Where were you 13 years ago today?

I was working at my father's sub shop in Syracuse, NY when it happened. We watched the terrible event and news on the TV there. I'll never forget that day.

I was at my 8th grade bus stop in Vancouver, WA waiting for the bus and I remember kids talking about some sort of an attack on the Pentagon and thinking "that's bullshit. no one would be able to attack that place." When we arrived at the school my homeroom teacher told us what happened and turned on the news. She told us if we wanted to go home for the day we had that choice. I decided to go home and I watched the news all day in shock.

I was in class. 4th grade, 9 years old. I remember being told everyone had to go home so our parents came to pick us up. Mom picked me and my brother up. We went home and I didn't know what was happening. I was just happy we were going home. All else I remember was seeing footage of (I think) Osama on the news and I was yelling at the tv. Don't remember if I even knew what happened but I didn't like the guy. That's all I remember. I live in NYC to so that's pretty close. I mean, not in Manhattan. I live a borough up. Like a 45 minute train ride to the Twin Towers. My school is one block from ground zero. One of my schools buildings was actually destroyed from the debris from 9/11 and just opened back up in Fall 2012. Crazy world we live in.

It was the first week of Middle School (7th grade) and when I went down stairs and saw that my dad was watching tv that morning I had assumed the video of the planes going into the towers was a movie. I went to class later that day and I heard the announcement over the intercom. At that point I didn't know where the twin towers were at or anything so I didn't ever really pay any mind to the whole thing.

You know honestly (and I don't want to sound like a monster) I never cared about what happened with 9/11. I didn't lose anyone that I knew (condolences if you did) and I was never personally affected by it. Also yes I'm from the US if anyone asks.

I was an 8-year old kid in Brooklyn, New York. I really didn't want to be in school that day, so I went down to the nurse's office and tried to convince her that I wasn't well enough to stay in school. By the time I got down there, the staff was busy listening to the radio and freaking out about the news. I was too young to fully understand what happened, so I just assumed that my family was in some sort of danger too (my aunt worked close to the towers, so I wasn't completely wrong).

By the time I got back to my classroom, parents were already picking up their kids and taking them home. It was weird being able to look in the sky and see smoke coming from the direction of the city. Everyone was glued to their radios and TVs that day.

It's already been 13 years, though. Man, time flies.

I watched the tragic event unfold on television in England.

I was a sophomore in college, still in bed in my dorm room. But my roommate was up and so my door was unlocked. My friend who lived next door burst in unexpectedly and just said turn on the TV. If I recall, he didn't have one in his room. I was still half asleep and didn't quite grasp what was happening. For the rest of the day we kind of all just didn't go to class (they got cancelled eventually anyway) and watched the news on TV and barely spoke.

Swedish afternoon home from programming & database lecture when all of my IRC clients blew up. Turned on the TV and it was early on in the events, everybody thought it was a fire until we learned it was a plane, got to discussing how that could have happened, what systems failed and then we saw the second plane hit live on TV.

The rest is ugly history. Don't let it happen again.

I was in the car on my way to elementary school. My mom had the radio on. I really was not paying attention and had no idea. It was not until I arrived at the playground when a more knowledgeable third grader was running around telling everyone "Someone hit the world trade centers!!!". I did not know what those were, but I knew it must be serious. When class started, my normally bright, funny, and all around amazing teacher was just sitting in silence with the radio on. Everyone was quiet.

I was living in a different city and had a job in the civil service. They'd put a TV on in a break room for anyone to watch the news about the horrible event if they so desired. I live in the UK but I'll never forget seeing the live TV feed. One plane had already crashed. I watched with horror as the other plane crashed into the second tower on live television.

