September 11 Attacks, 2001, by John Gerard Tetel

From MemoryArchive

Who: John Gerard Tetel
What: Terrorist Attacks
When: September 11, 2001
Where: Saint Germain en Laye, France

After I graduated high school and before going to college, I took the academic year of 2001 to 2002 off. Since I had French roots and had taken French in high school, I decided to develop my knowledge of the culture and language. I live with a host family in a small town on the last stop of the RER Paris metro system called Saint Germain en Laye. In order to entrench myself further in the society I attended classes at a local lycée for the equivalent of a senior in high school.

Classes started on September 4th, we received our schedules and then were given a couple of days to settle in. My dad was going to stay with me for a week to help me adjust to this new life style. Classes didn’t really start until the following Monday, so we saw family and friends and hung out together for a few days. We ate with my host family too. It was nice to have a buffer with my dad being fluent in French and a familiar face and my host family, who was extremely nice to me, but it was still a little awkward since I had never done anything like this before.

Monday was my first day of classes. I was meeting new friends. They were very interested in getting to know me. I can’t remember being that nice to a foreign exchange student on the first day. I was worried what I would do for lunch, and very thankful when a group invited me to eat with them. The rest of the day passed similarly. My dad came by to pick me up with my host family. We had dinner together. I thought this would be the last time I got to see him for a while since he was leaving back home the next day.

Tuesday was a little easier. I had the same people in all of my classes, so I wasn’t so intimidated. My schedule worked out so that I would get home a little before dinner time. As I was walking home, I began making plans with another student to watch a movie later that night together. I had to go home and eat dinner with my host family, but after that I was free and didn’t start classes again until ten the next morning. I could easy catch a quick flick that night. On my walk home I was sad that I wouldn’t see my dad that night, but very excited to have already made plans with a friend.

My host mom must have heard me come through the down stairs door because when I finished walking up the steps, I opened the door and she was waiting for me. She spoke slowly so that I could understand her (my French was far from perfect that early in my study abroad experience). From what I could gather, she explained that there was an accident with a plane in New York. My immediate thought was Oh my God my dad was on a plane heading for New York. She told me it happened around nine or ten in the morning over there. I quickly did the time change and realized that it couldn’t have been my dad’s plane. I felt a little relieved, but still felt uneasy. I wanted to talk to family. We spoke for a couple of minutes and then said I could watch the news and they might have more answers than she did. She had to prepare dinner too.

I tried calling my mom, but the lines were jammed. I also called my friend and told him that I didn’t think I would be going out tonight. He said he completely understood and not to apologize. I kept watching the news for a while, it was hard to understand since the anchors spoke so fast, but I felt like I had a good handle of what had been going on. No one was sure exactly what was happening, and I sure wasn’t going to be able to figure it out, especially when all my news sources were in French. I took a break from the TV and put on some music. I listened to the Charlie Daniels Band’s In America. It was a cold war song saying that it may look like America is doing poorly, but it will bring itself back up. It encapsulated exactly what I was feeling.

I was very relieved when my dad called. He had been in mid-flight when they were told that all airports were closed in the US and was sent back to Paris. I know it was a tragic event, but I was still happy that I would get to see my dad again. He wouldn’t be able to get a flight back home for another week.

Students would wait outside the room while they waited for the professor to get there so there were always five or ten minutes to socialize. Everyone was very concerned about me and asked if I had friends or family that worked in the towers. I said that fortunately I did not and that I hadn’t had a chance to talk to the friends and family that I had in New York, but was confident that they were fine. Everyone was extremely considerate towards me. I had never seen so much warmth from people that I barely knew.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about being abroad during this time was to see how quickly the actual attacks seemed to fade from people’s memory. There was a satirical news program called les Guignols de l’info that my host family and I watched during dinner. They previously poked fun at the US as often as possible, but they took some time off directly after the attacks. By the time the War on Terror started however, they were right back to their usual antics.

Since I hadn’t really been affected by it, my friends and family were safe, I went along with my friends. I can’t say I was ever as quick to make a joke and didn’t laugh at all of them, but I was on the road to recovery quicker than my friends back home. They couldn't believe some of the jokes I had heard (and made). However, they did think it was funny how I pronounced Osama Ben Laden. I never knew how else to pronounce it except how the French did. Also since I lived outside the US when it happened, I feel a little like an outsider when professors talk about it to students like everyone was living in the US at the time.