It was moving day for us too. I had recently transfered to Atsugi, Japan and we were moving from the temporary housing in the Navy Lodge into an off base house. We felt lucky in the morning because a typhoon was skirting the area and we had been afraid the moving company would cancel. But there was only a little wind and rain.
9/11 was a night time event for us in Japan. The cable wasn’t due to connected for a couple of more days and I had hooked up some old rabbit ears to the TV but the reception was pretty bad. I gave up and went outside to smoke but my wife was still playing with the TV. She came out and told me something was happening in New York. I came in just in time to see the second plane hit. The snowy picture we could barely see was American network broadcast with Japanese reporters doing voice overs.
I didn’t see it on TV, either. I had taken my computer and TV’s to my mother’s house in Virginia a few days earlier so they wouldn’t get broken in the moving truck. I retrieved them on 12 September. It wasn’t until a year later on the anniversary date that I saw some of the video that the rest of the country had seen while it was happening. I didn’t even know that video of people jumping from the towers existed until the next year. It was shocking.