Where were you on 9/11?

[Bo Diddley]

I was in section 133. Row 6.

Section 135. Row 12. We added another seat this year which may have moved us a little farther back.

[myboynoah]

I may have shared this. We were in Tokyo and mrs. myboynoah and I had just returned from a date. The kids were in bed and I was checking the news on TV before turning in myself. There was some weird report about a plane hitting one of the towers, so I decided a watch to little bit more. Then the second plane hit. I was up the rest of the night. I wandered outside a couple of times during the night to check the perimeter of our housing compound. I noticed I wasn't alone in doing so.

[happyone]

I was at work in the DISA bldg on Hill AFB - Spent most of the morning watching the Big Screen TV in the Break room with everyone else in the Bldg

[dabrockster]

Came across this today. Scrolling through and reading about some of the people who lost their life helps bring it back to focus and reserving them. Even after so long.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8314ATb/

[LVAllen]

Surprised I haven't commented in this thread. I was on my mission. My companion had called up a member to confirm that night's splits, and the member was shaken, said he couldn't talk, that we were under attack, and that we should call our mission president. Not having access to the news, we had no idea what that meant. But, being cheerful young missionaries, we figured we knows what out mission president would say anyway - get to work. So we went tracting. Didn't have any success, but we did find someone home. He looked at us like... do you guys not know what's going on? He invited us in, and we watched the news for a bit. Elder Law tried to slip in something about finding peace in a troubled world. We kept tracting, Elder Law tried that same line a few more times, and we ultimately gave up and went back home. Later that night, we visited a pretty butch female member of the ward who had served in the Navy. Don't remember why we were there. Bush started speaking in the background, and she went to parade rest as we watched. That week was also transfers, and I had buddies who bounced around the mission for the next week while they figured out alternate flights, since all their flights had been cancelled.

[bluegoose]

Surprised I haven't commented in this thread. I was on my mission. My companion had called up a member to confirm that night's splits, and the member was shaken, said he couldn't talk, that we were under attack, and that we should call our mission president. Not having access to the news, we had no idea what that meant. But, being cheerful young missionaries, we figured we knows what out mission president would say anyway - get to work. So we went tracting. Didn't have any success, but we did find someone home. He looked at us like... do you guys not know what's going on? He invited us in, and we watched the news for a bit. Elder Law tried to slip in something about finding peace in a troubled world. We kept tracting, Elder Law tried that same line a few more times, and we ultimately gave up and went back home. Later that night, we visited a pretty butch female member of the ward who had served in the Navy. Don't remember why we were there. Bush started speaking in the background, and she went to parade rest as we watched. That week was also transfers, and I had buddies who bounced around the mission for the next week while they figured out alternate flights, since all their flights had been cancelled.

Maybe you've mentioned before, but where were you serving?

[LVAllen]

Maybe you've mentioned before, but where were you serving?

Minnesota Minneapolis. At the time, I was in the Twin Cities area. It made the total lack of air traffic extra weird.

[Northwestcoug]

I just saw a statistic that over 100 million people in the country were born after 9/11. It is a distant memory for us, and not even one for a lot of the younger population.

[The_Tick]

I just saw a statistic that over 100 million people in the country were born after 9/11. It is a distant memory for us, and not even one for a lot of the younger population.

The crazy part is the amount of stuff I see out there now where the younger generations don't believe that it happened.

[Northwestcoug]

The crazy part is the amount of stuff I see out there now where the younger generations don't believe that it happened.

Sort of related, but my daughter just found out one of her co-residents believes the moon landing was faked.

[Bo Diddley]

I was working the graveyard shift, so was in bed but I couldn't sleep. So I got up and was on the computer just browsing (desktop with the crt screen). I remember seeing a headline in the news section 0n the Yahoo home page that said a plane had hit one of the towers. I pictured it being a small plane. Then later a second plane had hit. So I turned on the news right around the time the first tower fell or maybe just after and it was a replay. I think I spent the rest of the day just watching the news before going back into work that night.

[Pelado]

Surprised I haven't commented in this thread. I was on my mission. My companion had called up a member to confirm that night's splits, and the member was shaken, said he couldn't talk, that we were under attack, and that we should call our mission president. Not having access to the news, we had no idea what that meant. But, being cheerful young missionaries, we figured we knows what out mission president would say anyway - get to work. So we went tracting. Didn't have any success, but we did find someone home. He looked at us like... do you guys not know what's going on? He invited us in, and we watched the news for a bit. Elder Law tried to slip in something about finding peace in a troubled world. We kept tracting, Elder Law tried that same line a few more times, and we ultimately gave up and went back home. Later that night, we visited a pretty butch female member of the ward who had served in the Navy. Don't remember why we were there. Bush started speaking in the background, and she went to parade rest as we watched. That week was also transfers, and I had buddies who bounced around the mission for the next week while they figured out alternate flights, since all their flights had been cancelled.

On your mission? You're so young!

[Northwestcoug]

9/11 was a wake up call for our national security, and most of us were eager to use any means necessary to prevent another attack. That national sentiment has had consequences:

The Patriot Act granted sweeping powers to the federal government. It gave agents new authority to use secret search warrants on Americans and made it easier to monitorthem around the clock. It authorized the widespread collection of citizens’ digital information without any warrant at all, and made it a crime for service providers to tell anyone what the federal government was doing. It also allowed the government to detain some foreigners indefinitely without ever giving them a trial.

