Ten years ago today ...

[savvyliterate]

I originally wrote the part under the cut on Sept. 11, 2006, recounting what happened in 2001, but updated it today to add in some more memories and the AP bulletins, which AP added into a story it moved today detailing the attack minute-by-minute.

At the time I was a senior at the University of Alabama. I was the news director of the student daily paper, The Crimson White. National media were at our doorstep because they attempted to integrated the then all-white sororities (this finally happened a couple years later.)


I woke up at 8:10 a.m. and I was late. By unanimous decision, the other guys on the editorial staff at the Crimson White decided that I would lead Marie Parsons's JN 311 class on a tour of the newsroom at 8:30. I grabbed my clock, then jumped out of bed, grateful that for once the shower wasn't being used by our suitemates. I showered and dressed in 10 minutes and spent the next 10 minutes biking furiously across campus.

When I got to the Office of Student Media at exactly 8:30 CDT, the downstairs was empty and I could hear voices upstairs. Well, crud, they're already here! I sped up the stairs, into the newsroom and found the entire professional staff sitting around the TV. They all looked at me and I gave them a confused look.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"You didn't know?" One of the staffers gestured to the TV and I turned just in time to see replayed footage of the second plane crash into the World Trade Center tower. It was seven minutes before Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

I immediately ran to my desk, bringing up the AP wire to see what was going on. I tried accessing CNN.com, which was being hammered so fast that it kept going down. They finally reduced to a text-only site, updating hitting it as quickly as they could. But, I saw the bulletins that'd moved just over the past hour as I blissfully slept past my alarm, then showered and biked across campus:

8:53 a.m. EDT: NEW YORK (AP) — Plane crashes into World Trade Center, according to television reports.

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9:04 a.m. EDT:NEW YORK (AP) — Explosion rocks second World Trade Center tower.

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For the next two hours, I spent most of the time staring at the TV as things happened one right after the other. Every so often, I'd go back to my desk and read more of the wire and CNN, which at the time was a mess of alerts and bulletins.

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9:43 a.m. EDT:NEW YORK (AP) - An aircraft has crashed into the Pentagon, witnesses say.

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9:59 a.m. EDT: **FLASH** NEW YORK (AP) - One World Trade Center tower collapses.

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10:29 a.m. EDT: **FLASH** NEW YORK (AP) - Second World Trade Center tower collapses.

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10:37 a.m. EDT: NEW YORK (AP) - Large plane crashes in western Pennsylvania, officials at Somerset County Airport confirm.


At the time, we didn't know what was going to happen next and as the news casters started listing potential terrorist targets, I kept thinking of the history lesson I'd gotten in 8th grade. Our teacher said that Russia had one of its missles pointed at Montgomery thanks to Maxwell Air Force Base and the Air University located there. If the Russians attacked the U.S. during the Cold War, Montgomery would had been blown apart as one of the first targets. Atlanta was discussed as a possible terrorist target because it is the major hub of the southeastern U.S.


Terrorists wouldn't attack Tuscaloosa. What need do they have for Alabama football? But they could attack Montgomery and Atlanta and, oh my God, what would happen to my family? I started shaking uncontrollably and for the first time in a very long time, I wanted my mommy and my daddy and I wanted them to hold me and tell me that everything was going to be okay. I think the only other time I'd been that scared at that time in my life was the rolling dread I felt when I'd looked at my aunt in June 1995 and asked her in a shaky voice if my parents were separating.

Terry Siggers, who was in charge of all the technical stuff in the Office of Student Media, came up and put his arm around my shoulders and we stayed like that for about an hour.

Around 10 a.m. CT, about 30 minutes after the crash of Flight 93 was reported, I called Luke Connell, the CW's editor, and woke him up. He grumbled something incoherent, said that was nice and went back to sleep.

Thirty minutes later, Dan Murphy, our managing editor and the person on equal status with me on staff, came into the newsroom, pale as a ghost. His family is from New York state, and it struck close to home. He looked over at me and said, "You know that we have to cover this, right?"

That's when I was shaken out of my stupor. That's right. We had a story to cover.

Since then, my family has dubbed this "reporter mode."

