Americans shaken by 9/11 terrorist attacks share their memories 15 years later

Ask almost anyone where they were on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 and most can tell you where they were and exactly what they were doing. That day, like the day in 1941 when Japan waged war on America by bombing Pearl Harbor, remains a date forever emblazoned on the minds of a nation.

The terrorist attacks on American soil that claimed close to 3,000 lives challenged the security most Americans had felt about living in this country. The fear that terrorism--whether home grown or by foreign terror groups--had become a part of daily existence made many individuals and families take a second look at their lives and re-evaluate what was most important to them.

Diane Dickerman

Diane Dickerman who moved to Murrells Inlet two years ago, made a life-changing decision after the 9/11 terror attacks. She and her husband, Charlie, had moved to Maine but Diane had consented to take a job with a former boss and work at the Boston Harbor Hotel, living during the week in an apartment in the northern part of the city and commuting home on weekends.

She remembers clearly that Tuesday morning at the hotel, which is located across the harbor from Logan International Airport where unknown to anyone at the time terrorists were boarding American Airlines Flight 11 bound for Los Angeles.

“There is a building in Boston called the World Trade Center so for a few minutes we thought it was that building but quickly learned that was not the case,” Diane said.

Over the next few hours, no one at the hotel could get in touch with anyone. The phone lines were jammed. Transportation had shut down as well and the hotel employees had to walk home.

“My husband was in meetings and finally when we talked, I decided I didn’t want to do this anymore. I didn’t want to be 3 ½ hours away from my husband. I’m sure a lot of people went through the same thing. There were too many things going on. It made you realize the time you could be spending with people important to you, that those minutes are precious and you shouldn’t take them for granted,” she said.

The attacks placed fear in Diane who said she watched news of the attack repeatedly. On her first vacation where she had to board a plane, she was extremely apprehensive. The one positive thing she saw come out of 9/11, she said, was the way people came together and rallied around the flag.

“You kind of had the feeling it was going to be like that for a very long time,” she said.

Charlie Dickerman

Charlie Dickerman and his co-workers were in an intense annual strategy meeting in Bethel, Maine, when their boss called for a break and made his way down the hall to the men’s room. Walking by a television, he raced back into the meeting room “ashen faced.”

“My first reaction was that it was one of those little planes and the pilot had lost his way,” Dickerman said. “I kind of pictured it bouncing off and crashing.”

Disbanding the meeting, the group went to watch the news just as the second plane crashed into the second tower.

“Again you weren’t sure what you were seeing because you thought it was a replay. None of it had any reality for me. This incredible thing was happening in New York and I could not relate it to anything in my life, nothing,” he said.

It wasn’t long until the group learned another plane had flown into the Pentagon.

“The wife of one of the gentlemen in the meeting worked at the Pentagon,” Dickerman said. “He could not get word to or from his wife. The planes had been grounded everywhere so there was no way he could get home with any speed. He rented a car and started driving to Washington. Our feeling at the time was that the airports would open up before he could drive down there. We were wrong!”

Dickerman said the entire event seemed so bizarre and made no sense but when the second plane hit, he knew it was an act of war.

“When you look at the number of people killed in such a short period of time, it is just unbelievable,” he said.

Two blocks from what soon became known as Ground Zero, Dickerman’s sister-in-law was working in a bank. Those employees began the long walk home through heavy ash, he said, with it taking her the better part of the day to get home.

“Thank God no one I knew was harmed,” Dickerman said. But the fact that companies just disappeared and stopped existing was beyond comprehension.”

On a personal level, Dickerman said he has not let the incident change him.

“It has changed travel, airports, trust and the level of fear and really even comfort,” he said. “I make time allowances but I still do what I want to do. It may be naïve, but it is an easier way to live.”

Lana Egnatoff

Lana Egnatoff lives in Myrtle Beach but in 2001 when the security of America forever changed, she was at work at her accounting job in West Virginia. It became a very scary day for her when she realized her 23-year-old daughter was in Washington, D.C., visiting a relative who worked at the Pentagon where a third plane crashed ultimately killing 125 people inside and injuring hundreds of others.

“It was so scary. I kept calling and calling. I didn’t hear anything until noon. I knew he had planned to give her a tour of the Pentagon but that day he took the day off but I didn’t know it,” she said.

Later in the week when Egnatoff heard planes go over head, she said she instinctively ducked. “I was just afraid. September 12 was my birthday and I couldn’t be happy all day long. I felt guilty thinking about all those people who wouldn’t get to celebrate another birthday,” she said.

Egnatoff had a friend who is an EMT and went to Ground Zero to help. “Within a year he had a child born with a terrible brain tumor and I believe all those chemicals did that,” she said.

Ginny Chapel

Ginny Chapel of Little River was working in a veterinarian office in Greensboro when a co-worker called to say they thought a plane had run into the World Trade Center tower.

“We didn’t have a TV at the office so we tried to catch up on the news in between business and it was just an awful feeling that someone could do that,” she said. “I still cannot get over that.”

