A lot of our magazine this semester is about the relationship between America and Islam. People's feelings are very strong, and a lot of their ideas and opinions go back to the events of September 11, 2001.
We thought it would be appropriate for people who remember the events of that day to share their experiences, and invited CSI students to do so. These are their stories. . .
I woke up at 11:15 PM to the constant sounds of my phone ringing. I got up and answered with my grandmother in complete panic mode yelling at me asking, "Are you alright?!" I replied with, "I think every thing's ok."
I went back to sleep and then was awaken by my dad saying, "We are under attack!"
I worked at a coffee shop. People kept coming in. They wanted to use the phone. I gave away everything for free that day, and let them make phone calls to whoever or wherever they needed.
One man, I'll never forget his face. He was tall, in a blue suit covered in ash. He wore glasses and a short beard, and he looked like his mind was gone. I made him some coffee. He took it in his hand, but I don't think he even noticed it, to be honest. I asked if he was ok, even though I knew he wasn't.
"They jumped," he said quietly.
I was really young. All I remember was watching them play it on TV over and over again. I don't think I understood it very much at the time, it looked like a rocket ship in reverse.
I was in sixth grade. All of the kids were ushered into the gym, and told to sit down on the floor. I watched a lot of kids' parents come in and take them home. I was one of the few kids not taken out of school early that day. I was very annoyed because of that. When I got home, someone told me that two airplanes were flown into the towers. For some reason, I automatically assumed that Japanese people taking revenge for World War II had crashed the planes. I wasn't a very smart child.
I was hanging out with Muslims on 9/11. A girl I was seeing was French-African, and had other friends from Algeria and Morocco who were Muslim. I was on my way to her apartment when the bus PA system announced that the second tunnel from New Jersey to Manhattan had been closed. I asked my bus driver what was it that had just ruined someone's commute? His exact words were "some nut just flew a plane into the World Trade Center." I get really annoyed when people generalize and say things like "Muslims were dancing on 9/11." The people I was with were scared and vulnerable.
I was a freshman in Curtis High School on September 11th, 2001. I remember sitting in my third period French Class when the principal got on the PA system and told everyone to calm down about 'a plane hitting the World Trade Center.' When I heard that a plane had hit the WTC, I will admit at first I didn't think it was a big deal; awful that it had happened, since I had imagined that it was a small plane that had hit the buildings. As third period came to a close, the true horror of what happened that day was soon apparent. I spent the whole day in school watching people be pulled out and going home. At one point, toward the end of the day, I remember the few of us still in school ended up listening to the radio about what was going on. It was the scariest moment in my life hearing that an airliner had hit the Pentagon. No one knew who had done it or what was really going on.
As I left school that day, the smoke from the fallen towers was looming over the city as an evil streak across a brilliant blue sky. I waited for the 62 a few blocks away from the ferry. When I got on the bus, there were people wearing breath masks -- everyone was wearing them after the collapse of the Towers -- with looks of shock on their faces; just blank and empty as their minds tried to comprehend the horror of that day.
That day will forever be scarred into my brain.
My memories of 9/11 are sitting in my fifth grade English class. The priest of the school's church (Catholic school) walked in and told all that "something" had happened in the city. He asked if any of us had family that worked there, and if we did to walk downstairs and attempt to make phone calls to contact them. After being released from school early, I remember going home and watching people jump from the windows of the World Trade Center to escape the fires. Then the towers collapsed, and I knew from right then and that America was changed forever.
I was in fourth grade at P.S. 23. It was during English class, so we were doing writing exercises. I wished something would happen so I could go home.
I remember that a frantic teacher came in to the classroom and whispered something to my teacher. My teacher became frantic, and then the students became frantic. As time went on, students were being taken out of the classroom until I was the last kid left in the class. I asked the teacher what happened, and she told me to be quiet and read a book.
My dad picked me up, and I asked him what was going on. He told me the Twin Towers went down. At the time I didn't know what they were, so I kept quiet. Later I found out that my dad had missed his train and had to take a later ferry. If he had been on time, he would have been a block away when the towers fell.
My parents kept me home from school for a week or two.
It was a shocking day, not only for the nation but for an impressionable 10 year old. I remember being home sick from school. My mother called in a panic, telling my cousin and I to stay in the house. After watching the news, and seeing the second plane go into the building, my cousin and I immediately ran for the pier down the street in Brooklyn.
The sounds of people screaming and crying underneath the sirens were bone-chilling. The silence that followed when the first building collapsed was nerve wrenching. After the shock passed; mothers, wives, husbands and friends frantically called loved ones but failed due to network failure of cell-phones. My mother, who worked twenty minutes away at Kennedy airport, got home nine hours later. It was truly a gruesome day to remember; all the faces and tears coming from those who lost someone. I will never forget that tragic day where so much pain was caused.
It was my second full day of class, freshman year, at Stuyvesant High School, three blocks down West Street from the World Trade Center. I normally took the E train every morning to the World Trade Center station, walked through the tunnel to the Chambers Street exit, and walked down Chambers to get to school. However, that morning, I saw a friend I knew from middle school. She told me it was easier to exit through the World Trade Center exit and walk to school, so we did, and got lost along the way. This was a little before eight in the morning.
First period was gym. In the middle of class I felt the building shake, but paid it no heed. Next period was English. Around the end of that period, an Assistant Principal came on the loudspeaker and said, "As you may know, a small plane has hit the World Trade Center." At first, I didn't know what to make of this.
Third period was Mandarin. By that time, nobody was actually teaching. Instead, we were all glued to the news on the televisions in our classrooms. A classroom across the hall faced the World Trade Center, but we couldn't see the damage due to all the dust in the air. Near the end of the period, the same Assistant Principal came over the PA telling us that following the end of the period, we were to report to indefinite homeroom.
In homeroom, it was more of the same; people glued to the TV, trying to contact family on cell phones, etc. I remember wondering who would do such a thing? I feared that there was going to be another war soon, and my cousins were going to get drafted or something like that.
We were sitting there in the indefinite homeroom for what seemed like forever. All of a sudden, the TV lost reception. Our homeroom also faced towards the World Trade Center. It got really dark all of a sudden, the thick dust picked up in intensity. We all panicked! We didn't know what the hell was going on. The same Assistant Principal came back on the PA and announced that they were evacuating the school, and that we should proceed in a calm and orderly manner.
We were instructed to evacuate via the exits facing the West Side Highway. As my class was walking towards those exits I saw a fireman, covered head to toe in dust stumble into the school from an entrance facing the World Trade Center, hacking up dust. Other firemen frantically passed him bottles of water to rinse out his mouth. His dust-covered body was the last thing I saw before I left the building.
Once I actually left the building, we were told to walk north. I had no idea where to go. I figured that the subways weren't running, and there was no way I could get home to Queens. Luckily, I ran into my cousin -- who also went to Stuy -- and stuck with him as we walked to a dry cleaners' shop in Greenwich Village that was owned by a friend of his family. There, I was finally able to call my family and tell them I was okay. I stayed there until the subways started running again around 5:00 PM.