...and 9/11, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a Tuesday and I just got out of the shower.
My morning started the same. She said, "something hit one of the twin towers." I hurried to get in front of a TV. When I first saw the hole in the building, I immediately felt like it wasn't an accident, I mean, that was a center-punch. You'd think if a pilot was trying to avoid the building, it wouldn't have been such a "perfect", dead-center hit.
Some whack-job pilot trying to go-out with a bang? Bad deal. We had no idea how "bad".
When the second plane hit... well, that's when the world changed. Then the Pentagon. Then the plane in Pennsylvania, which apparently vaporized, leaving zero debris on the ground. It all seemed way too big and organized to be the work of a rag-tag band of extremists.
As we sat in front of the TV for basically the next 2 days straight, they were reporting all kinds of crazy, untrue & sensationalized crap, demonstrating again the media's desire to get viewers is more important than fact. More important than the fear they were spreading.
It was somewhat comforting every 15 minutes when 2 fighter jets flew overhead
At one point, when they were grounding all the planes over the US airspace, a "disturbance" was reported on a flight that was on approach to land at O'Hare. Two of the F16's from Great Lakes Naval Air Station (if I recall correctly) that were providing cover for the Chicago area, went after burners to intercept the plane. Of course, no one knew this (issue with this flight) was going on in real time, so when the resulting sonic boom shook the northern suburbs, we feared that another attack of some kind had happened. Talk about "on edge".
Sounds crazy now, but in those times, we had no idea what was going on and like I said the media made it even worse, as they usually do, as they still do. Some things never change.
If you want a "realtime" snap-shot of what was going through people's minds during the attacks and days that followed, take a look at this thread:
9-11 : World Trade Center - The Thread . There's a lot of insight into
who we are in those posts and how we react to attacks on our way of life. It's a riveting and telling read.