In 2001 I was recently married living in our first apartment together while going to college. We were getting ready to go to school when the radio station started mentioning that a NY building was struck by a passenger airplane. we switched to a news radio station and news was pouring in about hijackings and terrorism. Then the second plane hit and we knew we were under attack. We ran down to our friends' apartment that had cable T.V. we watched the cable network news channels as the buildings burned, people leapt to their deaths, then the buildings collapsed. We went to school but classes were cancelled. People were gathering in the student center and elsewhere around televisions, computer labs, and radios.

I remember thinking this is crazy and knew history was being made and our world would never be the same. I remembered watching videos of night battles in Iraq with missiles and tracer rounds when I was in jr. high.  I remembered seeing the Berlin wall come down when I was 12 years old live on television, just like then I knew something momentous was happening even if I didn't understand all of the ramifications. I remembered watching the Challenger shuttle explode live during elementary school as we were all watching the first school teacher being sent into space with the teacher running in tears to turn it off and us not knowing exactly what happened.

In 2002 I went to DC and saw first hand the hole in the Pentagon that had an enormous 2 or 3 story US flag draped on the building next to it, and got in trouble with the military police for taking a photo of it. The pulled up over the grass in a humvee and pointed a Browning M2 50 caliber machine gun at me and ordered me to surrender my camera and submit to a search. I was then told after they had reviewed all of my photos (thank goodness it was a digital camera) that the only place I could take photos or point anything at all at the building was nearly a half mile away on the berm of the freeway because of heightened security measures. They deleted my photo because it showed the interior of the building during repairs. I was going to miss my train back so I didn't get any others. White house, FBI building, and the Capital building tours were all cancelled. The Smithsonian had an exhibit of 9/11 with cameras, shoes, ID cards, missing flyers, crushed I beams, demolished firetrucks, etc that was very sobering. I still have hours of television footage recorded during that day and
the next few days of the news coverage of the attacks and the aftermath
during the one year anniversary where several stations just ran the
exact content from a year before all day.

In 2008 I went to New York City and saw the hole in the ground where the twin towers stood. I saw them building the WTC memorial and saw a temporary museum with more artifacts from that day.