I remember that I was typing an email to a friend (actually the very first other land before time fan I ever got to know). I was telling her about deleted scene from Disney's Dinosaur, which were part of a Special Editon DvD's bonus materials. Suddenly the phone rang and I picked up.
It was my Dad calling from his working place. He told me to switch on the TV, and that (I cannot recall if he said one or two plane(s)) had crashed into the World trade Center. I don't remember for sure, but it must've been either around 3, or 4 pm middle European time, wich would either mean shortly after, or one hour after the second plane struck. I can't say for sure.
It is difficult to describe what I felt and thought at what I saw. Numbed may come close to it, but it doesn't really fit. In fact I was very weaving between being todally shocked and trying to stay calm and think about what was actually happening. I remember I was thinking of Pearl Harbor, especially after news of the plane that had crashed into the Pentagon came in. I was just horrified when I heard about another plane being sighted near Pittsburgh (it was shortly before the fourth plane crashed in Shanksville). I thought immediately of Harrisburg and that the nuclear power plant there might be the next target.
News were very confusing that day. Pictures were shown of a plane circling above Washington D.C. but I don't know to this day if it was the plane that was crashed into the Pentagon or if it was a plane that just waited for instructions on where to land.
I recall sending a few words mail to that friend of mine I had been writing to when my Dad called me. It was just one or two sentences. Something like "My goodness! It's so horrible what is happening in America!!!" or so.
I remember the grave mood that evening when my Dad returned home and we (my Dad, my sister, and I talked about what was happening and what was yet to come). We were all sure that many changes were to come. My sister told about how she learned about it. She was in the city walking along the shopping mile when her boy friend called her on the cell phone. My sister said it was really eerie, when she unlike most people around her knew about it, while cell phones started to ring everywhere.
In the evening they showed picutures of Palestenian children celebrating on the streets, and it was about that time they began to speculate on who had committed that attack. I think the name Osama Bin Laden was used that evening already. I remembered the name mainly from the attacks on US embasies in Kenia and Tansania in 1998 and Bill Clinton's attack on al Quaida camps in Afghanistan.
There was yet another thing I remembered. And this one thing more than anything else gave me a really nasty feeling. I remembered a talk I had little more than one year ago, during a student’s vacation in 2000. Back than my whole grade went to a little town near the Dutch border for a few days. One day we went to Amsterdam, and during that journey I was talking with a friend of mine, and somehow we came to the subject of terrorism. It was probably because it was not too long after the time when the intifada in Israel began and Palestinians blew up themselves in the streets just to kill as many Israelis as possible. What I said during that talk, and what gave me such a miserable feeling on September 11th was, that I was surprised that people who blew themselves up were ready to do so to kill just a few others. I think back then I said that I worried about terrorist trying to attack a nuclear power plant, and then, I remember this for sure, (we were just on a ferry in Amsterdam and the ferry went past a high storey bureau building) I mentioned the World Trade Center. I was thinking of the 1993 attack and wondered why those terrorist hadn’t made sure to use enough explosives to make the towers collapse. You can imagine the shudders the memory to that talk gave me on that September day about one year later.
