I was in the military at the time, had only been on base for about 7 months.

We were all getting ready for the morning run when the news came in- the run was cancelled of course, and they proceeded to assign people to door guard shifts, because you never know if one of the people you work with will automatically turn into a terrorist.

My natural reaction was that we were all going to get deployed- a lot of us did, but the comm. folks got set up over in Qatar, not anywhere close to where the action was. They threw me over to Cuba for a couple months, then Qatar a year later. Fun fun.

I was with my nan. I said they are attacking Americaworld she said would you like another cup of tea.

She had lived through the blitz and this was like water off a ducks back to her callous old hag that she is

Now weve got avian bird flu coming to wipe us out.

and it will be like snot off a ducks beak

My co-worker came into my office, gesticulating and near-shouting, "Can you believe this?" She always did this, though - we were political outrage buddies. I thought it was a horrible accident and didn't start scanning news websites because I had a big project. Then, Political Outrage Buddy came back in and told me two more planes had hit (the second tower and the Pentagon).

I felt sick - just horrified and nauseated. When the towers fell, I viscerally felt my sense of hope for the lives of those affected vanish. Unknowingly, I started making strange noises. Eventually, extreme agitation set in, as well.

Andrea Doria wrote:I was at first scared of what they were gonna hit next, then I immediately forgot about it. About anhour later when I saw my friend and he said something to the effect of "this is a dark day" I asked why.
Later on I felt sad, of course. But not for a while....

My reaction to what I saw on t.v. was somewhat similar. Being on the west coast I was just getting ready for work and remember thinking 'holy crap, this is just crazy', but not thinking much of it after that. I listened to radio broadcasts and watched more t.v. throughout the day, yet the magnitude of it all didn't really hit me for a couple of weeks. 'This is cool' never became of any neurons in my head.

the midge wrote:
however, the day before katrina hit n.o., i told some people that i had felt disappointed in past 'killer' hurricanes that lost strength before making landfall. i didn't want to feel that way, and i was sort of ashamed of feeling that way, but that's how i had felt. i don't think i'll feel disappointed in them again.

I did feel something similar a couple years back when we had a huge fire in the mountains surrounding our city. http://www.city.kelowna.bc.ca/CM/Page129.aspx The fire had started naturally via lightning strick and within days went from a fire in the distance to covering the spot you watched from. There were a couple times that when I heard the wind had changed for the better feeling slightly disappointed. Slight disappointment turned to panic when I was evacuated from my own home, however. A guy I know actually said he was disappointed that his house didn't burn down. A little extreme in my perspective! Thankfully though, as large as the fire was, no one was killed.

On September 11th, 2001, I was one of the handful of Aussies watching the events unfold in real time. I rose at around 7pm (being on the graveyard shift) and prepared for another wonderful day of maintaining the large computers that were the conduit for the wonderful new technology of spam SMS. When I arrived at work at about 10:45pm, the two team members I had come to relieve were fixed around a large plasma screen with a picture of a smouldering building on it.

I did not even have the opportunity to ask them to clarify this image before the second plane hit its mark. The shreik emmitted by one of my co-workers was enough to start forming a few logical conclusions.

My next eight hours were spent in a constant, frenzied panic. Repeat phonecalls to busy signals signalled the lack of any support services from Pacific Bell, Sprint, MCI and AT&T. Next came the flood of calls automatically diverted to our tech support division from hundreds of customers all frantically pleading for me to do anything to get in contact with their loved ones. After a scant couple of hours, the sheer volume of the complaints numbed me stuporous and devoid of any memory of the towers' collapse.

Finishing work, and refusing my boss's request for overtime work, I took my long, blissful stroll home in the morning spring sunshine, glad to be homeward bound and groovin to some music on my MD - always the calmest, happiest time of my day.

At home, I ran to the kitchen and grabbed some grub, and flopped down on the couch, switching the TV on by habit. Instead of the usual innocuous smiling morning TV faces that breezed delicately through my consciousness, I was confronted by screaming faces, siren noise, endless reruns of the footage and the nascent speculation on culprits and cause. The awful sterility of the slick news presentation juxtaposed against the grisly death and decay triggered a violent nausea that effectively killed both my appetite and my desire to stay awake. I killed the cathode ray and passed out.

I was awoke on the couch 6 or so hours later, by my housemate turning the dreaded telly back on. The news broadcast continued to churn out a mess of misinformation and pat theories, only to be broken shortly by President Bush's emergency speech. I was intrigued enough this to continue viewing. Though the exact content of the speech eludes me, from memory, this speech contained the genesis of the 'war on terror'.

