I remember I was in Biology class when we found out the first plane hit. My teacher turned on the TV and at the time I was a high school Sophomore. As the day continued on we were shuffled from class to class and it was in Latin Class when I saw the two towers fall, after seeing the second plane impact in Biology.

When I saw the two towers fall it was one of those things that resonated with me. I still cannot get the image out of my head no matter how hard I have tried, and as a patriot of this country it struck me to the core. I was in southeastern Virginia and when we found out the Pentagon had been everyone I knew began panicking – they had relatives up in that area or parents who traveled on business.

They let us out of school around noon that day and I couldn’t tell you what parent picked me up that day as I was only fifteen. That afternoon I printed every single article I could find on it and saved it. Weeks later I found tons of magazines after I had managed to get September 12th copies of newspapers. I have the original issues of all this material and sealed it in a box until the fifteenth anniversary when I finally pulled it out and started putting together a memorial website in the survivor’s words for a class project.

I went to Ground Zero six months after it happened for my sixteenth birthday and it was one of the most intense and powerful things I have ever seen. There was a fence with thousands of pictures of ‘missing’ people. It begins to overwhelm you at that point, that much death, and everyone was crying before they hit the end of the fence. All that remained was a crater with piles and piles of debris and no survivors or bodies to be found.