Nine Years Ago
I was sitting on a bus in Moscow waiting to catch a flight to Siberia. We had been in the air for nine hours so we had no idea that we were actually one of the last international flights out of JFK in New York City. Our interpreter has run in to the airport to confirm our flight time and get a few things for the team. He said that the TV and radio were both saying that the World Trade Centers had been bombed and that they had “fallen down”. Everyone on the bus was sure that he had misunderstood. We tried to explain what the World Trade Center building were, how large they were, and how there was no way that they had “fallen down”. We walked in the airport to find out that we were wrong.
As we were sitting on the runway waiting to fly out of Moscow to and into Siberia I borrowed a satellite cell phone and called my brother back in the States. He tried to explain what was going on but it was pretty much impossible to grasp. After our brief conversation I tried to fill in the rest of the team on the idea of three planes being used as weapons. We flew on to Siberia and sat in our hotel rooms watching the footage of plains flying into the World Trade Center buildings. We could onlu understand occasional words. “George Bush”, “New York City”, “Pennsylvania”, “Osama Bin Laden”, “Condoleezza Rice” and “Al Qaeda”.
Every morning I would go down to the front desk of the hotel we were staying in. The hotel manager spoke no English but each morning she would hand me a ripped piece of newspaper with the names of Russian TV shows. She would circle the ones that were news shows so I would know what time they would be talking about the attacks back home.
Eight days later we weren’t completely sure we were going to be able to fly home. After a long mechanical delay we finally boarded a flight to New York City. The flight from Moscow to New York was packed with people who had been stranded after international flights were temporary grounded. I still remember landing in New York City. There was still a dark debris cloud pierced by the giant work lights at ground zero. The plane cut through the debris, landed, and the pilot said “Welcome to the United Stated of America.” Everyone on the plane cheered. We were all so glad to be home. The security at JFK was heavy. We flew on a completely empty flight from New York to Atlanta where we were greeted by our friends and family.
To this day it still feels weird to remember 9/11. Being overseas it was like we knew it was real but we were so sheltered that it’s hard to know what it must have been like back here in the States.
Where were you on September 11, 2001?
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