I was in my office that morning, and got my first indication that something was happening HERE, on FR.
Free Republic was about the ONLY site on the web that functioned that morning. Everything else was locked up.
It was just a horrid day. We let everyone in our office go home at noon. It was somber.
Our company had sales people stranded all over the country. Rental cars were hard to come by, so some of the guys who had them drove LONG distances to go pickup fellow salesmen and bring them home to Louisville.
I was temporarily stranded... overseas...
Like you, I discovered on FR what had happened. I was a lurker back then, and didn’t request a screen name until 4 years later. After reading about the first plane hitting, I turned on the tv in time to watch the second one hit. I called my husband at work in case he didn’t know. Called the school where the kids were and asked the plans. They said the kids were in lessons and that if they let out early, they would let me know. When the towers fell, I dropped to my knees and wept. What a horrific day.
I was neck deep in a project I had been working on for two years, going live shortly, and could not wrest myself away, which was, for me a blessing.
But I was not insensible to what was going on. I worked in a trailer attached to a hospital right in the flight path of an Air Force Base, and at one point, my trained ear (having been a former jet mechanic on military planes) told me a there were a large number of fighter aircraft flying at low altitude.
I went outside, and there were a bunch of people looking up into the sky, and there were maybe 8-10 F-15 fighters coming in to land at the AFB, which was not a very active one for military, even back then, as it was being phased out.
But on that morning, there were those planes, and I have a good amount of experience with Navy jets, and these were acting quite unusually (to me, at least)
They came in, strung out in a fairly short straight line, maybe 25-50 yards apart, at about 500 feet.
As they went overhead at very slow speed, they were randomly slowly rocking from one side to another, each one would dip their left wing maybe 45 degrees, and then repeat it, dipping their right wing slowly to 45.
It looked to me as if they were looking at things on the ground, but I had no idea. I have never seen military aircraft do that around an airfield.
A woman next to me blurted out “Bush did this to us...he got us into this!”
I knew her personally (a Lefty) and snapped at her “Bush had nothing to do with this.”
Later, our Department Chair called me to her office, she was a former Army Colonel, and wanted to talk to me about something. She said she had friends in the Pentagon, but hadn’t been able to reach anyone. She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a bird-colonel insignia, and handed it to me. She said she wanted me to have it.
I was very flattered, but did not think about why until much later. I guess she was just looking for something or someone who could understand her former life, and thought of me.
I did not watch all the footage...did not watch in real time. Patients and hospital workers were clustered around televisions in waiting areas, but I was sticking my head down into my work because I had to get it done.