I had gotten out of school for a couple hours for a doctors appointment. I was in 6th grade, I remember hearing it on the radio in the car while my mother was crying.

I was in the first days of 3rd grade at my new school sitting in the classroom during the morning with a couple of my friends waiting for the day to start when the teacher walked in and calmly told us what happened and that we shouldn't worry since it was far away in New York (I live in Minnesota). If I remember correctly we went about the day as normal after that but I remember all the advlts acting strange and looking upset but I was an oblivious 3rd grader who just wanted to get home to play video games so I thought nothing of it. After the school bus brought me home I saw my mom watching CNN on the television and she greeted me and made me a snack as usual then she told me to go to room and play for a while, but before I went up to my room I glanced at the TV and saw the live footage of both of the towers burning. Now, I was a little kid but I wasn't stupid and I knew CNN was real news and what I saw on TV was actually happening and I told my mom I wanted to watch the news with her because now I was scared. Shortly after we sat down on the couch is when the first tower collapsed...it was live, the moment it collapsed and all those lives being lost in an instant was being viewed by my young eyes and I don't remember how I felt, probably because I was still too young to understand the gravity of the situation but seeing my mom cry the way she did was all it took to shake me. The next thing I remember is my dad coming home late that night and spending hours trying to call his mom who lived on Long Island, New York but the lines were busy and we couldn't reach her. The rest of the day is hazy to me, its just those few moments I remember clearly and I will always remember as if it happened yesterday.

Whats weird to think, at least this is how I look at it, is that 9/11 and the wars that became of it have been a major part of most of my life and others my age, throughout most of the rest of elementary school I would see the same footage of planes crashing and towers collapsing over and over again. Then the wars started to pick up and it was constant news reports of soldiers getting legs and arms blown off and prisoners being beheaded, for me and my whole generation it was like we were at the age when it all happened to be old enough to understand and be scared but young enough to have it consume our childhoods. And now looking back I never would have imagined that I will be soon fighting in the wars that spawned from this event that happened a full decade ago. I turn 18 in a few months and will graduate after this school year, after that I'm enlisting in the U.S. Army to hopefully see the rest of the war through to the end.

I was 12. Around the 8am mark, -as- it was happening, my school was saying the pledge of allegiance. Rather poetic.

My father worked at a World Trade Center (Not THE WTC, there was more than those towers. Fun fact) and the entire building was... Eh, "Evacuated" is a drastic term. It was more of a "We should all just go home, just in case". He picked me up from school within that hour and told me we were probably at War. Conflicting thoughts about. I was only 12 after all. Among my first thoughts were "holy crap, I'm alive during a war?"

Oh, how naive I was.

I lived in New York at the time, fortunately I was far enough away from it, but I could still see it clear as day. I believe I was in a coffee shop, one of the women behind the counter came running out and turning on a TV with the news. I remember when they said the Pentagon was hit, I remember the crash in Pennsylvania.

But the one bad thing that at least hit me personally was the ridicule I suffer to this day for being an Arab.

I was in chattanooga, TN. just finished orientation for covenant transport. and was waiting for my trainer. since that was my first OTR trucking job. saw it in the TV, then my trainer picked me up and we went to transload off a wrecked truck on the I75/I24 interchange. And my driving trainer was from Jordan. I consider him a friend of mine now. And I don't hate because of the events. Probably because of that. If I hadn't been in the truck, things would have been bad for him. It was fairly ugly out there on the road for a while.

I was in 1st grade, and all I remember is that I learned of it when I got home. They didn't show us 1st graders what was going on, but when I got home the news channel was on, and I think I asked something along the lines of what is that. All I saw was smoke coming from them, never saw them falling down.

I do remember however the news saying that Osama was the mastermind behind it.

EDIT: Wow, I am watching the special on the history channel about it. It doesn't even seem real, like it was some horror movie. The little devices that took videos the images are really good, when I turned it on I thought it was a whole bunch of reinactment to make it look even more devastating, but I was surprised to find out it is actual footage.

