[Salgak]

I was in my office in a dot-com in Arlington, Virginia. We had a conference going on, I was surfing FR (I was the Systems Administrator). Suddenly, the net slowed to a crawl: most news sites were unreachable. A colleague ran into my office, and told me to turn my radio on, a jet had crashed into a building in New York. . .

We turned on the Company TV, just in time to watch the jet hit the second tower. At that point, it was obvious that this was NOT an accident. I was reporting just that to the company President when a jet flew by, far closer than normal. About thirty seconds later, we heard a loud explosion and felt the building shake a little. (We were about 3-4 miles up from the Pentagon.) Then the TV broke the news that a plane had hit the Pentagon. 10 minutes later, we closed the offices: I started a fresh backup of our data, and took the last three consecutive backup sets home with me that night.

I also have a friend who lived on the hill overlooking the Pentagon, somehow, I got through to him at his office at the Patent Office, and offered him an Evac out of the area, not knowing what would happen. Mistake on my part. 7 hours later, after fighting traffic on a scale DC had never seen before, or since, I got him, his cat, and 6 random GI's out of the Pentagon area, dropped the GI's off at a commuter parking lot in Woodbridge, Virginia, and got home, to a TOTALLY hysterical wife (cell phones were pretty much useless after about 10AM in DC. . . ).

The ride out was memorable: with the exception of my pal, everyone in the car was either military or ex-military, and we all KNEW that a war had just begun. . . .

[dfwgator]

I was driving into work in downtown Dallas. I always listen to "The Ticket" which is the sports radio station here, and they were talking about seeing the WTC on fire. I turned to another news station where I was listening to them interview someone on the street there in NYC when the second plane hit.

Obviously once I made it in to work, everyone was talking about what had happened. A lot of rumors were flying around, that up to 20 planes had been hijacked, and even that perhaps one of them was headed for Dallas. Nobody really knew just how extensive this thing was.

They let us go home at about 10:30. I headed straight for the nearest blood bank (obviously many others did the same as me). Waited for a few hours before finally giving blood, but they had ordered pizza and cokes for everybody, and we all tried to help the beleaguered staff any way we could (on a normal day, maybe they get 10 people at the most to come in).