Ask HN: What’s your 9/11 story?

My wife and I were living in Brussels, Belgium. She was General Counsel of Euroclear, the company that exclusively handles all back-end clearing and settlement of trades on the Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris Bourses, as well as the London Stock Exchange, and the majority of all back-end clearing and settlement throughout Europe.

I was between employers at that stage, and for some reason I had turned on the TV and was looking for English language channels. I stumbled across CNN, and decided to stay there for a while. After a little bit, they started coverage of the first tower being hit, so I called my wife to see if she had heard, and wondered if they had any customers there. Turns out they had a lot of customers in the towers, so she had me put the handset up next to the TV, and she turned on the speakerphone in her office. Everyone in her office gathered around.

Not too long afterwards, another plane hit the second tower. I watched it go through.

I think that may have been when the operations team went into emergency mode, and they had a TV in that room. I think she spent the rest of the day down there, although I don’t think she spent much time looking at that screen. Her attention was required elsewhere.

Later, when Prince Charles was touring the US, and specifically NYC, he talked to some of the people in the British companies that had offices in the towers, and some of those people spoke about how critical the support was that they got from Euroclear, and that this support saved their company.

I like to think that she played some part in the success of Euroclear in weathering that storm, and that I may have played some part in helping her.

Freshman year of high school, middle of the country. I was walking to English class in passing period and people going in the opposite direction were chattering with excitement about something. I saw a friend and he said, did you hear? They blew up the World Trade Center. He was smiling not with happiness but with like crazy excitement.

Then I got to English class where they had a TV set up watching the news coverage and a few other teachers came in with their classes to share the TV. One of them said, there it goes, the whole world’s finance is in that building.

The horror of it all didn’t really kick in. Not it sure if that was due to being 14, or due to experiencing it all through TV, or just being kind of a bastard at the time. I feel a lot more sensitive to loss and human life now that I’m older, some of the old footage I’ve seen this week has affected me a lot.

Nobody knew anything about it until I got to social studies class where my teacher told us that bin Laden has claimed responsibility but having never heard the name before I thought he was saying “Ben Laden” due to his midwestern pronunciation of the vowel sound, so I was picturing perhaps an Englishman.

In science class I remember half of us were trying to convince the teacher that there was no way we could come to school tomorrow. Totally disingenuously.

The news reports all suggested nothing would be the same but as a kid from the suburbs far from NYC, everything seemed the same but we had the national anthem going off more often and people started to argue about the wars a couple years later. Only after many years could I see in hindsight how different our path has been from others we all might have taken.

I was in my 3rd year of college, I woke up early for some reason and was watching CNN while eating some breakfast. I was watching when they went to the building after the first plane hit and everyone was scrambling to figure out what was going on. I can still remembering watching live as the 2nd plane came into the camera shot and slammed into it live. It was surreal. At the time I was taking Arabic and Middle Eastern studies classes. I remembering just being stunned. I was glued to the TV the rest of the day watching. I felt the same thing Jan 6th 2021, I sat there watching the capital videos with my mouth open along with my wife. I was watching the proceedings randomly and watched as the Senate started freaking out and calling for everyone to get out of the room. Those two events just left me stunned and trying to grapple with the new world we just entered.

If you want to imagine what it was like on 9/11 on CNN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iwlFFM3DDQ

Go to 13:25 to see the 2nd plane hit it live.

I was in elementary school at the time 11 miles away, just across the river, in NJ. They really didn't want us to see the news so they took all of us into the main auditorium and had us just sit. A few of the parents of the other children worked in the city. They made it an early release day.

One of my parents worked close by and my cousin lived close too. Her house had a clear line of sight to the towers with some binoculars. I remember seeing little black dots fall out of buildings and I remember wondering if they were chairs. I am older now and understand it was people. I missed the collapse of the first tower but saw the second fall through the binoculars.

A lot of my classmates didn't show up for a few days. I didn't understand the gravity of what had happened until was quite a bit older.

I remember ABC news was playing all day and associate the voice of Peter Jennings to that day.

I plan on watching the Nat Geo documentary, One Day in America. Last year I tried the 110 flight stair climb challenge, the same total as the towers, and gained a different level of appreciation for what the responders and volunteers faced that day.

I was at home recovering from minor surgery on my back. I was flipping through the TV channels and not really paying much attention, I remember seeing it on the news and thinking it was a new movie trailer or something. When I realised what was actually happening I knew I was going to war, I'd only been in the army a year.