I was in a choir lesson at my school (Ireland). I was around 16. The teacher had popped out for a second, and when she came back in she moved us all into the next room and turned on the TV. She told us something was happening and we should probably see it. The first plane had hit, and myself and a friend immediately knew what happened. We just looked at each other with this look of "Oh holy shit....". It was bizarre. That one look was all it took to know what was going to happen from then on, and that the whole world had changed in a very real way. I remember thinking "There's going to be a full scale invasion in the middle east, and it is never going to end." Might sound eerily prophetic, but I had figured for a while something like that was going to happen.

There was speculation as to how an accident like that could have happened, and how it managed to hit the building so square on. Most of the people did not really know what was going on, but I remember exchanging a glance with my choir teacher and she knew what was happening aswell. Then, the second plane hit. It was pretty scary. Some of the girls in the class started crying. It was fucked up.

We spent most of the next day just talking with our teachers about it, and about what was going to happen. Some of the people in our school had friends and family in New York and they were really worried.

I was living in a different state at the time. Getting ready to go to work at a fast food place, to open. I remember seeing the news reports on TV before leaving. But was so out of it tired that I thought it was a movie. It wasn't until I got into my car and it was all over the radio also that I realized what was actually happening.

I was about 100 miles south of here. I think I just watched cartoons or something

Home from college. Dad woke me up to tell me the news.

9/11 was important though the results were more important. Much more important is what's happening in Ukraine right fucking now and no one is even slightly interested. But hey, bombing arabs is the thing to do.

I was getting ready to go to class in my small Western Manitoba town of four thousand people. I was eating Corn Pops and I turned on Regis and Kelly because what 15 year old doesn't watch Regis and Kelly in the morning? But it was being preempted for stupid news, because some jagoff had accidentally flown a plane into a skyscraper. I don't remember if it was national ABC news or the Detroit affiliate, but they were speculating if it had to do with faulty equipment, fog or user error. Then one of them said, "now hold on, it looks like- can we get another shot- it appears as if-" and basically they slowly realized there was a second explosion. The five minutes after are this swirl of slow realizations; they didn't want to openly speculate further, but it was becoming clear that this was no accident. I remember a grim sort of humor overcoming me, "here we go", the world is actually Tom Clancy, etc. I knew even at 15 that this event was going to launch a whole lot of stupidity and a whole lot of people were going to get hurt, but even then I don't think I could have pictured it would be the defining event of the decade, arguably the defining event in Western history of the nascent 21st century.

I went to school and a couple people were talking about it, but being that we weren't Americans and we're 15 years old and maybe not always thinking of the people being hurt, the prevailing reaction was this kind of amused shock. What was happening was patently ludicrous, it's like when you get one of those stories that someone in Malaysia lost their mind and run amok, and slashed 30 people's faces before commuting suicide by cop. It's so divorced from the sane, from the norm, that it practically ceases to be real. At the same time, despite it being completely crazy, there was also a sense of expectation... Or at least, we could recognize there were so many people who were suicidally pissed off with America that this kind of thing kind of 'makes sense' to some degree. But none of us leapt to Islamic or Islamist terrorist organizations; growing up in the 90s made me expect domestic terrorism rather than foreign.

We had a gym class that was a health class, which amounted to sitting in the multipurpose room, and the gym teacher giving up teaching in order to watch the news with us. I don't remember the time exactly but it would be easy to figure out, because I watched the first tower fall in real-time. Before it happened I didn't think the buildings would collapse, I figured that if the impact was great enough to topple the building, it would have happened immediately. However, reality ensued and it fell. The giant ash clouds that came out gave me my first demonstration of the enormous size of the towers, watching New Yorkers huddle behind abandoned cabs, seeing the cloud of dust and ash expelled by the collapse warping around buildings, seemingly turning corners to chase them. Delirious. I specifically remember this one video of someone running from Ground Zero, recording a woman leaned up against an empty car in the street, and how overwhelmed she was. The recovered and broadcast footage of these moments inspired more 00s and 10s action scenes than the Matrix. I feel like every particle physics demonstration I see is a recreation of the papers and dust sailing through the air in Manhattan.

