I was living in Biloxi.
I was asleep when the first plane struck. My housemate, Sean, knocked on the door to my room to wake me with the news that a plane just hit the World Trade Center and I needed to come watch. Sleepy-eyed and incoherent, I stumbled off my futon and joined him on the couch in the living room, where we sat glued to the TV.
At that point, no one knew what had happened yet - was it as accident? Was it on purpose? We watched the news reports ad footage and saw the second plane fly straight into the other tower. Both of us said, “Oh my God…” at the same time. At that point, we knew what everyone else in the world knew: this was no accident.
We watched as people streamed out of the buildings and ran screaming, and watched, horrified, as desperate people who knew they were going to their deaths anyway, threw themselves off the building from dozens of stories up. To me, that was the most unfathomable thing and are the images that are burned into my memory the most - that people faced with a fiery and horribly painful death were throwing themselves in scores from the towers in abject terror.
We watched the towers come down and couldn’t believe this was happening. Sean turned to me and we stared at each other. “We have to go in to work,” one of us said. Jamie, our third housemate, was already gone, but we weren’t due in until later that day - Sean, for his evening shift, and me, because I had worked overtime the day before shooting football widows for the first Monday Night Football.
The newsroom was chaotic and frenzied. Phones rang off the hook, editors barked orders, and reporters and photographers scurried around to get out the door to cover everything. I ran, too.
I photographed countless businesses putting “God Bless America” on their marquees, American flags suddenly flying everywhere, frantic mothers who were pulling their children out of school - photos I couldn’t use because they were all too scared to stop and give me their identifying information, people filling up gas cans because of news reports the pumps were closing. I sat in line at a station myself for an hour, listening to the radio, afraid that if the gas stations really WERE closing, I wouldn’t have enough gas to do my job the next day.
I didn’t eat that day - no one did. We spend the whole day documenting what was going on to put it in the paper, documenting people’s shock and horror and shoving down our own ability to process what was happening ourselves so we could do our jobs.
When I finally got home late that night, I pulled my car in the drive, cut the engine and left the radio on, listening. I laid my head on the steering wheel and cried and cried, finally able to stop long enough to let myself feel SOMETHING.
All air traffic had been grounded and the skies were eerily clear, but we heard jets take off from the Air Force Base all night - terrifying sounds because we knew they must know things that we didn’t.
That’s what I remember.
Where were you?