Never forget.

Nine years ago today:

I don’t remember too much about Monday, September 10, 2001. But I do know three pertinent details. One, my roommates — big NFL fans — watched “Monday Night Football” that evening, and never changed the channel afterward, so the TV was on ABC when we went to bed for the night. Two, I didn’t go to sleep until shortly after 3:00 AM (or 6:00 AM Eastern, roughly the same time Mohammed Atta was boarding a plane at Logan Airport), and I was planning to sleep very late the next day, because I didn’t have class until late afternoon — POSC-351, Middle East Politics, at 3:30 PM. And three, my phone was turned off, because the previous night I’d gotten a strange, middle-of-the-night hangup call (probably a drunk-dialed wrong number or something), and I didn’t want to risk being awakened again. However, I kept the volume on my answering machine turned up, so if someone actually needed to reach me and wake me up, they’d be able to.

So it was that, when Becky called me Tuesday morning, September 11, at 6:50 AM — that’s 9:50 Eastern Time, more than an hour after the first plane hit the first World Trade Center tower, 13 minutes after the Pentagon was hit, and 9 minutes before the South Tower of the WTC would collapse — I didn’t hear the phone ring, but instead was awakened by the sound of her voice, saying:

“You guys, you ALL have to wake up! Both of the towers of the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon, have just been ATTACKED by TERRORISTS! Iran has just ran terrorists into these buildings and blew them up! Well, actually, they didn’t blow them up — they ran PLANES into these buildings! Wake up! Turn on your TV! Go watch the news! Seriously! This is, like, the biggest terrorist attack in the world! Like, in the history of the United States! Wake up! Turn on TV! Go watch! Seriously!”

Why Becky, amid the fog of war that morning, blamed “Iran” for the attacks remains an enduring mystery. But I didn’t process that detail at the time. In fact, I really didn’t process any of it, I was so sleepy. I heard something about a terrorist attack, and “turn on your TV,” but that was about all I got.

So, without really grasping what was happening — and certainly without having internalized any of the details of the attacks that had been referenced at the very beginning of the message (i.e., planes hit World Trade Center and Pentagon) — I climbed out of bed, stumbled into the living room, and turned on the TV. It was, as I mentioned, tuned to ABC.

What I saw was utterly shocking: smoke rising from the Pentagon. Flight 77 had crashed there just 13 minutes earlier, so this was the biggest “breaking news” of the moment; the WTC attack had been ongoing for a while, but these Pentagon shots were brand new images.

So, for me personally, due to this coincidence of timing, the very first image I saw of the 9/11 attacks was not of the World Trade Center, but of the Pentagon on fire after being attacked. Thus, notwithstanding the unprocessed details of Becky’s sleepily-heard, partially-understood message, I became perhaps the only person in America who learned about the Pentagon attack before learning about the WTC attack.

And you know what? An attack on the Pentagon — the Pentagon!! — was more than enough. Not realizing, in my groggy stupor, that anything at all had happened in New York, I felt that Becky’s “get up and watch TV now!” message was fully justified by what I was seeing: Holy shit! Somebody attacked the Pentagon! That’s huge!

I don’t know exactly how much time passed before ABC switched to a split-screen view of New York and Washington. In my fuzzy memory, it feels like several minutes, but it was probably more like 30 seconds at most. In any event, they went to split screen, the burning Twin Towers appeared on my TV, and suddenly “huge” became simply incomprehensible. They’d hit the World Trade Center, too?!? What the…?!?!

Whole thing.