I think it officially became a half-day because everyone wanted to watch the news. This was 5-6 years before the rise of social media; how different would our behavior be if we had a direct feed to events in our pockets at all times? I went home, made lunch, and watched CNN for the rest of the day. Later in the afternoon, I heard the word 'Al-Qaeda' for the first time. I saw one of the other buildings, a fat wide one, collapse.

It was either that day or the next that Bush made his little speech. I remember RECOILING when he said the word 'evil-doers'. At 15 years old I could recognize that invoking EVIL when talking about geopolitical events was antiquated and stupid. I was 15 thinking the President of the United States should be above such childish rhetoric. Maybe I was a weird 15 year old.

Everything since has been history. Patriot Acts and preemptive wars and Facebook and Great Recessions and PRISM.

I was at school when it was announced. Middle school. Until I got home and then went to another place that had a TV, I thought it was a jet fighter that crashed, and that alone was shocking.

Believe it or not I was taking my ASVAB test for the Marine Corps.

I was in my American Literature class my senior year in high school. A guy who was late to class barged in and interrupted the teacher to let us know a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Naturally freaked out, we flipped on the class room television and watched the talking heads try to figure out what the fuck was going on. After watching for some time we all gasped in horror as a second plane struck the other tower, and then one more time when the towers fell. What a horrible day. Obviously nothing has been the same since. That day dramatically and directly effected my life as I would go on to enlist in the Army national guard that May and end up getting wrapped up in the conflicts in the middle east myself. What a weird day.

Doing Russian language homework. Had the TV on. Remember a rumor that the attack was done by a Chinese militant group calling themselves "The Peoples Red Army" or something. Don't think I was old enough to really get the whole situation but do remember kids at school talking about a coming war the next day.

I was at school, watching it on TV. About 20 minutes after the planes hit, I got pulled out of school by my grandmother and taken home, as many of us did. I didn't understand at the time. Then, President Bush came on TV that night and explained what happened and I realized it then. It kind of developed my interest in foreign policy and politics because I wanted to understand why those things happened.

I was in middle school. We had no clue what was happening (none of the teachers told us). The principal announced that we weren't going to have school the following day, so we were all happy and didn't care why at the time.

Our bus driver was the one that told us what was going on... I was very upset that something that big was kept a secret from us.

I was at my parents place re-installing windows on their PC cause their old HD had crashed.
While I was waiting I was reading a few threads on somethingawful.com on my laptop when a thread about a plane crashing into the first tower appeared. I told my mom to turn on the TV and the first image we saw was the second tower getting hit.

I was 15, at home, doing whatever I was doing on the internet, when my grandmother called and told me to turn on the TV. I just sat there thinking "What the fuck is happening!?" as the footage just got crazier and crazier, and the reporters started confirming that this was not just a bizarre accident. And I was in a bad way in my personal life at the time, which made the whole thing even less palatable. The next week for me was a whole lot of getting up, turning on the news, and just trying to wrap my head around it all.

I was in 6th grade and I was getting ready for school and then saw it happen on TV. Most of the classes that day were about dealing with tragedy and shit like that. Big discussions. I knew the severity of what was going on and realized it was terrible, but all I thought about was how it would affect my father who was in the US Army. And then we all know what happened eventually.

I clearly remember I was in my second grade class and as every kid came into the class our teacher told us something bad had happened. She turned on the tv and every kid was just amazed at what was on the screen. I do not remember if our school let us go home for the rest of the day but I do recall watching the news and switching between different networks.

Was on the way back from college. Caught some BBC footage when I walked past a TV store and just thought it was a big fire. Got home and saw the second impact.

That night felt like such a game-changer. Being a Brit, it took me a while to understand most countries aren't prepared for this.

