I haven’t written much at all about 9/11 on my blog, but I did want to write down (mostly for my sake, before the details fade from memory) where I was that day.
At the time, I was living in Washington, D.C. (I had moved there in the summer of 2000.) On the morning of September 11, 2011, as usual I took the Metro to my office in Bethesda, Maryland, and arrived sometime around 9:00 a.m. After I settled in at my desk, a coworker came to me and said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. At first I thought it was an accident, “just” a plane crash, but as the morning progressed and I kept reading news about the other planes online, it became clear that this was an organized terrorist attack.
I stayed at my desk the whole morning. Some others were watching the news on TV in another part of the office, but for some reason I stayed glued to my computer and kept reloading the major news sites, though they were slow to access. By noon, our company said we could go home if we wished. So I left for my apartment, stopping at the supermarket for food on the way.
It was eerie. I lived less than a mile from the White House and a couple more miles to the Pentagon. Who knew if there would be even more attacks? I would hear helicopters and didn’t know what to think. The afternoon wore on. I called my parents and some friends to let them know I was safe, and watched more news on TV. After a while I had to turn it off and try to rest.