What Were You Doing….?

“I was in Venice, Italy on 9/11. Such a strange and scary experience to have been in a foreign country when my home was under attack! I’ll never forget finally being able to get my mother on the phone! We both cried at hearing each other’s voice! I didn’t know when if ever I would get home again. Can’t believe it’s been 10 years! We will never forget. God bless America.”

“It was shocking. There’s no other way to put it. I seem to remember that Jennifer — we were dating at the time, we weren’t engaged or married yet — but she called me that morning and said, ‘You need to turn the news on.’ So I did and the first image I saw was the World Trade Center smoking. That was enough to get me to sit down and watch and try to see what in the world was going on. It was like a movie. Honestly, it was like watching a movie all day long. I remember thinking ‘This can’t be real, this can’t be real.’ And just to think that so many people in that building had to choose between jumping out of the building or burning up. It’s like they had to choose their form of death. It was an extremely tragic day for our country. And I’m always an optimist, too — I try to look at what good can come out of this and the good thing that came out of that was it brought it our country together. And it really kind of boosted our patriotism. A lot of times it’s good that we can have that, but it’s sad that it takes an event like 9/11 to do that.”

“I was a sophomore in high school. I was in the choir, and I remember even in my little bitty town of East Texas — in Lindale, Texas — there was kids leavin’ school because their loved ones had been injured or killed in 9/11, so it affected so many people and so many lives, and it’ll never be forgotten as long as I live. I’ll always remember where I was and that feeling.”

“I was playing golf with a friend early in the morning. Had an apartment in New York, and I lived in New York kind of at the time. If you looked out my bedroom window, we saw the World Trade Center. I was on my way back home. I was playing a 7 o’clock round of golf, and then I was catching a Noon flight, and when I was finishing up, we stopped in to get a drink and I looked and we saw the second tower come down. It was a vicious day.”