9/11/01 - Janna's Story

From the 9/11 Reader's Project - here's Janna's story:

I was still living at home with my parents and I was asleep that morning. My sister ran downstairs and woke me up saying that a commercial airliner had crashed into a skyscraper in NYC… something that never happens, of course, so she thought I’d like to check the news. We both sat on the couch together watching a shocked Katie Couric and Matt Lauer trying to determine what happened when the 2nd plane hit the other WTC tower… and our jaws hit the floor. I quickly popped a blank tape in the VCR to record the live coverage. I knew this would be a turning point in our country… nothing like this had ever happened before. Nothing would ever be the same. It was then that we were really scared and realized that this was a terrorist attack so we called our parents… our other sister was at school. We were hoping that no more planes would go down… but quickly realized that planes were going down in and near D.C. too so we just had no idea what to expect. It was horrifying. We sat and watched the news coverage with a mixture of fear and heartbreak… so aware that countless people died right as we were watching. My stomach was in knots. We just sat and watched and prayed and the whole thing just played out on live TV. We were absolutely horrified as the events continued to unfold. We were crying as we watched the towers fall… the scenes of people running away and out of the cloud of debris will never leave my mind. The shouts of people watching in horror as people jumped from burning floors near the top of the towers shortly before that. It was like watching evil pouring it’s wrath on a city… and my heart just broke for all of the lives lost and the loved ones who were left behind. So much devastation in such a relatively short amount of time. We feared for President Bush’s life because of the unknown remaining targets that were in the enemy’s sight. We wondered who the enemy was. In the days that followed, I was so inspired by how our country came together… how everyone rallied behind President Bush as he declared that we would find out who did this and bring justice. There were American flags everywhere… so much patriotism! It’s a shame to see how that unity has disintegrated over the years and how everybody seems to make Bush into the enemy now. People are forgetting who the enemy really is.