USC community shares stories of Sept. 11

Submit your own at http://www.dailytrojan.com/september11

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I was in fifth grade on September 11, 2001. I remember the principal knocking on my classroom’s door and calling my teacher into the hallway to tell her what had happened. When she came back, tears running down her face, we all knew that something was wrong. She just shook her head, sat down at her desk, and told us that we were being sent home.

When I got home, my father was waiting for me at the bus stop. This was strange; he was never home that early. Jubilant to see him, I eagerly asked why he was there. His words were simple: “The twin towers were destroyed.” I could not conceive what he meant until I got home and saw the news on television.

My mother wasn’t home. She was across the street with our neighbor and her seven- and six-year-old children. Their father worked on the 16th floor of the north tower. We didn’t find out that he was OK until five o’clock that night.

Nathan Berger
Junior, computer science and business administration

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I was a junior at USC, awakened from sleep in my bed at Troy Hall by a phone call from my then-girlfriend (now wife) Becky. Last year I wrote up a lengthy blog post about my memories of that day, including an audio clip of the phone call. Here’s an excerpt:

Becky called me Tuesday morning, September 11, at 6:50 a.m. — that’s 9:50 Eastern Time, more than an hour after the first plane hit the first World Trade Center tower, 13 minutes after the Pentagon was hit, and nine minutes before the South Tower of the WTC would collapse — [and said:]

“You guys, you ALL have to wake up! Both of the towers of the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon, have just been ATTACKED by TERRORISTS! Iran has just ran terrorists into these buildings and blew them up! Well, actually, they didn’t blow them up — they ran PLANES into these buildings! Wake up! Turn on your TV! Go watch the news! Seriously! This is, like, the biggest terrorist attack in the world! Like, in the history of the United States! Wake up! Turn on TV! Go watch! Seriously!”

Why Becky, amid the fog of war that morning, blamed “Iran” for the attacks remains an enduring mystery.

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Two girls who lived down the hall, Amy and Emily, both friends of [my roommate] Cameron’s and friendly acquaintances of mine, came down to our apartment, wanting some company as they watched the horror unfold on TV and dealt with the panicked rumors that were flying at this point. Somebody’s relative in Pennsylvania had heard from someone that there was a plane headed for L.A.; somebody else had heard the Library Tower was a target. Or maybe the Hollywood sign. Or maybe… us? Could USC be a target? I remember actually saying — not as a joke, genuinely trying to be reassuring — that surely, if the terrorists were going to attack a college in L.A., they would choose UCLA. I have no idea what my reasoning for this statement was — because UCLA is a public school? because, this being before USC football’s rise to prominence, UCLA felt more “famous” at that point in time? — but regardless, it seemed like the thing to say.

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I only had one class on September 11, 2001. As I mentioned earlier, it was a Political Science course titled Middle East Politics, at 3:30 PM. The professor, Mideast expert Richard Dekmejian, was fielding calls all day from local and national news organizations, but to his everlasting credit, he didn’t cancel class. He could have put the media attention ahead of his undergraduate students, but instead, he showed up and gave us a hastily conceived “teach-in” on the three groups who he felt could potentially be behind the attacks: the Iraqis, the Palestinians, and Al Qaeda. At that point, of course, we really had no idea which it was. But he gave an excellent, brief lesson on all three.

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At some point during the day, while en route to or from campus, I stopped at University Village and bought a cheap portable TV at one of the shops there. I felt an urgent need to be connected to the news at all times, so that if something else happened, I wouldn’t be stranded with only the limited information that my primitive cell phone at the time could provide.

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As night fell, the most pronounced local effect of the attacks on L.A.’s everyday life became extremely noticeable: there were no planes in the sky. That fact may not seem terribly significant to those who have never lived in Los Angeles, but see, the L.A. sky doesn’t really have stars. Instead, it has planes. The light pollution is so bad that it’s almost impossible to see anything except airplanes in the night sky — but LAX is so busy that there are virtually always several planes overhead, in any given direction, at any given time. So the absence of planes was downright eerie.

Even more eerie was my experience walking back from Ralph’s supermarket — where I had gone in hopes of finding a copy of the L.A. Times’s “Extra” edition — late that night, under that strange, blank sky. I felt this overwhelming sense of eerie quiet, like the entire city was hunkered down. And then I had this bizarre, split-second thought that a car turning into my path — well, turning onto the side street that I was about to cross — was perhaps aiming for me. This didn’t make any sense at all, and I immediately shook it off as absurd, but the mere fact that such a thought would even cross my mind was a perfect manifestation of the fear and paranoia that I think we all experienced that day.

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My first post-9/11 class was Constitutional Law on Wednesday the 12th, and I remember that I had a really, really hard time concentrating. The aforementioned Professor Gillman specifically announced at the start of class that he was going to do his lecture as normal, because — as he candidly acknowledged — he really didn’t know how else to process what had happened, or what else to do. It was the Rudy Giuliani approach (everyone get on with your lives, or you’re letting the terrorists win), a few days early.

Meanwhile, an impromptu memorial sprung up at Tommy Trojan, and American flags and patriotic sentiments were everywhere on campus. … I wanted to create some sort of memorial / patriotic tribute myself, so I made a “GOD BLESS AMERICA” sign, and hung it from my apartment’s front porch, along with an American flag that I bought, if memory serves, at the Noticias 32nd Street Market. The resulting display might seem a bit hokey in retrospect, but at the time, it felt almost important to do. Becky, for her part, made a sign that said “PRAY 4 NY” and placed it in her sixth-floor window.

Brendan Loy
Class of 2003, print journalism and political science

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I was in my fourth grade science class when the planes hit the buildings. I remember vividly my teacher leaving the classroom for several minutes and returning crying. We had no idea what was going on. After school, my mom told me that some people had flown planes into buildings in New York (I lived in Boston, so not far at all) and that our country was under attack. We were all very scared and we went home and watched the news all night.

Brendan
Sophomore, aerospace engineering

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I was in seventh grade when my mom woke me up and pulled me into the kitchen to watch what was happening on the TV (Torrance, Calif). I remember being very confused, like I was watching a bad movie. It didn’t really register until we were at school and my science teacher broke down after the first tower collapsed. Going to a private Lutheran school at the time … a lot a praying followed.

Colleen Hoffman
Research Assisstant III/Supervisor in Dr. Katrina Edward’s Lab, USC Biological Sciences Dept.

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I was in Las Vegas and had just gotten in from a casino a few hours before and had left the television on. I woke up to the news that the first building had been hit by a plane. As I was watching the second plane could be seen flying into the second tower. The news proclaimed that we were being attacked.

Being that I was half asleep, I thought it was a show or movie. I called my friend in the next room and told him to turn on the tv and asked if this was real. We both realized the reality of the moment.

Las Vegas news came on and the Air Force based was closed for security, the airport was shut down for about two days. Hoover Dam was blocked. People were renting and literally buying cars to get out of town.

Many people believed that The Strip would be a good next target. That day if you went on The Strip it was completely empty and the casinos as well, very surreal. I had flown in so the company I was working for rented a limo from L.A., had them drive to Vegas and pick us up and take us home. A time I will always remember.

Dave
Education

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As a management consultant I was called to the Pentagon on 9/11 for an early meeting in the D ring on the south side of the building closer to the river entrance. Two wedges over from the section that was hit inside the building no indication that anything was happening until the emergency evacuation lights kicked on orders were given to evacuate and people calmly went to their designated exits. Once outside it was clear all hell was breaking lose.

Having grown up in New Jersey with a view of the World Trade Centers from my parents house this event struck home in both places and I know people who were lost in both places.

3,000 miles from USC but the Trojan families in New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and Virginia all rallied to check on their own. Almost 10 years after leaving ‘SC that day and in the ones that followed I reconnected with so many Trojan friends that I hadn’t spoken to in so long. Those bonds are deep and in tragedy we see the true meaning of family.

Russell Klosk
Class of 1992, political science

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Our class was celebrating our professor’s birthday, when he received a phone call that made us all freeze after looking at his facial expression. He asked us to stop and take a moment for Breaking News, that was the moment we all saw the first plane hit one of the towers. I have to admit, it took us a few seconds to understand that this was not a movie, a demolition or another country. It was our precious USA under attack.

Sandra Ramos
Master of social work, class of  2013

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When I first heard about the attacks, I was sitting in my fourth grade class in Massachusetts. The school gave us a letter saying, “Some planes have crashed. Don’t worry.” We didn’t think anything of it at the time. Then the police came to the school to escort us all home, we began to worry. I got home, and my sister sat me down in front of the TV and for the first time I saw the devastation. But, while most people were horrified by the situation, it was worse than that for us. I had friends who lost parents that day. My sister watched as the principal came into the room and pulled a kid from the classroom. Everybody knew what that meant. When we went back school that week, we didn’t actually do anything. We sat all day in the auditorium with grief counselors trying to help us out. While most people here at USC look back and think about how sad it was that so many people died that day, it’s different for me. The memories are fading for them, but not for me. I lost people that day. While I was devastated that so many people died, I was more concerned about the few faces I would never see again.

Sarah
Sophomore, astronautical engineering

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I was in my fifth grade homeroom classroom when the towers were hit. It was one of the only rooms in the school with a television and they had herded us all in like innocent sheep to watch what the teachers deemed an “historic” event. All of a sudden there were hundreds of children crowded in the room, sobbing, watching the news coverage and footage of people jumping from the buildings. I will never forget watching people jumping- their bodies limp as they flung them out the windows. I remember saying to my friends how they looked like sacks of potatoes. I also said that the paper flying from the building was pretty.

One by one the children from the school were picked up by frantic parents who somehow believed that an elementary school in the middle of nowhere  was less safe than a home in a development. My brothers and sister and I were one of very few kids who were not shepherded home.

I remember arriving on the bus and seeing my Mom and Dad at the bottom of our painfully long and steep driveway. It had turned out that my dad was just outside of new york doing business, and my mother had spent the entire day trying to find him. All transportation and communication had been ceased, so my dad rented a car and just started driving home. The fear that I saw in my mothers eyes, even for that instant, is something that I will never be able to erase from my memory. It was that same fear that haunted her every time she picked up the phone- wondering if someone we knew was inside the towers.

My aunt owns an ambulance company in Connecticut — all available units were sent to Giants Stadium. None were used.

I feel that the reality of Sept. 11 is different for the people who are from the east coast that really felt the physical shock of it. That is in no way to discredit the emotions of those not from the area but our experience with the tragedy manifested itself differently. I live in Pennsylvania, where those brave men and women of flight 93 took over the plane that crashed about an hour and a half from my home. I had neighbors that wouldn’t leave their houses for weeks. I had friends at school who had lost parents and siblings- I even knew someone whose mother had hung herself after her husband was discovered dead in the rubble.

Even more important, I remember the goosebumps and the swell of pride that I felt walking down the street, seeing a flag hang from every stoop. It reminds me of the Pledge of Allegiance- “One nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” I wish there was a way to give justice to the victims of that day.

Despite the differences we have, 9/11 showed us that we are one nation, and we can not be divided. It’s like my Dad always said: When the going gets tough, the tough get going. September 11th is not a day for politics or lobbying, but rather one to celebrate and remember those nearly 3,000 mothers, fathers, firemen, policemen, and U.S. citizens that we will not have the pleasure of walking the earth alongside. This day is for them.

Liz
Sophomore, Spanish