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I'm American, I was 19 years old and I was in the Army at the time stationed in Germany. I was doing maintenance on equipment when we heard about it on the radio. From what the radio said it sounded like the first plane was a Cessna and an accident so nobody really cared. About half an hour after the second plane hit the motor pool sergeant got a phone call telling us all we had 30 mins to be in front of our respective company headquarters with bags packed for a month of field operations. I'd guess that's how long it took for the Army to decide to raise the security posture on it's bases and for that to filter down to us. My platoon ended up being the designated quick reaction force for the base and we spent the next month or so living in the upstairs part of the military police station. The only times we were allowed to go anywhere or do anything was going to the dining facility next door to eat (in shifts, in case something happened we'd have half the platoon ready) and once a week we were allowed to go home and take a shower, in shifts again. Of course, literally nothing happened during that month but I did get a lot of reading done. For a few days there were armored vehicles and infantry doing patrols around the base and tanks at both gates, although I don't know if they were actually given live ammunition. Eventually things de-escalated and we only did guard stuff like that for maybe one week out of every two months.
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Sep 30, 2015 10:09
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ashgromnies posted:I remember a lot of confusion and weird theories in the first days after it happened. Didn't it take at least a few days before they attributed it to Al Qaeda? I remember hearing on the radio that a number of different groups claimed responsability, including Palestinians, Iranians, Iraqis, Libyans, etc. The radio was my only real contact with the outside world and they didn't have a clue as to what was happening for a week or two. Almost nobody had heard of Al Qaeda at that point and a lot of people had a relatively positive image of the anti-Soviet mujahideen.
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Oct 1, 2015 07:58
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Spacewolf posted:I remember the day - I believe the anti-Palestinian sentiment may be because one of the news stations showed Palestinian kids celebrating that it happened. I specifically remember the news, and not just Fox, claiming that the PLA had claimed responsibility for the attack, and when something like that gets out it sticks in peoples' heads, especially if it's pretty much what they wanted to hear anyway.
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Oct 1, 2015 14:25
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To be honest, most people I know didn't actually give a poo poo about NYC itself, it was more the idea of what happened. Many people outside New York really don't like New Yorkers for a bunch of reasons. I remember in 2003 one of my Army buddies from Indiana, after being cut off by a guy with New York plates, yelling out his window "that's why you fuckers got planes crashed into you" but at least he had the decency to realize immediately afterwards that he'd gone too far.
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Oct 2, 2015 23:24
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Violet_Sky posted:Was it? It seems like all I hear about is stuff like Hey Arnold and Pete and Pete. I was born in '93 and we didn't have cable. That'll obviously depend on a lot of things but from my point of view it was pretty great. I was born in '82 and when I graduated in 2000 it seemed like everything, especially the economy, was just going to keep getting better and better. I grew up poor as poo poo but even in my garbage rural community there was an optimistic feeling that you could go to a relatively affordable state college and get a more or less guaranteed decent middle class job, and if that didn't appeal to you, you could just go to GM or Ford and work on the line for a decent paycheck. I only lived in the States for 6 of the last 15 years and almost all of that was in Michigan so after the 2001 recession, which never ended there, it feels like everyone expect maybe some IT nerds is doing worse and worse every year. I don't know if middle class communities have had similar sorts of changes but things where I'm from went from "yeah, things are bad here but you can make it if you try" to "about the best you can hope for is stocking shelves at the local Walmart and slowly drinking yourself to death".
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Oct 15, 2015 21:54
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