I was in 5th grade. We were let out of school early with no explanation as to why they decided to make it a half day. I didn't know what was going on at the time or that the attacks took place but I was really happy to spend the entire day hanging out with my best friend because my father brought him home with us. It wasn't until a few days later that I was told what had happened in school once classes resumed.

6th grade. Helping take books to the library from the classroom. I remember hearing the teachers' phones in each classroom start blowing the fuck up and whatnot. All of a sudden the librarian walks over and turns on the TV and me, the librarian, the dude who was helping me, and like 1-2 other people are just staring at a burning building. I think the second plane hit while we were watching and there was definitely this "oh, shit" moment and that's right when it started to sink in for me that this was like super fucking serious. Anywho, we went back to our classrooms and just waited and watched the news.

Teachers left their classrooms to go have a meeting. Few minutes later, told all of us to go play and chill outside. Few minutes after that, we were all on our way home. And that's more or less exactly what happened.

Sitting drinking coffee in the living room watching Scooby Doo waiting for my breakfast (I was in grade 3. It was around 7:30 our time). My brother came up stairs and said some crazy stuff was going on and to go to a news channel. We had school that day but lots of kids were really scared. I remember being terrified of planes for a few days afterwards. I didn't want to go outside because they would be there.

At this exact time, 12:28 pm, I was in the 9th grade at Bronx Science wondering why the Social Studies staff room was entirely empty, and why the European History room across the hall, which had a giant screen television, was completely stuffed with people.

It's worth noting that about an hour and a half earlier, the student was informed by a school wide announcement that two planes had collided into each other over the WTC. That was the degree of confusion at the time.

I stayed in the staff room long enough to hear on the radio "...the Pentagon is under attack in one of the worst terrorist attacks in US history...", which sounded incredibly surreal. I then stepped into the room across the hall just in time to catch video of the towers collapsing, along with ample footage of people jumping out of the buildings to their deaths. These images were of course removed from broadcast by all media in the following days.

The rest of the school day went on almost normally. No class were canceled, and some teachers allowed us a free period while others tried to carry on class as usual. The school did not make any other announcements that day. The 4 Train that goes from upper Bronx all the way to downtown Manhattan was much more different. It's a train that, at about 3:30pm, would be chocked full of high school students trying to get home. Except that day, it was silent despite the mass of teenage bodies in it. When it got to 141st street, right next to Yankee stadium, the giant dust cloud that now covered lower Manhattan was visible even as far north as we were. Then the train went underground, and that's about all I remember of that day.

I don't live in the US, so I only remember the news broadcasts. I had just gotten home from school, when someone said on IRC that there had been an accident in New York. We had just gotten a TV package including some international news channels like BBC, Al-Jazeera and CNN, so I turned on the TV and moved it into my room a few minutes before the second plane hit.

I also remember seeing images from a highway near Pentagon shortly after it was attacked featuring some wreckage, so I never understood what the hell the truther's were going on about when they started claiming there wasn't any wreckage at the Pentagon site.

As I live fairly close to one of Stockholm's airports, a couple of hours after the attacks I started seeing and hearing military jets approaching, not sure if they were patrolling or just repositioning to other air bases. Our airforce was really small even at that point, so it probably made sense for them to move the few planes they had to bases around the major cities or airports.

Either way, the sound of jets flying over continued throughout the night.

I remember Bob Dylan released a new record that same day, so I must confess I was listening to that with the news on mute. I was 14 (too young for Dylan really), and the coming days at school it kinda dawned on me what had actually happened.

I was in my morning english class and on the way to Spanish is when I first heard about a plane hitting one of the world trade centers, didn't believe it and thought the kid was making it up (as he was a known liar) but the rest of the day in my classes it was just watching the news and talking about the events. I was in 7th grade at the time.

Let's see. I would have been 18 at the time, probably some time near the start of college (I took a year off to figure out WTF I wanted to do or if I even wanted to go to college), and I was actually awake in the morning which was almost never the case. I got a call from my ex internet girlfriend of all people asking if I knew what was going on. She told me to turn on the TV and I think it was just in time to see the north tower fall. I went and got my parents and I forget the rest of the day.

