ran into the guy who had called him and told him in the main student center as we were walking and, as we were walking down to the t.v. lounge downstairs to see it on the news, the guy who'd called and told him said that he had been listening to the radio station DC101, which is in downtown D.C.
"the d.j. was talking normally and all of a sudden he yells, 'holy! -...' and there's this long pause and then he comes back on the mic and says, 'oh my god, folks, the ground just shook underneath us and there's black smoke billowing out of the pentagon!' this is crazy as hell, man...never in a million years..."
"nah man, you know what?" i said. "this may be crazy as hell, but i'm not surprised. america has made a policy of pissing off any and all countries that it possibly can, even when they go in on (insert corny "bunny ears-like" finger quotation marks here) humanitarian missions. it seems to me that it was just a matter of time before some shit like this went down."
angry/confused glares from the other two guys is the only response i got, so i decided to go back to my room. every door on the hall was open and every t.v. was on, with faces glued to it and mouths gaping open for want of something to say, other than, "hooooooly shit, dude. ho-ly shit."
"man, i have a class in a few minutes," my roommate said when he noticed that we'd been watching the news in almost complete silence for more than two and a half hours. "i guess i should go and just see if they're still having it."
"dude, we could probably see the pentagon on a clear day from here. this area is gonna be, like, crippled for a at least a while. look at that shit," i said as i stood up and pointed at the giant hole in the side of the pentagon. "i seriously doubt anyone is actually expected to come to class after this. and even so, you have a good excuse for not going...but it's up to you."
later on that evening at dinner, we watched t.v. to see if there were any more updates, of which there were few...mostly just more gruesome, inappropriate angles on the people who had to jump from the top floors of the world trade center.
i quickly lost my appetite, but mostly because of the immediate outburst of hatred and racism that i heard all around me.
"i bet it was those fuckin' sand niggers! god DAMMIT! why can't we just nuke the whole fuckin' middle east and put 'em out of their misery?!?"
"yeah, man. i hear that shit. those mother fuckers are always stirrin' up some kinda trouble. we could just nuke all of 'em and take care of all of this kinda shit!"
i turned and gave them my best "you are ignorant and i hope you shoot your feet off in a drunken hunting accident" glare, and then i turned back around, scoffed, and shook my head.
"do those guys really not understand that there was a reason for this? this didn't just come out of the god damn blue. watch...whoever did this is gonna come out with some kind of a manifesto or something saying how the u.s. government killed their family and bombed their village, even though they used to support us or some shit like that."
the only response, once again, was "you terrorist motherfucker, it's your fault" glares...but this time, they came from my friends.
i laid awake the night of september 11th and thought for a long time before i fell asleep.

Citation

“story30.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed January 16, 2025, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/7569.