It was the last day of the summer holidays. My family was out buying groceries while I got up late and turned on the TV out of boredom. When I was zapping through the channels, I stumbled across a news channel that was showing live footage of the burning towers. A few minutes later, I saw the first tower crumble live on television and was stunned. At that time, I thought that some tragedy had happened and hadnt seen the footage of the plane crushing into the tower, or of desperate people jumping out of the windows, yet. I thought that the building had certainly been evacuated before it crumbled, so I didnt realize the magnitude of the human tragedy of it. It took me several days to truly understand this aspect of 9/11, the horror and the tragedy of those trapped inside the towers.
A little later in their coverage, the German news channel echoed the reports from their American colleagues and called it a terrorist attack. They also started showing a replay of the plane crushing into the tower, and then the second tower crumbling. By that point, it had dawned on me that I was witnessing an epoch-making event.
When my family came home, I immediately ran towards and told them that the WTC had been destroyed in a terrorist attack - it felt like huge news to me that they should know as soon as possible. They didnt really react, were too busy doing their own stuff. I think they also didnt realize the gravity of this event just yet.
I was a bit older than most of you guys, was 16, about to enter 11th grade and had just started getting interested in politics. It was obviously a big story even here in Germany, but our public life didnt come to a halt or anything like that - many, if not most, Germans didnt hear about it until the evening news. Despite this, and despite my family no-selling it, I personally knew very early on, about 10 minutes after turning into the live coverage, that this was huuuuuuge. I didnt have any in-depth knowledge of domestic (let along foreign) policy yet, but intuitively, I knew that this attack would change the entire world, and not for the better...
A couple of years later, while I was at college, a friend of mine who was serving in the German military was deployed to Afghanistan where he got almost killed when he drove a jeep over a landmine.
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Dunno if any of this is contributing anything substantial, but I wanted to share my memories/outside-perspective.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 11 2018 12:50pm