Where I was

I was on Adams street, heading West just past Cotner Boulevard. I was on my way to my 8:30am Japanese 101 class when the DJ on KFRX announced that an airplane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. At the time, he said it was thought to be an accident and it was unclear as to what size of aircraft it was, and he and the co-host speculated about whether it was a small single-engine plane or something larger. The tone of the report made it sound like it was just another accident.

By the time I was on my way to my 9:30 class, Econ 365, the second plane had crashed as well. The professor had the CNN coverage projected on the 20-something foot wide screen in the front of the classroom, CBA 143. The professor, Dr. Donna Dudney, turned it off after about 10 minutes and told everyone that class was canceled. I made my way from the CBA over to the Lambda Chi house as quickly as possible, where I found a spot in the TV room with 15-20 other guys. Just a few minutes after I sat down the first tower fell. Nobody said anything for several seconds, before Joel Webber summed up everything we were all thinking by whispering, almost inaudibly, "Holy shit."

Somewhere along the way video started coming in from the Pentagon, with a map of Pennsylvania and reports of another missing plane interspersed regularly. In the half-hour between the collapse of the first and second towers, I remember feeling as if these events on the screen were about 3 million miles away, but also that I was deeply and personally offended and impacted by them. The attitude in the room oscillated between foggy disbelief and acute outrage. An almost palpable blood lust filled the room as words like "al Qaeda" and "bin Laden" were introduced into vocabularies that were otherwise devoid of Arabic-sounding words. Somebody in the house found an American flag, which had probably served as a curtain in some Freshman's room, and hung it from the outside of the house with several strips of duct tape. With the images of the second impact replaying over and over, I headed back home to grab some lunch before work.

I don't remember much about how work went that afternoon. I think I alternated between Yahoo news and the small TV mounted in the conference room that could barely pick up channel 10 if you turned the antennae just right. By then the coverage had been reduced to the same 20 minutes of content being rehashed again and again.

Amanda and I had just started "officially" dating two nights before, and she called me from Hannibal, MO, to make sure that I wasn't somehow secretly involved in the military or FBI or something. I remember thinking that was a really cute question, and I wondered if it was just an excuse for her to call me.

That was six years ago. In some ways it seems like it couldn't possibly have been that long, while at the same time it seems like it's been hundreds of years since Osama and Co. slaughtered thousands of Americans in cold blood. Like the Kennedy assassination, which was before my time, I expect that this event will be the "Where were you…" of my generation.

So, where were you? How do you remember it? What vivid details stick out in your mind? Feel free to leave a comment below.