I live in Sussex County, NJ, northwest corner. I slept through it all. I woke up around 11:20 am and saw my answering machine had a message. It was my Army sergeant son-in-law and he said to turn on my tv to see what was going on. I put on the tv, don't recall which channel, I do recall that I had no channel 7, ABC network here out of NY. I saw the replaying of each attack. I called my mother and said "what the hell is going on?", she said about the same. I also called my daughter at college, William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ, that much closer to NY than where we live, and I told her to leave and come home. I called my sister in Tennessee, she and her husband were watching tv in disbelief also. I then called my sister-in-law in Warwick, NY and she was hysterically crying, she had two cousins who worked in the towers, one, Frank Monahan, died from Cantor Fitzgerald, the other died also, not sure which tower or what floor, she didn't talk about the second one as much as Frank. She and her family always went to Mets games with Frank and his family. (but she's anti-war and a democrat...and completely uninformed...) My husband was working in Jersey City, he and our son, installing tile. They were in a high rise building, 20 floors up, right on the river's edge nearly directly opposite the World Trade Center. My husband was soon home between noon and 12:30. He walked in and immediately started crying. He said when he saw out a window of the building he was in that the first tower was hit, he instantly said, "it's terrorists", his fellow workers laughed, saying yeah right or something to that effect. As he continued to look out the window watching the smoke pouring from the first tower, he saw the second plane come up the Hudson right past the window and he watched it tilt and hit the second tower. Our son was down out of the building to get coffee. My husband nervously and frightenedly went down out of the building to find our son to get the hell out of there fearing more planes were coming, he'd heard there were more. Once he was home he couldn't stop crying over all the people that were killed, and kept seeing that second plane hitting the second tower in his mind. He couldn't go back to work the next day, our son did though. Our son-in-law went on active duty at Newark Airport the next day or the same day, oh just recalled he wasn't officially our son-in-law yet, not until 2004!. That Thursday we went to the Firemen's Convention in Wildwood, NJ. My husband is a volunteer firefighter. We saw military helicopters flying over the coast and saw some when we were on the NJ Parkway also. He said the ceremony they had at the convention hall was extremely sad with the New York Fire Dept. having lost 343 of it's finest, let alone all the life lost that day. While he was at the convention I was in our hotel room watching the constant coverage. I did a lot of crying and fear crept in quite easily I must admit. As soon as the convention was done, we had to go home two days earlier than we normally would, we didn't like being that far away from our kids, it just didn't feel right. About 2 years ago or less my husband and son worked down in Ground Zero. The first day my husband was stopped and staring at the steel cross. Another guy came up to him and said, 'first time, huh?', he could tell.
