I found out about 9/11 from the radio. My alarm was tuned to NPR when Bob Edwards informed listeners that “a twin-engine plane” had just hit the World Trade Center. Assuming it was a tragically off-course Cessna, I didn’t think much of it until a few minutes later, when Bob–this time, with a somewhat quizzical tone to his voice–told us that “another twin-engine plane” had followed suit.
Then I turned on the TV and learned things were far worse than I could have imagined–and then got still worse when American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. (No, I didn’t hear it from my condo in Arlington.) But I remained in enough denial that I thought I would just work from home until an editor got through to my home line and told me to head into the newsroom.
I biked to work, thinking Metro might close, and finally saw the crowds streaming out of the city on foot–so dense that I had to ride in traffic on the Key Bridge–and the enormous cloud of black smoke rising over the Pentagon. Then it was real.
The rest of the day was a blur of horrifying images on the TVs in the newsroom, failed phone calls and successful conversations over instant messaging with friends in New York that yielded tidbits for our stories, and my increasingly pointless attempts to work on a column about Windows XP.
The next day, I set aside the XP review, telling my editor “I can’t do this,” and instead pounded out an essay about how the Internet’s resilience made it an effective way to reach people on 9/11. I also learned from one of my better freelance contributors that he had lost his sister, a flight attendant on AA 11.
(After the jump, you can read the account I posted to a mailing list for tech journalists late that Tuesday night.)
3,519 days later, I found out about Osama bin Laden’s demise from social media.
I was in central Florida for the NASA Tweetup and was driving back from dinner in Orlando with a college friend. But as 11 p.m. neared, none of the radio stations, not even the NPR affiliate I was listening to, had broken into their programming with the news. I stopped by a restaurant where a few Tweetup attendees had gathered, saw it had closed and checked my phone to see if they’d moved on to somewhere else–and then finally saw Facebook and Twitter lighting up with mentions of the news I had been waiting to see since 2001.
I jumped back in my car and was incredulous not to hear a single station cut in with any announcement. I got back to my lodging, flipped open the laptop and turned on the TV and learned of the crowds already gathering in front of the White House and the World Trade Center site. (Sure, some of that celebration got over the top. We’ve been through a lot. Deal with it.) I wished I were back in D.C. and not alone in a rented house in Cape Canaveral.
Reading other people’s Twitter messages and Facebook comments helped, but it wasn’t the same as being present in my city. All I could do after watching President Obama’s address was stop by the nearest dive bar to toast bin Laden’s demise. That seemed like a bad idea when the first fellow I met there responded with vile idiocy about how Congress was a bigger threat to the nation. But then I got to break the news to a second customer who was glad to hear it, after which a third walked into the place with her hands in the air saying “he’s dead!” and high-fiving everyone. That was more the reaction I was hoping to see.
I agree with the Post’s Gene Robinson: It’s right to rejoice in the defeat of an enemy of not just our country, but of civilization itself. Wherever you may find yourself at the time.
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I sent this e-mail a few minutes before midnight on Sept. 11. As you can read, the shock was fresh:
I just had to turn off the TV. I can’t stand to watch the clips of the plane crashing into the building anymore–I keep hoping the jet will miss, but it never does.
Today has been beyond surreal. I biked into work and couldn’t take any sidewalks, because they were all filled with workers walking out of the city. Thousands of people striding out of Georgetown and across the Key Bridge into Virginia. I had a good view of the black cloud pouring out of the Pentagon. It looked just like on TV.
By noon, the city was vacant–except for the people lined up to buy our extra at 4 p.m. They kept on showing up through the afternoon and evening.
On the way home, I saw National Guard troops and Humvees at every other intersection in Georgetown. No planes in the sky. I think I noticed the lack of sound first, then realized that nothing was flying.
As far as I know, all of my friends and family here and in NYC are fine.
Now I’m supposed to work on a column reviewing Windows XP. Somehow I find it hard to give a shit about this at the moment.
Rob Pegoraro 
My friend was in cancer treatment and I was on hold with the insurance company. I turned on the Today show while waiting and saw it unfold. By the time a human came on the line we were both talking about it. I remember the sonic boom when the jets came in on “fast” to monitor the skies over DC. I went to the local hospital to give blood for Pentagon folks but…..the hospital never got the scads of injured they expected. Sad, sad, sad
Rob, at least you have a place to go back to where the fellow with the “vile idiocy about how Congress was a bigger threat to the nation” is not the norm. I live in south Texas, and I have to report that fellow IS the norm here.
Think about things rationally? Have a rational conversation about life? NO! Everything seems to be taken as polarized. And if it is not Republican or Tea Party-based, blinders go up and earplugs swing immediately into ears.
Here’s hoping that somewhere in our future is some sort of return to rational discourse about the problems facing us as a country…where people are encouraged to say their minds…and interruption, yelling, and vile comments are NOT the order of the day.
I can still wish you and the other readers this, though I’m surely NOT holding my breath for it to break out all over the planet:
Peace!
I was at work out Herndon way at a small DoD contractor. We got our updates from the web the first hour, then everyone went home. Except for one guy who was a volunteer firefighter. He said he spent the night at the Pentagon. Another co-worker’s wife had a college roommate working at Cantor-Fitzgerald. A friend was in the Old Guard and watched the Pentagon burning. Before 9/11 his job at Arlington was fairly easy and low key. Things picked up after that.
We were on a 10 day wilderness canoe trip in northern Ontario and we had no contact with the outside world until our outfitter’s float plane picked us up on 9/19. They said nothing. We went back to their base camp, took showers, had dinner and still they said nothing. We got in our car and started back to Thunder Bay, checked into our hotel and still nobody said anything. Finally, in the hotel room, I called my folks to check in. I asked how things were and I’ll never forget the reply: “Fine, except the world has gone to hell in a hand basket”. We just couldn’t wrap our minds around the story my Dad told us. We turned on the TV in time to see Bush’s Sept 20 address to Congress. We drove home past overpasses lined with American flags. We drove home to a changed world really. Now, when people talk about their memories of 9/11, I feel so disconnected.
Hubby was elk hunting in high country out west. They came off the mountain at dusk and tried to find the radio station w/country music. They kept hitting buttons then heard why the music wasn’t playing. They had noticed all the military jets flying in the late afternoon but didn’t know it was out of the ordinary until later in the evening.
I found out coming back from breakfast with my dad. He had flown in during the weekend to look at a house I was thinking of buying and was scheduled to fly back home around noon. I had taken the morning off, to have breakfast with him and drive him to the airport. We had just walked back from the restaurant. As I walked to the elevators I saw one of the people working in my condo glued to the tv in the party room. I thought his expression was so odd, that when we went up to my unit, I immediately turned on the tv. Just in time to see the second plane hit the tower. I called work and told them it was a passenger plane, not the small plane they had heard. They didn’t believe me. I said I watched it. I was looking at the rerun and it was definitely a huge plane. Even seeing the plane and the hole in the other tower, I was still in denial about the scope of the thing. My dad and I got into the car with his luggage to run an errand and the go to the airport. In the car, the rock station DJs, who were always cracking wise and making off-color jokes, said that the Pentagon had been hit. I was disgusted that they would make a joke about what happened in NYC. I turned the channel to NPR and that is when we headed back home. To this day, I still cannot believe I was going to continue to take my dad to the airport after seeing the planes in NYC.
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