9/11 - My Story

Source: Voice of America News

I was only 8 years old. I got up and got ready for school with my brother, who was only 7. My sister was about 3+ months old and doesn't remember anything.

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My brother and I caught the bus and we went to our elementary school Mapleton Elementary. I went to class and got ready for the school day, like I did every other day. I then overheard my third grade teacher, Mrs. Watabe, talking to another teacher (I believe it may have been another third grade teacher Mr. Hart) and I heard something about planes crashing into a building in New York city. I was very confused: could that actually happen? Could planes and other things really crash into the Empire State Building or something?

I didn't even know what the World Trade Center was. I just knew that it was a couple of buildings that were in Manhattan, and I had no idea that they were of any national importance or anything.

This was when I didn't exactly know how to use the internet to look up news articles and things so I settled for watching the television and listening to the adults talk about it to learn what happened.

It wasn't until a little while later that I learned the Pentagon had also been hit. The Pentagon was a building I actually knew about and I think I started to realize how serious this whole thing (whatever this thing was) actually was.

Who would be so bold as to throw planes at buildings in the US? Obviously there were people out there that were worse than I could have imagined (which is saying something, considering certain persons in my family).

Not very long after, while I was in my Tae Kwon Do class, I was told about a fourth plane. Our instructor, Mr. Kelly, told us about someone from our school (it wasn't just one Dojo; it was a considerably large school) who was on a plane called Flight United Airlines 93 and it crashed in a field somewhere in the state of Pennsylvania.

The story I heard was that this man, upon realizing that their plane had been hijacked, actually re-hijacked it or something and flew it into the ground far away from the intended target, believed to have been the United States Capitol. 40 people died, plus the 4 original hijackers. None survived the crash, but the catastrophe could have been much worse if the plane had hit its intended target.

This is just my story. There are obviously many other interpretations to what happened, and many other people have described where they were at the time of the attack on 9/11.

I have a theory that everyone who lived through 9/11 can remember exactly where they were when they heard the news. I think for a split second in my groggy state I actually thought my roommate meant that aliens had descended upon earth and were attacking. Source: Andrew Dobson's DeviantART profile