Then cynicism decided to take the reins. It occurred to me very quickly that the attacks on the twin towers were very explotable, politically speaking. It struck me first in the 'terror' speech, when Bush declared his intention to call to account 'any country which harbours or promotes terrorism," that any nation which presented a different ideological viewpoint to that of the US was immediately consigned to the group of rogue states. It subsequently occurred to me that thousands more were going to be killed in the near future through retalliation.

I'm remember muttering something like "Fuck all that" very quietly as tears welled. I lifted my head to notice my housemate crying 'nononono' repetitvely and sobbing deeply - as a young girl who emigrated from war torn Croatia she had seen war first hand. She seemed fairly convinced that war did not fix things. I have to say I agreed then as I do now.

Bad Epilogue
Said housemate and I ended up becoming very very friendly that afternoon. It was the only time I have ever been involved in 'cheating' on someone, and unwittingly. Needless to say, the friendship did not survive and she started hiding half-eaten chocolate pudding under her bed. Absolutely nothing good came from the WTC collapse.

emmanuelle cunt wrote: it took my a while to realize the tower has actually collapsed - i remember looking at the blue sky behind the dust in the place where the tower was standing seconds before and being totally puzzled.

I totally remember that feeling. There was all that dust and smoke, so it took me--I don't know--probably several seconds for my brain to really process what my eyes were seeing.

initially, i was really stoic. i felt like whatever had just happened, we weren't gonna hear the full story for a quite a while. and even then, it'd be filtered through the news media and their warped agenda. there was too much speculation. a lot of assheads on tv spinning the whole catastrophe this way and that. so i decided not to get too excited. didn't watch tv till a couple days later.

I definitely didn't think 'This is kinda cool'.

But I did think 'The USA totally had this coming at some point'.

I found the whole thing very hard to process. Even now, I don't think I can imagine what the people who died that day, and had plenty of time to think about how they were going to die, were going through. The way they kept showing the footage of the collapse, and the masses of people fleeing Manhattan, made it seem like some really fucked up movie.
Once it became clear that it was a coordinated attack, I thought to myself that we had absolutely the worst motherfucker in charge that we could have possibly had in charge at a time like that.
Time has proven me entirely correct in that belief.

People are going to hate me, but I have to cop to thinking it was kinda cool.

I mean, in the news you hear about people in all kinds of fucked-countries getting killed by the tens of thousands in all sorts of catastrophes and civil wars all the time, and the only people who usually give a fuck are a couple of activists.

Since New York is a couple states over from where I'm from, it's practically another country to me. I mean I've been there all of one time, it was just a tourist trip that was pretty much the same as going to Paris or any old world-class city.

So it's not like I'm going to greive over people getting killed just because they're from the same country as I am, even more than I would for the MANY more people who got offed in much more horrible circumstances in other countries. Rwanda comes to mind.

At any rate I also immediately thought that it was the US had it coming, as many of you have mentioned above. I mean, you can't just blatantly support a quasi-facist state like Israel with money, hi-tech weapons, and diplomatic pressure and expect that those who are getting squeezed by Israeli policy aren't going to hate you and dream of doing shit like that.

To wrap this up, I no longer think it's kind of cool, because it has obviously ushered in a new era of McCarthy-like hot Cold War style politics, and allowed the Bush administration to reach new levels of shamelessness.

Also, having spent the summer of 2001 in Europe (before 9.11, that is), and going there again in winter of 2002, I personally witnessed the treatment of US citizens abroad go from 'not that bad' to 'your people are freaks' in about 6 months.

Now, years later, it is impossible to escape being asked the same boring questions by virtually everbody you meet in Europe. "What do you think about Bush, Iraq, 9/11....." The level of propaganda purporting to reveal the idiocy of the "average American" (whoever that is) has also predictably gone through the roof.

For what it's worth, it's pretty clear that these statistical studies that turn out results like "87% of Americans can't find Iraq/France/Russia/wherever on a map" target the lowest-common-denominator public schools in either mad redneck or pitifully depressing and underfunded inner city areas and are thus not that representative. Granted, Americans are usually not that up on geography, but geographic knowledge is hardly a criterion for IQ evaluation.

So, on the grounds that it caused a chain reacting leading to further tragedies and the biggest embarrassment possible for the US (can you imagine what the history books in 20 years or so will say? When I grew up, Vietnam was the only really big fiasco we had to live with), I no longer look at it as having been kinda cool.