09-11-2011, 01:58 PM
I know what you mean, Reinhard. I came home early that day for some reason - think I maybe started work at 7 am, and was done at 3 pm, and took the 3:39pm train out of Oslo. It was the day after our parliamentary election in 2001, and the labor party government had just lost the election.
My dad met me at the station at 4:10 pm CET (which would be about 10:10 am in New York), and told me that he had been watching a news report on BBC about a plane that had crashed into the World Trade Center when another plane had hit the neighboring building.
By the time I got home and turned on the TV to CNN, the first tower had already fallen. The second tower fell about 10-15 minutes later, as I was watching in horror. My wife, who is an American, and who was seven months pregnant at the time, could not bear to watch. She went to the kitchen, and closed the door. I spent the afternoon walking between the kitchen, and the TV in the living room, where the sound was turned down so my wife would not have to listen.
It was about 7 hours after the attack before I sent the first email to relatives in the US, late in the evening, after my wife had fallen asleep, recording my first reactions. My time must have been off by one hour in that first email - I had been told a little after 4pm, not a little after 3pm :
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"We have been watching the TV news tonight too. My dad told us about it a little after 3 pm our time, just minutes after the second plane had hit the world trade center. He had been watching BBC live coverage of about the first crash and fire when the second plane hit.
I checked the location the fourth plane came down - United 175, I think it was, out of Newark or Boston. Came down near a town called Shanksville in SW Pennsylvania. Pretty much on a direct line between Pittsburg, PA and Washington DC, not too far from Thurmond, MD, where Camp David is located.
No idea what they were going for - probably some other target in DC, and what happened - maybe the pilots refused to allow themselves to be hijacked. Who knows ? But that plane crashing probably saved a lot more people on the ground somewhere.
I hope they find the bastards who organized this. And I hope everybody else agrees with the brits and israelis - whoever organized this is an enemy of *every* civilized nation in the world, and we should pool our resources to hunt them down and kill them."
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The next day, nobody was getting any work done at my job - everybody was just congregating into small groups around TV sets and computer monitors, talking in hushed tones about what had happened, and watching the news over and over again. Horror was giving way to anger, and the determination that whoever had ordered this needed to be found and killed.
When it was announced in the evening of the 12th that NATO had declared that they would invoke section five of the North Atlantic Treaty (that the attack on the US was to be treated as an attack on all of us), most people seemed grimly satisfied. Our first troops deployed to Afghanistan (in December 2001) were special forces troops, plus mine clearance and EOD groups. As of the end of 2010, a total of about 7000 of my countrymen have served in Afghanistan during the last decade, with ten killed and several hundred wounded.
I must confess that I felt joy when I heard that US special forces had finally killed Osama Bin Laden this year. As Winston Churchill put it after Second Alamein: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning".
Stein
My dad met me at the station at 4:10 pm CET (which would be about 10:10 am in New York), and told me that he had been watching a news report on BBC about a plane that had crashed into the World Trade Center when another plane had hit the neighboring building.
By the time I got home and turned on the TV to CNN, the first tower had already fallen. The second tower fell about 10-15 minutes later, as I was watching in horror. My wife, who is an American, and who was seven months pregnant at the time, could not bear to watch. She went to the kitchen, and closed the door. I spent the afternoon walking between the kitchen, and the TV in the living room, where the sound was turned down so my wife would not have to listen.
It was about 7 hours after the attack before I sent the first email to relatives in the US, late in the evening, after my wife had fallen asleep, recording my first reactions. My time must have been off by one hour in that first email - I had been told a little after 4pm, not a little after 3pm :
----------------------------------------
"We have been watching the TV news tonight too. My dad told us about it a little after 3 pm our time, just minutes after the second plane had hit the world trade center. He had been watching BBC live coverage of about the first crash and fire when the second plane hit.
I checked the location the fourth plane came down - United 175, I think it was, out of Newark or Boston. Came down near a town called Shanksville in SW Pennsylvania. Pretty much on a direct line between Pittsburg, PA and Washington DC, not too far from Thurmond, MD, where Camp David is located.
No idea what they were going for - probably some other target in DC, and what happened - maybe the pilots refused to allow themselves to be hijacked. Who knows ? But that plane crashing probably saved a lot more people on the ground somewhere.
I hope they find the bastards who organized this. And I hope everybody else agrees with the brits and israelis - whoever organized this is an enemy of *every* civilized nation in the world, and we should pool our resources to hunt them down and kill them."
----------------------------------------
The next day, nobody was getting any work done at my job - everybody was just congregating into small groups around TV sets and computer monitors, talking in hushed tones about what had happened, and watching the news over and over again. Horror was giving way to anger, and the determination that whoever had ordered this needed to be found and killed.
When it was announced in the evening of the 12th that NATO had declared that they would invoke section five of the North Atlantic Treaty (that the attack on the US was to be treated as an attack on all of us), most people seemed grimly satisfied. Our first troops deployed to Afghanistan (in December 2001) were special forces troops, plus mine clearance and EOD groups. As of the end of 2010, a total of about 7000 of my countrymen have served in Afghanistan during the last decade, with ten killed and several hundred wounded.
I must confess that I felt joy when I heard that US special forces had finally killed Osama Bin Laden this year. As Winston Churchill put it after Second Alamein: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning".
Stein