I cannot honestly believe that five years have gone by since my generation’s “Pearl Harbor”. I watched the Flight 93 movie Saturday night, which I had no intention of doing, but I was flipping through the channels and it happened to be just starting so I kind of got sucked in. I thought they did a good job of it and while I am generally not an emotional guy I found myself teary-eyed several times throughout the movie and even felt my heart racing at some spots.

It’s amazing how clear I remember that day five years ago and yet can barely recollect what I did last week. I was at the Bradford School on the third floor of the Gulf Tower in downtown Pittsburgh, a few months shy of finishing up my programming degree. I started at 8am and went through the first class and moved to the next one at 9. A few minutes afterwards I remember one of the guys coming in late laughing about how “some idiot flew a plane into the World Trade Center”. Everyone kind of laughed about it because we had no idea how serious it was. We all had the impression that it was some jackass trying to do a stunt or something in a little prop plane and he got too close to one of the buildings and grazed it. We just went right back to the class subject at hand and then a few minutes later another person came in and said, “You guys have got to see this.”

We all got up and went down the hall to another room where they had a television and saw the devastation. By this time both towers were hit and only a few minutes had gone by when they suddenly announced that another plane had hit the Pentagon. I remember calling my mother on the phone and I was actually able to get through the first time. She was watching it as well. I told her I was going to go home shortly (I was becoming nervous about being in one of the tallest buildings in Pittsburgh) and I would call her back later. As soon as I hung up the phone an administrative staff member came in and told us that the FBI was giving evacuation orders to leave the building immediately. We were right nextdoor to the Federal Building so they were probably being cautious but sometimes I think back and wonder if they knew that Flight 93 was heading in our direction.

We all filed out of the building and everyone was standing out on the sidewalks and even into the streets looking up into the sky to see if they could see anything. I remember my buddy, Justin, was standing with me and I told him I wasn’t going to hang around and was heading straight to my car to get out of the city as soon as possible. I was worried about something happening downtown and also about being stuck in a lot of traffic and people getting panicky if things got worse. He said he was going to go to where his mother was working a few blocks away and I told him that he should probably just get of the city and that I would be more than willing to take him home if he wanted, but he insisted on going to his mother’s workplace. I remember telling him to be careful, I headed straight for my car. I called my older sister and told her to turn on the TV. She hadn’t been watching it so she had no clue yet what was happening. I also placed a call to my roommate, Jason, because I knew he delivered all over downtown for his job. I got his voice mail and told him to stay away from the city if he hadn’t come down yet.

I got in my car and surprisingly traffic was not bad yet at all. I didn’t go home because our satellite was out of commission for a few days so I went down to the Waterfront area to Cap City, the restaurant that I worked at in the evenings. They weren’t open yet, but I knew people would be there getting ready to open up. When I got there they were all in the bar watching the TV. I remember Danielle was crying because her boyfriend lived in New York and she couldn’t get ahold of him. I looked up at the television and saw that the South Tower had collapsed since the time I had left downtown.

Only a few moments after I started watching a CNN banner suddenly went across the top of the TV that said another plane had crashed in Pittsburgh. I almost freaked when they said that, but at the same time something inside me said that didn’t make sense. I had just came from downtown and definitely would have seen something. I walked outside of the restaurant and looked to the northwest at the city skyline and didn’t see any smoke or anything. I was afraid that my parents would hear about the “Pittsburgh crash” and start panicking, so I began to try and call them. It took several attempts because the phone circuits across the country were being overloaded. I reached my dad and told him about what they just said on the news, but that I was looking at downtown now and couldn’t see anything wrong.

I went back inside with everyone else and continued to watch and suddenly the North Tower fell. We were all just in absolute awe. I couldn’t believe I was watching a 100 story building collapse to the ground on live television. The news anchors not long after that corrected the fourth plane as crashing outside of Pittsburgh and not in it, but they still didn’t say where. We got word from headquarters that the restaurant was not going to open so everyone began to leave and I headed back home.

For a few days afterwards there was a lot of nervousness in the city because a lot of people were wondering if Flight 93 was actually meant to hit us in Pittsburgh. I remember being nervous about going to class the next day. I think it was Thursday that the mayor came on TV and gave reassurances that there was no evidence that the fourth plane was meant to hit our city and today we now know that was correct.

So that is my “Where were you on 9-11″ story. I didn’t know any of the victims of September 11th and even though I guess I was never in any real danger that day I didn’t know that at the time and thinking back to how frightening it was just for me I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for the people in New York and those who had a connection with someone that died that day. It had to have been my mental distress times ten.

Everyone has a story to tell about what they were doing when they found out and how their day continued. That’s what a leviathan this event was. It temporarily swallowed the lives of every one in the nation that day and for a few it was permanent. Hopefully we as a people have learned from the events that day and will be ready for the next one which I do believe will come and will be worse than the last.