I don't remember much, I have a terrible memory (its difficult for me to remember things from more than about five years ago) but I know that I was taken out of school early, I was annoyed that I was taken out right before lunch. And my dad came home from work early, which I always got excited about because he always played videogames or baseball (I hate baseball but he liked it) with me when I was little but he was glued to the TV (because my uncle and grandparents were in Manhattan, my grandpa was smoking a cigarrete on a building close to the WTC and saw both planes hit).

EDIT-@WONDERWOMBAT:
I saw one too, its insane and terrible what happened. I think most of us here were to young to comprehend how devistatingly terrible it was.

I talked with my dad on Skype today, and he filled in the blanks in my memory. I was in pre-school, right before Kindergarten and my family was living in Gainesville, Florida. I remember my mom (who worked there) taking me home early. When my Dad saw what happened, he went home, put on his BDUs (inactive army at the time), and got my brother from the elementary school. When we all got home, Dad was really angry when he heard that the Air Force had been told to stand down and not do anything.

I was..13 at the time, in middle school I believe. I remember watching in on TV, just thinking "wow" but not really fully understanding it. I was a naive kid and didn't really care about much of anything, so it didn't matter much to me.

It matters now, however, and I understand the importance and role it's played in our nations history.

In the same vein, it's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that a lot of our younger generation doesn't know the world "pre-9/11."
A small part of the greater tragedy that day was the feeling of innocence lost.

North America

Then in places where they hated white people because of the Iraq war.

Riding with my mom to school, heard it on the radio.

In High School. Day was just starting, learned about the first plane on my way into school. Class stopped after the second plane. I went to the theater attached to the school and watched the tragic events live on a movie screen with a couple dozen students.

Out of curiosity, while perhaps relating it to historical events in the same vein from anywhere throughout history, when do you think the annual mourning and media coverage surrounding the events of 9/11/2001 will cease to occur? I would imagine it would be more of a gradual tapering-off, but looking at this from the perspective of a history lover and studier... when might this event cease to be something treated as though a part of recent memory and fade into the history books? I'm not old enough to have much to relate to the situation, so I don't know... but I want to.

Pearl Harbor was 70 years ago this December 7th and every year that I can remember there has been media coverage of it.

9/11 being the tragic event that it was, I am sure there will always be mention of it in the media every year for just as long or greater, and rightly so. We should never forget.

Hard to say. We still have people alive that were there, or were personally affected by the bombing at Pearl Harbor. Though it's not as "big" as it once was, we still observe "Pearl Harbor Day," and it's still very much a real and traumatic event for those people personally affected, even if the vast majority of the population has no personal recollection of it. I doubt the media coverage will ever cease in our lifetime, but like Pearl Harbor, it will become less talked about with each passing generation, as unfortunate as that may sound. And of course, there is the very real (and very disturbing) possibility that there may be future events that could surpass the sheer atrocities of 9-11, and it may lose it's potency that way as well. Let's all hope that never happens.

I was just watching a few minutes of the archive footages of 9/11 on the History Channel. These are videos that people have recorded and sent in, no commentary, no music, just raw footage. I swear, I feel like I'm going to vomit. Does anyone feel the same way? How can anyone watch these videos? It was so awful

I watched it all. Reminds me of the day when it happened.

I was at school and when I got home that was interupting my cartoons so I went away in a huff not realising the seriousness of the event

The videos are bad, but the worst thing to come out of 9/11 is Kevin Cosgroves call to 911, his final words, that will scar you for life.

Not this century, and likely not the next either. These kinds of events tend to stick around, even if they turn into more of a rote commemoration as time goes by. Still, names like WTC, Lockerbie, Beslan and even comparatively small ones like Ut?ya will be with us for quite a while.

Why di curiousity get the better of me :cryvaultboy: