As we approach the 15th anniversary of 9/11, read these recollections of the monumental event in our history.
Joseph Caddell, adjunct assistant professor of history
“I was home, getting ready to go to campus. I teach both here and at UNC-Chapel Hill. I didn’t have any classes at State that day. I had students at both campuses call me to ask me if I was watching television. That was the first that I knew about it. They asked me what I thought was happening.
“We started talking about how unlikely it was when the second plane hit the tower. Everyone was trying to come to grips with everything that was happening, and if it was a terrorist attack, who it was likely to be. We talked about Al-Qaeda pretty quickly, because we just had the USS Cole event in the autumn before. I had been giving presentations here at NC State in the fall and winter of 2000 on Al-Qaeda because of the attacks on the USS Cole. For a lot of Americans, I think the attacks on the Cole had made Al-Qaeda more commonly known.
“Classes weren’t cancelled, but became general discussions of what was happening. People were angry and worried. It’s funny how we’re all connected; everybody knew someone that could have been in the World Trade Center at the time. I had former students who had gone into the financial and investment world in New York. I had taught in Washington, D.C. for the military for years and I had friends in the Pentagon who I was worried about. Former students knew that I taught in Washington for the Department of Defense. I had retired from doing that in 1998, but suddenly, I was getting former students asking if I was okay.”
Richard Slatta, professor of history
“I was teaching at NC State and I had just gone out a week for research leave. 9/11 was a wonderful example of historic misunderstanding. This is the case in which people looked at history with the wrong answer. I was in Hawaii. Not surprisingly, when the events began airing on television, the immediate reaction of most Hawaiians was their own history in the Pearl Harbor attack that launched WW2 with Japan. What Hawaii did was shut down everything. They shut down all airlines, boat traffic between the islands; I had friends who got trapped on various islands.
“I was there researching. The Hawaiians didn’t understand the nature of a terrorist attack. You wouldn’t attack a place that’s relatively remote, like Hawaii; you would attack a city in the center of American commerce and politics in New York City. It’s an excellent example of people looking at history and reaching the wrong conclusion. Hawaii would have never been a target because it’s too remote and terrorism depends on publicity. It was interesting to hear Hawaiians try to process this event and how they viewed it compared to how I viewed it.
“I teach a course that involves terrorist tactics so one can look at history but you don’t always see the right thing. Of course with all of our military bases, North Carolinians were concerned with a possible attack somewhere. That made some sense, but Hawaii was not going to be a target so it took them about 3 days before they opened transportation just within the islands. They canceled flights, so our only information was coming from phone calls and television reports. Even though Hawaii was far away, the Hawaiians took it very personally and worried about it a great deal.
“It was frustrating, because I had cellphone contact, but it was difficult to get information from my family because of the nine-hour time difference. I was a little bit worried; we didn’t have very good sources of information there. What it reinforced to me, is that though they were far removed, they felt very much a part of the attack and apart of the response. We were having a history conference and the participants voted to continue on with the research and presentations. Their attitude was that if we just canceled things, essentially you were rewarding terrorism for forcing you to do other than what you wished. We’ve seen that reaction in Europe as well. They don’t want to shut down their cites; they want to show that they’ll continue regardless of what happens.”
Lt. Col. Timothy Hudson of ROTC
“I graduated from West Point in June 2001. At that point, I joined the Army as soon as I commissioned in June. It rained at our graduation; I’m not superstitious at all, but that means we’re going to war.
“I had a little bit of time off in the summer and went to what the Army calls the officer base corps for engineers in Missouri at a base called Fort Leonard Wood. Like every Army morning, it starts out early with physical training. We were going to go into the woods to do some land navigation. They give you a map and a compass and they tell you to find some different points through the woods. I went back to my room, but didn’t turn my TV on.
“I got ready to go for the day, and went back to meet out with my group and everyone was talking about it. I still didn’t understand the magnitude of what was going on. Someone brought their car out to the woods and we listened to the radio while the details unfolded. They shut down the military bases and we didn’t know if we’d get attacked or not; we didn’t know what was next. That moment really defined the past 15 years in the Army. I’ve been to Iraq twice for a total of two years. That single event has defined how I spent my time, energy and focus.”
William Kimler, associate professor and associate department head of the Department of History
“I took my wife to the airport; she was supposed to fly north. We thought ‘oh, it’s the perfect flight; it’ll be gorgeous.’ She was sitting on the plane when all of the flight attendants said the plane wasn’t taking off. She ran off the plane and called me and I raced to the airport. They closed the access road; they didn’t know what was coming next. We lived pretty close there, so I was able to get to the airport.
“We turned on the TV in time to see the live footage of the tower actually collapsing. So I went to campus, because I had a faculty senate committee meeting. We all showed up there around 1 p.m. and dazed at each other — stunned and mute for about 10 minutes. We realized we weren’t going to do any work; the world just stopped. We didn’t know what was going on; everything had come to a standstill.
“The next day, we had a memorial service on campus the next day. Things were shut down for traveling and everything but that Friday night was the opening concert night for the North Carolina Symphony downtown. We went down and I must say that was the most stirring National Anthem I’ve ever been standing amidst because the emotions were so raw. You could feel all of Raleigh in its sympathy and bonding. Often, we go to ball games and stand there and shuffle our feet, but not that time. We all drifted back into our normal lives. There was so much that we could follow about what’s going on through the television.
“For once, the whole country was riveted on one city. Everybody was watching New York and trying to think what they could do to help. It seemed obscene to do something normal. Back then, emergency services needed all the bandwidths for the phones, so you couldn’t instantly reach out to contact people. New York is the national cultural capital. It’s television and media; it has Broadway and Wall Street, etc. It’s a big cultural icon for us, which is direct and personal. I remember the weeks after noticing people who never praised New York City, praised it. In a way, it was our American capital, culturally.”
David Zonderman, head of Department of History
“Driving into campus, I heard about the plane hitting the World Trade Center. I think a lot of people assumed it was just a small plane hitting a radio tower or something at the top. We weren’t getting any details. I remember going into class and mentioning it to students and telling them that they may want to check out the news. A lot of us were still getting information off of TV or radio. I think that was a 75-minute class that morning.
“By the time I got out of my history class in Harrelson Hall, people would mill around in the round building talking to each other. One of my colleagues said, ‘Have you heard the news? They hit the Pentagon.’ At that moment, my jaw dropped and my knees got weak. I raced back to my office. I had an old radio and turned it on and started to get updates from NPR, National Public Radio. I listened to that all through the day.
“I taught a night class called ‘Public History,’ in which we trained graduate students for places like museums, libraries and archives. I had my graduate seminar that night. I started emailing all of the students and told them if they didn’t want to go to class I’d understand. It was really interesting, like 90% of the students wanted to meet to talk about it. It was almost like group therapy; we spent 3 hours talking. We immediately said, ‘Is this like Pearl Harbor or not? How will Americans remember this day 25 or 50 years ago? Will it become a sacred site or memorial?’ and that’s exactly what has happened.
“I haven’t been there, but they recently opened up a museum as well. It was interesting for me, because I had still not seen the TV all day; all I heard was radio until about 10p.m. I had a delayed reaction in sense; I knew what went on but had not seen the visual images. I know my kids were in the public school; my younger one was in kindergarten. I remember we got a robo-call from the school system and it said, ‘Your children are safe, we’re not canceling school.’ My younger son had very vague memories. My older son, who was in middle school, watched vague coverage. That’s another interesting thing as a teacher; when I teach about Pearl Harbor in my History class, up until about this year I’ve been able to say to students, ‘Think of where you were on 9/11. That’s how your parents and grandparents felt during Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.’ Starting this year, all of the freshmen were too young. That window is now closing with the incoming freshmen.
Daniel Bolger, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and professor of military history
“I was a colonel when that happened in the Army. I was the planning chief for an organization in Norfolk, Virginia. It was called ‘United States Joint Forces Command.’ They had the responsibility for the land and water defense in the United States. It was left over from the Cold War. The air defense of the US was out in the in Cheyenne Mountains in Colorado with the US Canadian NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command], which was also left over from the Cold War. No one expected an attack like we got on 9/11.
“I was on duty that day and I remember being called up to the general’s area and the guy said ‘a plane just hit the World Trade Center,’ thinking in terms that we’d have to send over medical supplies, doctors, etc. We were watching the TV and we saw the second plane hit and the general I was talking to was a Special Forces guy from the Air Force and he turned to me and said, ‘That’s not an air traffic problem; that’s a terrorist.’
“Because I was at Norfolk, that command it housed at a Navy base. That entire naval fleet had all gone to sea; by the time I came home that night, they had all gone to sea. Our Marines were everywhere with machine guns. Nobody knew what was going to happen next. My children were both at school, and they didn’t even let school out early because they didn’t know what to do. When I got home, my wife looked at me and said, ‘This isn’t going to be over in a couple of weeks. This is going to be like Vietnam.’ I thought she was crazy, but she was right.”
Thomas Parker, professor of history, ancient history and archeology
“I teach on Tuesday and Thursdays in the fall so it was a Tuesday morning. I had taught my morning class in Roman History and had walked out of there having no idea. I ran into a student assistant who worked in the history department, which was then in Harrelson Hall. He told me that a plane had crashed into the Twin Towers.
“Like a lot of people, I just assumed that it had been some kind of accident. We had a TV monitor in the department that we could hook up with rabbit ears in those days. We turned it on just in time to see the second plane hit the twin towers. This was no accident; something terrible was going on. I was just going to go to teach my afternoon class. My students were mostly there and then I went home to watch the TV.
“I worked as an archeologist in the Middle East and then it became clear that the hijackers were all of Middle Eastern origin. There had been other terrorist attacks before, but this one was off the scale. Remember that 15 years ago, students were much less connected. There were no smart phones and you had to go to your room to go online. News didn’t spread as instantaneously as it does now.”
Bob Patterson, alumni distinguished professor of crop science
“I was lecturing when my secretary brought our class the devastating news, and I immediately stopped the lecture, and our class found a radio, and listened spellbound for a long time. Students slowly drifted off, silently for the most part — very reflective. Our faculty huddled, and wondered what would happen next … We felt certain that there would be more … and yes, there was.”
