I tear up whenever I watch any videos or look at images of that day. I too was 12 years old. I think I was in 7th grade, but I remember being on the computer. I was chatting in the old battle.net chatrooms that diablo/starcraft used to have. My mom said "travis, come in here quick!!" and I kinda just trudged along like "okay... what.." and my whole family was watching on tv. All i remember seeing, at first glance, were the two towers and one of them billowing in smoke. For the whole week at school, it was all we could really talk about in every single class. I remember some of my teachers crying while teaching a lesson.

I know America is fucked up in many ways, but damnit I am still proud to be an American. This is a proud nation, and when something like this happens, you feel a part of you gets destroyed. I cannot express the motivation that we all had to just go over there and kick some ass.

Never forget.

Slaughter

United States20255 Posts

September 11 2013 23:01 GMT

#22

I was a freshman in high school and me and my friends were walking from German to Chemistry around the time it happened. The atmosphere was noticeably different in the halls and we didn't know why then we walked into class the TV was on. At first when everyone thought it was an accident we just watched like 15 mins of it before we got to our lesson. As the day wore on the teachers clearly were more and more distracted and everyone was really like "oh wow something like this actually happened to the US? Crazy" it finally culminated in my Geometry teacher straight saying

"What's happening right now is more important than class today"

It was really just a weird feeling just hovering on the boundary of the mind for the next few days.

Definitely a different feeling when your several states away and you don't know anyone there from the experience of New Yorkers. RIP to the victims.

ZaplinG

United States3818 Posts

September 11 2013 23:02 GMT

#23

I looked at every single picture. Thanks for sharing.

Sawamura

Malaysia7602 Posts

September 12 2013 02:54 GMT

#24

I was in high school during the 9/11 attack still couldn't believe that the terrorist will target a NMT(non military target) where there was no value besides to cause death and destruction. WTC had workers all around the world even malaysian people were position there to do work. Still I didn't feel any regretting supporting the americans in it's war against terrorism...

unkkz

Norway2196 Posts

September 12 2013 07:24 GMT

#25

I never quite understood why Americans who had no relation to people in the towers could be so upset about it years after. Why not just let it go?

Not until http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks Breivik came. Then i understood the total shock and horror such a thing puts a country through. The feeling of how unreal it is while it is actually happening.

Very powerful pictures, it puts me right back to where i was that day. 14 years old talking to an american gaming friend over ICQ asking him "What's up" and he simply replied with "Turn on your TV". I was in such a wtf state that i phoned my best friend just to let him know. I watched the live feed that caught the second plane hitting the tower as well iirc and that's when you realized this was no accident which made it all feel very eerie and unreal.

Pandemona

Charlie Sheens House51493 Posts

September 12 2013 08:53 GMT

#26

Nothing will ever come close to the feeling i had when i was 11 coming home from school watching 2 massive buildings collapse in front of my eyes knowing that the size of New York City and the population and the density of the place, LOTS of people were about to get hurt.

Also the sense of relief? Maybe, when Osama Bin Laden was finally bought to justice for the crimes he had masterminded that day. Knowing that he was eventually caught after the Americans lost him and that we will be a safer place because of these incidents.

The 7/7 bombings again were a sense of realism to what silly people can do to our worlds, and how many people are in it.

RIP to all who have lost in these two acts of terrorism (and any other forms).

mizU

United States12125 Posts

September 12 2013 09:38 GMT

#27

damn those pictures are really intense

Mithhaike

Singapore2759 Posts

September 12 2013 13:30 GMT

#28

I was in secondary school that day. I remember coming home, watching tv, when suddenly there was a emergency broadcast. Something was up but I was pretty young and didn't really know what.

Then I read the newspaper the next morning(as a kid,yes i read newspaper on a daily basis). Half of the newspaper were talking about 9/11 with all the pictures of the smoking towers. There was plenty of rumors and nothing confirmed as of that day, but when i watch the news i was shocked. There was a attack on US soil itself?! There's going to be hell to pay, that I told everyone that I met. Once the perpetrator was found, the US war machine will stop at nothing until he's dead. It was true as everyone knew later.

The true impact of 911 is the sense of hopelessness. Those little black dots falling out of the building? I thought it was debris.

Then there's a zoomed in shot and I saw a middle age man falling to his death. The sense of helplessness and frustration and anger bloom in me as a kid. What have those murderers done! Why would they do that?! I do not know how to convey the sense of anger that I felt when I realised all those black dots were humans jumping out of a skyscraper for the slightest glimmer of a chance to survive. Even to this day, whenever I recall that middle aged guy, a sense of frustration and agony welled up within me.

The world has changed for the better or the worse after 9/11. Definitely. It was history in the making,that happened during my lifetime and that will stay in my mind and truthfully? I do not know why would people do this kind of things over "religion", their twisting and perverting it for their own purposes.

I see people blaming Bush for using 911 as a excuse. I do not blame him at all. A president is only as good as his underlings, it was obvious that intel was fked up and conveyed to Bush. There was a sense of the entire US needing to do something, anything!
Afghanistan couldn't be avoid, neither could Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was a foregone conclusion once they proved that Taliban was in Iraq, regardless whether it had WMDs or not imo. US needed to do anything to prove not just to the world, but mostly to itself that it still can defend itself and that people did not die in vain in 911.