In a better place.

Edit: Didn't realize this was a 9/11 thread. Still, I guess my answer still stands.

Freshman year of high school, remember watching the news in the cafeteria and like most people we were totally captivated with what was going on cause it felt like a movie or something. Shit didn't really hit how real it was until you saw the people running for their lives away from the collapsing building and right before saw people jumping from the upper levels of the building to escape the fire.

I was 11. School went as usual. I live in Finland so the attacks didn't hit until school was over. I went home. I recall my brother turning on the TV and saying something about it. That's about it.

I was a sophomore in college. I had just gotten up to get ready for class, maybe it was 8:30 am at the latest. I had a 9:15 am Bible as Literature course. So I got up, took my shower, and headed back to my room. As I was getting dressed (I lived alone in a two person room, my roommate was shacking up with her boyfriend all semester) I put on the TV. I ended up seeing the moments just as the first plane hit and the repeated replays on the Today show. My brain didn't register what I was seeing for the first few minutes. At first I thought it must have been the anniversary of the earlier WTC attack that happened in 1993 and they were replaying something to do with that, but it dawned on me that, no, that was impossible. This was new and happening right then. I ran downstairs to the first floor and woke up my boyfriend (now husband) and told him to put on the TV and that a plane had hit the WTC. At that point we had no idea what was going on, really, and no one knew it was a coordinated effort. There was still discussion of whether it was an accident, although that seemed less and less likely as the minutes passed. Since I had to be at class, I ran back upstairs, got my stuff, and ran across campus. I wasn't late, but it didn't really matter.

We ended up not having class. My professor talked about what happened and we vaguely discussed what we knew, which at that point was very little. He ended up releasing us after about 15 minutes, so I ended up walking back across campus. I took a straight shot through the student center where the dining hall, snack bar, and various televisions were set up. It was all very surreal. People were crowded around the communal TVs just watching the news. I watched at one TV for a few minutes, but I felt weird just standing there without any friends or my boyfriend, so I ended up walking back to my dorm. I stopped to watch a few more minutes of the news on the first floor common room TV, then I continued down the hall. I ended up calling my parents from my boyfriend's room. I don't know why I called them, I just wanted to hear my mom and dad and know that they were there and safe. It's silly since we live in Maine and there would be no reason for them to be in danger, but I wasn't really being rational. Later that day, they called me back to let me know that they had taken our family dog, Sam, to the vet that morning before the attack and that he had to be put to sleep because his health was failing and he was in pain. It's the stupidest thing ever, but I was so mad that they hadn't told me during the first phone call that I almost blew up, but after I calmed down I realized that I was just upset and wasn't thinking clearly. Classes were cancelled for the rest of the day, so we mainly just stayed glued to the TV and our computers reading CNN and trying to figure out just what the heck was happening.

I remember getting up to go to school and going downstairs. I was in first grade and my dad was watching TV with my mom, looking extremely intently. I don't remember them even acknowledging me, or looking away from the television. I went back upstairs, and I don't remember the rest of the day.

When I talk to my dad about it, I remember him saying "It was so weird...I remember for days (weeks?) afterward the sky was just smoke. It was all grey."

When I was at school for the one year anniversary, we all sat outside on the track and talked about it. My Music teacher was out on surgery and her long-term sub played Taps on the bagpipes.

Jesus, you're all so young!

I was a junior at Ohio University, getting ready for class at 10 am, and part of my morning ritual was to check a few sites online: The Washington Post, Toronto Star, Sports Illustrated, and the Joe Rogan message board. I found out from the last of those, as a forum topic had been started by regular user "MAJOR_PRICK_IN_NJ" (might have been NEW_JERSEY; don't feel like checking now) and the title was similarity also in all caps and titled something like HOLY SHIT PLANE HITS WORLD TRADE CENTER. This was before the second plane hit, so I turned on CNN in my room and saw the second plane hit. One of my other four housemates was up at the same time, and we were watching in our respective rooms, yelling updates as we plucked them from various sites updating in real-time ("Third plane turned around and heading for DC!" "I've got Congress and State being evacuated!")

