West Coast, Washington State. My oldest child had just been born. It was a while after I had returned to work from paternity leave. My wife was still on maternity leave. The deal was I would stay up and care for him at night and she would get get up early. It turned out to be a bad deal for me but that's another story.

She got up around 5am because she couldn't sleep and to feed him but she turned on the TV instead. Just a few minutes in the news interrupted with news of the first plane. She might have been watching the news to begin with. She immediately wakes me up. I remember them being confused and telling a story about a propeller plane that hit a tower before. She asks, "What does this mean?" As I sit there pretty groggy, I say that I don't know but the world will never be the same again. Right around that time the second one hit. It was terrifying. I don't know what channel it was but we (the newsman and I) sat and tried to come to grips with the reality of what was going on. Lots of denial and confusion. Talked about the FAA closing all flights down and the Pentagon and rumors of other planes. The first tower collapse and how it was difficult to see but I knew right away what was going on. The news guy couldn't bring himself to believe it. I yelled at the screen and then just stared. I stared a long time and then the other tower collapsed. I was late to work but I went in. I felt like I had to know what other people were doing. It was a terrible, scary and uncertain time.

I was working in my father's pharmacy. Couldn't believe my eyes. It still saddens me whenever I come across a footage of that incident. And some people here have the nerve to say "only two buildings were knocked down, and a tiny fraction of a percent of our population were killed". Un-fucking-believable!

I was driving my son to school and I turned on the car radio and they were talking about a plane that had crashed into the World Trade Center. So I called my wife on my cell and told her to turn on the TV and see what’s going on. She suddenly screamed ‘oh my god’ as the second plane hit.

At work Bluewater nursery we had radio on in our rm children were asleep so we could follow the dreadful advents

First part of the day I was at work. Two hours later I was renting a seventeen passenger van and driving up to New York City. Went to work at ground Zero at 7 the next morning. Left New york on June 27th of 2002. I was working for FEMA as a Mass Fatality Specialist.

I was a 19 year old sophomore in college. I had to give a speech in my public speaking class at 9:30 CST that morning. I was practicing and didn't have on the news. As I walked to class, I noticed there was no one out, and then my roommate walked by me. She told me that the Pentagon had been attacked, but didn't mention the WTC. I didn't hear about NY until I got to class. The person behind me said something, and I turned around like "what?!?" I didn't give my speech that day.

It wasn't until the tenth anniversary that I started to heal. I always felt weird about it, somehow incomplete. I watched every special, saw every documentary, but something felt off. I was reading an article about the anniversary, and it included tons of pictures from around the country on the day. There was a photograph of a group of college kids in Utah standing together and looking up at a TV in their student center. Something released in my chest when I saw it. I finally saw something that reflected my memories of the day. I was able to process that I wasn't alone that day. Many of us had that same experience at campuses all across the country.

It changed the course of our lives. It was the end of our childhoods, the end of our innocence. Our experience was unique and overlooked, but we had it together.

In a cave making videos

At the community college taking a class. That was an odd day indeed.

I was at work as a government contractor with Lockheed Martin. We stopped our work and simply watched TV in the conference room until we were sent home. Saw the towers collapse in real time as if a product of a demolition team downing a building. Twice? Despite plane hits were in different floors, their collapse behaved exactly the same... ???? It was never in the terrorist mind to collapse the buildings... much less two? They tried in the 90's with a van full of explosives in the basement parking of one of the buildings and failed!!! We will never know. And then again, I recalled a laboral terrorism act were at least 43 people were killed, 100 injured with a $2.30 sterno can set on fire on a spare chairs storage room in the Dupont Plaza, former Puerto Rico Sheraton hotel/casino New Year Eve 1986. Granted, played a lot in the tragedy that the Main Casino Emergency Exit door was Chained down!!! So sometimes the terrorists strike gold even when just looking for pebbles since no help was expected!!!! I will Never Forget!

In the hospital getting my appendix removed