where were you?

SOTD:
Alan Jackson - "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Spinning)"

I was in the first weeks of my 3rd year of undergrad at UT. I was a speech communications major and I had stacked my schedule with Tuesday/Thursday classes. This allowed me to enjoy 4 day weekends, but made for long days of back to back classes that began promptly at 8am and didn't allow for my first break until well into the afternoon hours. I lived a pretty typical life for a college student and this is how I remember 9/11...

8:00am
Running late to my Speech Comm class, as usual. Arrived a couple of minutes late in my 'uniform' of black yoga pants and a sorority t-shirt.

8:25am
Gave a speech, the topic was persuasion, if I remember correctly; it lasted maybe 3 minutes and I earned an A (despite my attire)

8:46am
The first plane crashed into The World Trade Center.

8:50am
Class was over and I made my way up one floor and down the hall for my next class, Poli Sci (for those of you who know the UT campus, I was in the Humanities Building); as I made my way through the halls I overheard fractured conversations about something that was happening in NYC. From what I could make out, there was a lot of chatter about a 'small' plane that had 'accidentally' crashed into a large building. At this point no one was really terrified, just a little dumbstruck with shock that someone could be so reckless.

9:01am
Took my seat and began to review notes for the exam I was about to take.

This is probably a good place to point out that cell phones were in the early stages of text messaging and I'm not sure I knew anyone who did it on a regular basis; wi-fi was unheard of, most computers, laptop and PC, required a connect via blue Ethernet cord to access the Internet and it would be few years before immediate access to information would be available as it is today.

9:03am
The second plane hit.





9:05am
Poli Sci 101 began (I still had no clue what was happening). Despite a few attempts from concerned students, the professor insisted nothing would interfere with our first scheduled major exam. He informed the class that if anyone walked out, they would receive a failing score for this exam and it would be almost impossible to pass the course. Tests were distributed & four people walked out. {In the week that followed, our professor apologized for not taking the information more seriously and decided those tests were not going to count for our semester average after all.}

9:45am
I had finished my exam and left class a little early. I still can't remember who explained what was happening in NYC, but I remember being in the first floor lobby of the building, picking up a copy of The Daily Beacon and preparing to head to my 10:10am class when I got the news that America was under attack. What I had believed to be a simple accident less than an hour before was, in fact, no accident at all.

There was a growing consensus that the last place anyone needed to be that day was in class. Not because we were afraid of an attack on the campus, although I don't know anyone who would have ruled it out, but because there was this feeling that we should just go home, back to our friends & loved ones, until we could understand exactly what was happening.

During this year, I lived in a dorm, specifically, Greve Hall, 6th floor; it was the on campus housing assigned to my sorority. It was a great place to live, if you were going to live on campus, because it was closest to the academic buildings and was located right off the strip (aka: Cumberland Ave).

As I rerouted myself back to the dorm, I stopped for a moment to take in the magnitude of the information I had just heard. I said a quite prayer, not knowing exactly who or what I should be praying for, but praying all the same that God be in control and asking for his guidance & protection over my life, the lives of those I loved & the lives of those I would never know. I don't think I realized it immediately, but tears had begun to stream down my face. With each step I was getting closer to 'home' and unfortunately, closer to seeing the devastation on television for the first time. There was a moment along the way when I stopped and stood in the moment; I remember thinking how things were about to change and that, as a country, we would probably never be the same again.

By the time my 10:10 class began, without me, I had made my way back to my dorm room and I watched as the footage replayed over and over. I watched it for the first time alone. But it didn't take long for a group of us to gather in our (seldom used) Study Room to watch together as it seemed like everyone tried to make sense of it all. I remember one friend, in particular, who was on her cell phone crying uncontrollably as she reached out to her mother to get reassurance that family members who worked in the buildings were safe.

At some point, I called my own mother. We were both in shock and I remember the relief in her voice when she began to speak. I wasn't sure where I should be. We talked about whether I should come home or stay put. We talked about why someone would do something so terrible. We talked about what might happen next. In the end, I stayed on campus, although, we both agreed that if Oak Ridge had been a target, I don't think either of us would have been very safe; she was 30 miles west and I was 25 miles east.

