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I was sitting in Spanish 1. The teacher was hated amongst all students, but what she said about the event was just horrible. A school office worker came into the classroom and whispered something to her. A minute later she said, and I quote, "A plane just flew into one of the Twin Towers in New York, oh well, back to where we were."

The class after that was Engineering Drawing. We had TVs in that class which were turned on to CNN. There I saw, for the first time, flames bursting out of the tower. Smoke billowing out covering the other building.

Then I saw the second plane crash into the other tower, live. I was shocked and horrified. After that, I had lunch, just to go back to History from 1500 and more CNN. There I saw the tower fall.

It is all so fresh in my mind. I remember it like it was yesterday. I can tell you almost everything said that day, everything that I heard. From then on, being an American citizen was different.

One thing that sickened me was Arabian people being FORCED to show their American pride. People became so prejudice against them that they HAD to act like AMERICA was their life. Now i'm not saying that that is a bad thing, but because they had no other choice but to do so was appualing.

3 years after the fact, and it still feels like yesterday.

I was awoken by my radio alarm clock at 5am as usual. The announcer said "two hijacked airliners have flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York and both buildings have collapsed."

I remember sitting bolt upright in bed. I turned on the TV and watched footage of the second impact and the towers collapsing. I phoned my best friend and said "turn on your TV. There's something happening now that will change the course of world history."

I loaded my TV in the car and went to my 7am business meeting. I expected nobody to turn up but all 30 of the invited guests arrived and I told them, one by one, what was happening. Some didn't believe me. We watched the TV for a while and one by one they all left in a daze.

After everyone had left I went to my office. At that time I shared office space with two guys who had just moved to NZ from London and were both sharemarket traders, who worked on the trading floor. They personally knew many, many people who worked in the World Trade Center. One of them asked me to go out for a walk with him and we stopped in a park where we sat on a step while he cried and cried. Over the next few days we learned just how many friends he had lost and I cried too, for people I've never met.

A small note: This was September 12, 2001. September 11 was an ordinary day like any other day, due to the international date line.

I was in beginings of a very tough point in my life(cheating wife with divorce soon to follow) I woke up after a heavy night of drinking about 5 min. before the towers fell. As sick as it made me, yes it was the pictures on the TV not the vodka, it did lift some of the stress that I was feeling about my personal situation. I know it's hard to say that any positive came from this but I think watching everything on TV, knowing that it wasn't me or anyone I know in one of the towers or on one of the planes, thinking about what the families of those people were having to deal with, and all those thoughts in my head about how sick the people who did that had to be, all those things probabaly saved my life. I knew at that point no matter how tough things will get with my life, none of it will compare with the things that tousands, maybe millions of people had to deal with in just a couple of hours.
These days I have more problems with the personal side of this story than the global side (the divorce has only been final for about a year) but I know that when things get tough, it could always be worse.
I hope this didn't sound conceded, but that's the way it happend to me.