I was in 4th grade outside of Chicago and immediately when we got to school our teacher sat us down and told us that a plane had flown into a building in NYC. I didn't know what the world trade center was and they didn't send us home so i didn't think it was a big deal. I thought this just occurred every so often as i had not too long before seen a news story of a little biplane plane crashing into a hospital somewhere in Illinois. 9/11 is also my dad's birthday and my parents didn't talk about the events and instead wanted to talk about the birthday. I didn't realize how big it was until days later when every tv station was wall to wall coverage 24 hours and they held a vigil a block from my house.

I was on my way to work just north of the Chicago loop, when I met a few guys on the subway from a financial firm who said they were told to leave work and go home because an airplane hit one of the twin towers in New York City.

Airplanes had hit buildings before, as sometimes pilots do stupid things, it wasn't unheard of for a Cessna to have an ooops into a sky scraper.

So, it was confusing, but I wasn't really worried.

When I got to work everyone was in the lunch room watching the TV, and we saw the rest of it in real time. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to get back home to Indiana, we weren't sure how many other planes were hijacked, nothing

I was in middle school, about 90 miles north of NYC, in a school district where a lot of parents commuted to the city for work. It was a cloudless morning, near the start of the school year — I was in 7th grade, and my dad had commuted into the city as usual.

Sometime during the day we became aware that something was going on, but the faculty kept us in the dark. A lot of my classmates also had parents who worked in the city, and I think the administration was wary of upsetting anyone before we were sure if anyone was directly impacted. Regardless, some news trickled in, but most of it was wrong. I remember one classmate saying she'd heard that the Pentagon had been bombed. I found that so upsetting.

Near the end of the day, my social studies teacher told us everything she knew. As she said: "my job is to teach history, and this is history." Most of what she knew was wrong — information was very fluid that day and the news didn't know what to report — but I appreciate what she did.

My dad got home late that night. He'd been in his Midtown office when the second plane hit, watching from a colleague's corner office. They evacuated the whole building, and he started running for Central Park — nobody was sure what was happening, and he wanted to be in a wide-open space in case the city was being bombed. He said cabbies were parked along the streets with their doors open and their radios turned up, so people on the street could hear the news as they ran.

He made it to Grand Central to catch one of the last trains out of New York, but they were evacuated twice due to bomb threats from opportunistic copycats. He considered walking uptown to stay with relatives who lived in the city, but finally they let him on the train. He caught the last train out of Manhattan. He remembers vividly sitting on the train silently along with the other commuters. There was a woman on his car who was covered in ash and smoke, and she burst into tears as the train passed out of Manhattan.

For days, surfaces throughout the city were covered with home-printed posters of missing relatives. Miraculously, nobody's parents from my school district were killed that day. My dad started taking steps to work closer-to-home and out of New York City soon after.

I was home (west coast) from my first year of college, taking a break to go serve a mission for my church. I didn’t have a job, had slept in and my sister knocked on my door and said “Wake up! Someone’s bombed the World Trade Center”

I had a TV in my room, and turned it on to follow what was going on. I do remember being horrified seeing people leap from the building. It took a while to understand what was going on. The rest of the day is a blur, until going to an impromptu church meeting to try and process the events of the day.

I was in college. I told a professor I would put a sign on their 8am classes door that class was canceled. It was Greek studies.

So I made a goofy picture of Honer Simpson with a donut for a head eating himself saying “Mmm I’m delicious”. Underneath it said “Professor so-and-sos 8 am Greek studies class on Sept 11 is cancelled”.

I woke up early, walked across campus, put the sign up, came back and went back to bed.

I woke back up between 10-11, turns on the TV and they were focused on the first plane then the second plane… And of course we know the rest :(

I was in my fourth year of a five year undergrad/grad program at BITS Pilani, India. It was late in the evening as someone in the rec room caught a whiff off it while channel surfing. The TV played BBC World broadcast non-stop for the next 36 hours, and the whole dorm was glued to it.

I was in college. I was walking through the lobby of my dorm building and someone pointed at the tv and said “you have to watch this.” All classes were canceled for the day, and I remember that the sky was completely free of contrails as all air travel was suspended.

Watched reporting all day. In late afternoon, watched reporting of WTC 7 and recall something not right about that, but put it aside. Took several years for me to revisit the official tower 7 narrative.

I (from Europe) was traveling in Indonesia, read about it, but it all seemed very far away until in the weeks after that I saw more and more people in Bin Laden T-shirts looking angry at me.