Perhaps it's because so much of what happened that day took place in less than 2 hours at the beginning of the day, or maybe subconsciously I chose not to remember the rest, but the remainder of the day is a blur. Sometime around noon the University officially cancelled classes and a candlelight vigil was in the works. A campus that was friendly, by nature, had become almost like one big family. Complete strangers were comforting one another. It was the only time in my college career, that I can remember, when in the week leading up to the big UT/Florida game, there wasn't really any 'Gator-Hating'! Eventually, like many big events scheduled in the days and weeks that followed (i.e. The Emmys), the game was postponed and played at the end of the season {final score 34-32; the #6 Vols beat the #2 Gators in the Swamp for the first time in 30 years!}.

The one thing that seemed to go on forever was the coverage. I purposely left out the word 'news' because the coverage was found on EVERY channel. Living in campus housing I paid each semester for campus cable. It wasn't a lot, but in all UT was about 50 channels. In the hours and days following the attack, I remember seeing some type of news feed on every single channel we had. The most prominent memory is Comedy Central. It was incredibly bizarre to see actual news broadcast here instead of the typical satire that I had become fond of following the 2000 election and the hanging chad debacle. Another significant change on television was the birth of news as entertainment; not a far stretch at this point, seeing how the only thing going out across the airwaves for days was commentary and new information about the people and events of that horrible day. It makes sense that the news networks would try to get as much information out at once as possible and so began the split screens and multiple news crawls across the screen, a tactic that has been scaled down by most, but still proves incredibly effective for at least one cable news channel.

Lots of other things changed following that day; for a country that once boasted 'freedom' we quickly become a nation that released many of those freedoms in exchange for what we believed would be security and protection. At airports, if you didn't have a ticket you could no longer access the terminals; this is still puzzling for me as I'm fairly certain the men who hijacked those planes had tickets and boarded them that morning just like everyone else. Sorry if I seem a little less than grateful for the security measures here, but the generation after mine will never know what it was like to sit in an airport terminal and watch as people say their goodbyes, loved ones are reunited or a man surprised his girlfriend by popping the question, all of which are thing I have witnessed myself on more than one occasion. Sure, you can still do this in baggage claim or outside security, but it's really not the same.

Nearly eighteen months after we entered what we thought was the 'War on Terrorism' a significant attack on Afghanistan took place. This, too, was a day that I will always remember as it happened in the middle of my Spring Break. It was my senior year at UT and I was with a group of my sorority sisters on a Royal Caribbean Cruise. There was only one place on the ship where I remember a television that wasn't on the CC broadcast that went to the cabins, it was located near the center of the ship in one of the larger bars. I can still remember sitting in an oversized, half circle leather chair for most of the day as we watched the attacks on a CNN feed. As the news spread around the boat, the bar began to fill with people. I bet I sat there for six hours straight, fearful of leaving my seat because I knew I would not be able to get it back. What frightened me even more, at the time, was that I was on a cruise in international waters and the US had entered into war. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't just a little bit concerned about my odds of being able to reenter the country a few days later. Obviously, these fears were not merited and we made it back, safe and sound. Unfortunately, for many men and women who have fought in the 'War onTerror' the same cannot be said; it is also widely believed that this particular mission, known as Operation Anaconda, allowed Osama Bin Laden and many other extremely dangerous terrorists the opportunity to escape to Pakistan.

As we mark ten years since the horrible attacks of 9/11, I reflect with a heavy heart on the nation we once were and the dreams we once had. Over the last few days I've watched countless people recount the events they witnessed that day and I almost consider myself lucky; I didn't watch in horror as the events unfolded live on the morning news, I wasn't forced to deal with the implications of these attacks immediately and perhaps most importantly, I wasn't in one of the cities that experienced unexplainable devastation as a result of the hijacked planes. My heart still aches when I watch the footage and hear the personal accounts. I can't begin to know what those people have gone through, and for that I am thankful. I still miss the way things were and the idea of what could be. Perhaps, most of all, I miss our nation of unity.

Where were you and how did your life change on 9/11?