Dan grabbed his camera, I grabbed a reporter's notebook and we stepped outside to an absolutely gorgeous fall day. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the campus was at its most serene. Terry followed us outside and one of us made the comment that it seemed so surreal. Then, Dan and I got to work.

We walked across campus to the Ferguson Center, our student union, and saw hundreds of students crowded around every TV screen they could drag into the building. The theater had also been wired into the cable system so more students crowded into there. UA's president, Andrew Sorensen, and the vice presidents on the UA staff were mingling among the students, offering them words of comfort.

I've always had a reporting style that was non-intrusive as possible, instead sitting back and recording everyone's reactions to the event. I did some interviews, but most of my reporting was documenting how everyone was leaning on each other for comfort. Around noon, I went back to the CW and started fielding phone calls. So many reporters called in, paid and freelance, wanting to know what they could do to help. This was my element and I began issuing orders and forming a budget. Luke came in shortly thereafter. "Why didn't you tell me?" he cried. "I tried!" I replied. Seeing that I had things under control in the newsroom, he went out to shoot photos.

The rumors had started to come in about gas prices skyrocketing and I told everyone on staff who had a car to go fill it up right then (something I repeated four years later the day before Katrina struck and I had learned that gas was going up then as well.) I did it myself around 4 p.m., and to also go to Butler Field and let my section leader know that there was no way I was going to band rehearsal that day.

There was no need. Even though practice had been canceled, most of the Million Dollar Band had gathered to offer comfort to each other. There were several members who had no idea where their loved ones were, including a color guard girl whose father was in the NYFD. I stayed out there for about 30 minutes and headed back to the newsroom.

By then, we had our budget hammered out and Nick Parsons, the design director, had come in to start mocking up layouts. I began writing my stories. As day went into evening, I added more to the general roundup while the focus turned to which of our layouts we would use. The Associated Press had granted its members full access to all stories and photos at its disposal for 9/11, so for the first time, we had access to their art without having to pay per photo. Nick advocated for the layout with a full-bleed photo of one of the towers collapsing. It was the one I liked the best as well and also lobbied for it.

There was some heated debate over whether or not to use it, and finally we did. The headline, "Surreal," came up from the earlier discussion Dan, Terry and I had about how surreal the day seemed - that a picture-perfect day in Alabama was going on at the same time as mass destruction in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania. During this time, caligogreywings and her roommate at the time, clarus, came by to make sure I was okay and to make sure I had remembered to eat.

At first, there was a discussion about whether or not to run any stories out there, just the photo and headline. Finally, we place a thin strip of a story out there.

That story was mine.

At 2:30 a.m., I was standing with Emily Craft, the new administrative affairs editor as we watched the pages come out of the negative processor at the Tuscaloosa News. "We're watching history," I told her and she agreed.

The September 12 copy of the Crimson White contained more local coverage of the reaction to 9/11 than the Tuscaloosa News did. The only thing in the A-section not related to it was a photo closing out coverage of the other national story that had been on our doorstep until literally that morning - the latest attempt to integrate the all-white sorority system. It was completely my section and I had spearheaded the way the CW covered 9/11. I had wondered why Luke hadn't taken charge at one point and I was told that he didn't need to, I had done that good of a job.

After it was all over, I went to Celeste's apartment because I wanted to be with someone and my cousin, who was my roommate that year, was already asleep. I opened the door, walked in and Celeste was waiting for me.

"I knew you'd want me to be up," she said. "Do you need to talk about it?"

"Not now," I replied, and sat with her in the dark.

It was a very long time before I slept.

What's so funny is that I never wrote all that much the bookend moment to this: The night that Osama bin Laden was killed. Both the original CW from 9/12/01 and the paper from 5/2/11 are seen above. In an eerie parallel, I was at the helm the night bin Laden was killed -- nearly 10 years, a thousand miles and a different person from who I was on 9/11. I really do need to write it down, and maybe I will later tonight, because it's so eerie how May 1 this year contrasted to 9/11.

Below is a photo page I did for today's Patriot-News. We've all done some truly amazing work this week. I'm proud to count this as one of them.