Civil libertarians questioned these new powers’ connection to 9/11. Some provisions had long been on the wish lists of federal law enforcement agencies, and it was not clear that the new powers would have prevented the attacks. They also cautioned that if history was any indication, the government would use the new powers primarily for routine law enforcement. They urged Americans to imagine those powers in the hands not of an altruistic and conscientious president, but one with little respect for norms, institutions or democratic principles.

The civil libertarians were mostly ignored, and as one new threat followed another — Iraq, ISIS, “lone wolves” — the president’s reach continued to grow. Across the Bush and Obama administrations, the commander in chief was given, or simply took, new powers to prosecute, shut down and seize the assets of alleged terrorist groups and their supporters. With the arrival of armed drones, the president assumed the right to remotely assassinate anyone, anywhere outside U.S. borders, at any time, including American citizens…
The faith we put in government over the past 25 years was, in a way, understandable. In the days after 9/11, as the country grappled with an unimaginable tragedy, the moment demanded patriotism, unity and camaraderie. As cases of alleged terrorists being killed or captured grew, and no major foreign attacks occurred at home, hawks claimed the civil liberties sacrifices were worth it. It was easy to miss the slow, steady erosion of our freedoms. When abuses did make news, we were reassured that while our presidents might make mistakes or skirt the Constitution, they did so in good faith. Our democratic process simply wasn’t capable of producing a head of state who could rule with the ambition of a tyrant.

Well, welcome to the worst-case scenario. We now have a president who is using the post-9/11 counterterrorism powers for his own ends. He is declaring national emergencies where none exist and is targeting his political enemies as if they were terrorists. He is carrying out reckless, extrajudicial executions on the high seas, while members of his administration joke about the possibility that some of those killed were innocent. He and his administration have encouraged officers from the Department of Homeland Security, created after 9/11 to stop attacks by foreigners, to engage in racial profiling and harassment of Americans. In the name of national security, he conflates criticism with treason, protest with terrorism, dissent with sedition.

the whole essay needs to be a national reckoning.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/o...-politics.html

[Moliere]

I was in Wymount. MJ and I had returned to Provo after I did an internship in Illinois. We’d driven back in August (that’s a crazy story for another time) and had just gotten settled into our new two bedroom apartment. MJ was about halfway through the pregnancy with Moli Jr. it was an early morning before my classes started and I remember trying to get the internet to work so I think I was calling the helpdesk and decided to turn on the tv. This was pretty much right after the first plane had hit so the coverage was just starting. It was surreal but I don’t think it sunk in just yet what was happening.

I had my finance class that morning (8 or 9am, can’t remember exactly) so I rode my bike down to the Tanner Building and went to class. The class and professor had turned on the news in the classroom and we just watched the news for the entire class time. By then the second plane had hit (maybe it hit when I was watching in my apartment, I can’t remember). The next class was an Operations class and that professor came in and turned off the projector and said that he acknowledged what was happening but that we were still going to have a regular class, so we did.

One silver lining from the whole thing is that my finance professor was so shaken up by it all that, at the end of the semester, he decided that instead of a final exam, students could elect to do four hours of service and just keep their current grade. This was a very hard finance class with a final that was known to be very difficult, so I took the alternative and did the service.

In all, I was affected by 9/11 but not as much as most people. I was so far removed from it all and as a college student that was engrossed in the accounting program I didn’t think much of it. Accounting had its own problems at the time anyway with Andersen and Enron and all the other corporate fraud issues, and those were more directly impactful to my profession. It was very much a defining moment of my generation but it’s hard for me to say that Sept 11 is an unusually significant day in my life.

[Pelado]

I was in Wymount. MJ and I had returned to Provo after I did an internship in Illinois. We’d driven back in August (that’s a crazy story for another time) and had just gotten settled into our new two bedroom apartment. MJ was about halfway through the pregnancy with Moli Jr. it was an early morning before my classes started and I remember trying to get the internet to work so I think I was calling the helpdesk and decided to turn on the tv. This was pretty much right after the first plane had hit so the coverage was just starting. It was surreal but I don’t think it sunk in just yet what was happening.

I had my finance class that morning (8 or 9am, can’t remember exactly) so I rode my bike down to the Tanner Building and went to class. The class and professor had turned on the news in the classroom and we just watched the news for the entire class time. By then the second plane had hit (maybe it hit when I was watching in my apartment, I can’t remember). The next class was an Operations class and that professor came in and turned off the projector and said that he acknowledged what was happening but that we were still going to have a regular class, so we did.

One silver lining from the whole thing is that my finance professor was so shaken up by it all that, at the end of the semester, he decided that instead of a final exam, students could elect to do four hours of service and just keep their current grade. This was a very hard finance class with a final that was known to be very difficult, so I took the alternative and did the service.

In all, I was affected by 9/11 but not as much as most people. I was so far removed from it all and as a college student that was engrossed in the accounting program I didn’t think much of it. Accounting had its own problems at the time anyway with Andersen and Enron and all the other corporate fraud issues, and those were more directly impactful to my profession. It was very much a defining moment of my generation but it’s hard for me to say that Sept 11 is an unusually significant day in my life.

I also had an 8 or 9 am class in the Tanner Building that day. Corporate Tax. The professor acknowledged the extraordinary circumstances of the day but we still went through with the material for the day.