I had friends in DC, near the Pentagon (who were fine), but I begged off classes that morning and was actually the one to break the news to my Russian professor when I called to tell her I wasn't coming to class that morning. I found out later they just watched the news. My same housemate from earlier and I had an evening class on elections taught by a former Gore staffer, so we went to see what he would say. I don't remember anything from the class except this prick walking in on his cellphone, hanging up, and saying "Circuits to DC are all still jammed" in an amazingly transparent attempt to impress us...well, mainly to impress the females in the class.

I remember two things vividly from that day. The first is the sense of loss and hopelessness and confusion I felt, even while tucked away in tiny Athens, Ohio. It was possible to understand how terrible this was and be completely dumbstruck at the same time. The other thing I remember, more in hindsight, is how I got most of my news and updates online and from message boards like The Rogan Board. It's seemed to me ever since like me grandparents learned of Pearl Harbor on the radio. My parents learned about the assassination of JFK on TV or watched the coverage that weekend. My generation has real-time news sites and now things like Twitter and more informal means of reporting than even the websites maintained by traditional outlets.

AOL's welcome screen broke the news to me. Was at home at the time. I was actually working as an intern at a news radio station at the time - and my job was to call in cancellations from the airport near me, but I had the day off.

Went to a board friends and I posted on at the time, first post I saw just said something like "THAT WAS THE CRAZIEST THING I'VE EVER SEEN" and that pretty much set the tone.

I was in class, 10th grade High School, when it happened. I remember they actually gathered all the students into the cafeteria, with tv sets airing the news coverage. They wound up letting out early from school, with other students calling their parents to be picked up or just letting us go home on our own if we wanted. One of the most surreal moments of my life, for sure. I remember the teachers just saying this was the end of the world, a few times. Just absolutely surreal.

I was a freshman in high school, doing ISTEP testing in one of the computer labs for English or something. One of the kids mentioned we're (US) going to war with some middle eastern country. I just thought he was messing around. When we got back to the regular classroom the teacher turned on the tv, and I remember them showing the first tower falling and then the second tower fell while we were watching and saw the plane hit and all the dust that was throw up. I think that day was a scheduled half day.

I went home and all the cable channels were reporting on it, the non-news or broadcast channels, like Cartoon Network or Nick switched over to their broadcast parents new feed. I never saw anything like that before, hopefully never see anything like it again. I fell asleep in the afternoon. Later that evening, I remember going into the bathroom and just throwing up in the sink.

In school. Went back home for lunch where i heard the news. It was basically all people talked about in the afternoon and we were told those who took the bus needed to leave now because they needed to send all the buses to the Montreal and Mirabel airport with all the planes being sent there.

Honestly, I was too young to really remember...

It was strange growing up and hearing everybody talk about this enigma that somehow manages to be so intimate yet so universal at the same time. It was strange that, with the passage of time, I grew more and more sensitive towards it, and over years, had begun to grasp the significance of it all-- after years of hearing my elders' tell me of their experience. And though I do understand a bit more, hearing about it still seems so foreign. It's strange speaking to one who's just a year older than yourself yet speaks of such a thing with absolute clarity where in you lies emptiness.

Sophomore year in high school, my buddy in the hall went "did you hear about the plane hitting that building? Pretty cool right?" Then I got to chemistry and my teacher was told about the second building. You could see him drop his head and start to worry.

English class, that's when we stopped to watch the news. Our teacher said they were going to start hitting all the major cities, including us (Chicago). So that was a stupid thing to say.

What a day, man.