9/11 Memory, 2001, by Anonymous

From MemoryArchive

Who: Young Iowa Man
What: 9/11
When: September 11, 2001
Where: Iowa

On the drive to my high school on September 11, 2001, I was listening to the radio and heard the news and didn't quite know what to make of it. One plane crashes into the World Trade Center. Okay. Wow. That's too bad. I wonder how that happened.

I carried on with my Tuesday.

When I got to school and discovered that a second plane had hit and that a terrorist attack was to blame, I was blown away. We watched the coverage all day in our classes and at one point, despite my being safely on the ground in a relatively remote location of the country and with the FAA grounding all flights, I felt truly scared for about three seconds.

"What if," I thought "another plane like Flight 93 (the one that crashed in Pennsylvania) was to come crashing down onto my small town?" I felt, as I suspect many people did, overwhelmed.

The right side of my brain quickly took over, however. It told me the chances of something happening where I was were minimal or almost impossible at this point. My fear went away.

As I watched ABC News's coverage, part of me knew that what was going on was serious. But I thought "if those towers don't fall, this won't be too bad. It's bad now. But if things stay like they are it won't be too bad."

Then, as I sat in Spanish class, the first tower came down. It looked like a perfectly executed demolition you'd see on a TV show. It seemed as though some invisible force was pushing the huge building down into oblivion and that for all of the structure's steel, concrete and engineering, it absolutely could not push back.

Later in study hall I reflected on what happened that morning. I thought about how silly it was for me to actually be scared earlier and sort of laughed at myself. But then I thought about how those people in New York, Washington D.C., on flights that day and those who had families, friends and loved ones in those places and how scared they must have been. Indeed, I thought, many of them probably still are. My fear was nothing compared to theirs.

It was only then that I really began to understand the significance of what happened, why terrorism is called terrorism and why it's used.