Originally from Long Island, N.Y., Chapel said the incident changed the face of New York geographically. Although she did not lose anyone close to her, she said it remains hard to believe that anyone could take so many innocent lives.

“You know you would like to trust people in general and the fact that people are capable of just killing others with no reason kind of changed that fact. Before, you got on a plane or you went to work in the morning and your family expected you to come home,” Chapel said. “It just won’t be forgotten for years to come. It is always going to be 9/11, 9/11 and people are not going to forget; not just New Yorkers but everybody.”

Karen Bland Grubb

Living in Manhattan and teaching elementary school in Ossining, N.Y., in Westchester County, Karen Bland Grubb passed the principal in the hallway that Tuesday morning and felt he gave her a very strange look but he did not say anything. She walked by the library, saw a group of teachers, and heard that a plane had flown into the towers.

“I just remember not understanding the magnitude of it,” she said.

Since many of the school children’s parents commuted to work, everyone stayed at school until all children were picked up at around 7 or 8 p.m. No children were sent home on buses, she said.

Grubb said the school was affected by the death of a couple of parents and the brother of one of the teachers was a firefighter who died, although they did not know it that day.

Unable to return to her apartment in the far north section of Manhattan for a couple of days, Grubb recalls eating lunch outside at the marina in “dead silence.”

“Everything was a sense of unsureness. Unreal. Nobody really understood the magnitude. Cell phones were overwhelmed but at some point I was able to get through to my parents,” she said.

She said there were rumors abounding--rumors about men in delivery trucks who might be terrorists. Her brother lost a fraternity brother in the disaster. She thought about the year before when she sang “Carmina Burana” with a community chorus at the World Trade Center. A man in the audience sang along and she wondered if he had made it out of the devastation on that fateful day.

“Life is so uncertain to start with,” she said. “But I don’t think it has affected me personally. I’m just very oppositional. However, I have not been back to the site yet. I want to go but I think it is going to be an emotional experience even 15 years later.”

Elaine Miller

A teacher at Lakewood Elementary School today, Elaine Miller said her children were at Socastee High School when the terror attacks occurred. Even though she felt like her life in Surfside Beach was far away from the incidents, she was affected by the lack of sound overhead.

“The no sound of airplanes was just eerie,” Miller said. “When I think back, I think we were just vulnerable because we didn’t think that could happen to us. As teens or young adults, we didn’t have that fear of communism or the cold war. So our generation, we were really shocked by it. It was surreal.”

Nanci Conley

As director of development in 2001 for the American Red Cross Northeastern New York Chapter in Albany, Nanci Conley quickly became involved in the disaster response. Now the executive director of the Eastern South Carolina chapter, she recalled recently how she first thought the disaster was just a radio spoof.

“I thought they were teasing,” she said.

In a major leadership meeting when the attacks occurred, Conley and her co-workers quickly shifted into disaster mode working 24/7. “After that almost everything became a blur,” she said.

Located about three hours outside the city, her chapter was also a blood center and became a major hub of activity. The New York governor encouraged people to donate blood. People lined up around the building for 24 hours, she said. “They just wanted to do something. We all felt so powerless. We were just numb. I don’t know how to explain it other than that,” she said.

With one of her children on Long Island, she panicked for a couple of hours when she couldn’t get in touch with anyone and no one could contact her.

Using a word so many have used to describe the feeling, Conley said it was just “surreal.”

“You just could not believe it happened. You just felt like you were in a movie. People actually walked from New York City to Albany. A man came into the office dazed. He just wanted to get home. Everything in Manhattan was just chaos,” she said.

The good that came of the incident, she said, was that people wanted to volunteer to help in any way they could. “I met so many wonderful people. Someone said my job must be so depressing but I got to see the good in people. They are amazing. That is what helped me then and helps me now to keep the faith in mankind,” she said.

Kenneth Parson

Marine Corp veteran and Naval reservist Kenneth Parson, 52, was at work at Grand Strand Water and Sewer Authority when his supervisor called.

“He said, ‘Kenny, I think your unit is going to be activated because we just got attacked by terrorists,” Parson recalled.

Immediately checking the television, Parson said the incident looked like a movie scene but it was not.

“Actually, I was shocked about the whole incident and at that point I was just waiting on a call to see if we were going to be activated,” he said.

Parson said he began to call his family because they all knew he was in the Navy Reserve and he began mental preparation. For most of his military career, he provided security and was a weapons instructor and felt sure he would be needed.

“I felt devastated and helpless at the same time because I couldn’t go and give a hand for support or even offer protection,” he said.

While his unit was not called up immediately, it was activated two years later to provide some onshore security for Navy and Maritime vessels.

Parson said 9/11 is something he will never forget and the incident has caused him to become consistently more alert.

“From that moment to this moment, I am always aware of things going on around me, not to be fearful, but to be aware of my surroundings. I heard something on the radio about if it looks different, it is different, or if something looks out of place, it probably is. You have to live your life, but just don’t become complacent,” he said.

Tim Henson

Southern Coast Vacations owner Tim Henson said he was working as a property manager off 16th Avenue in Myrtle Beach on Sept. 11, 2001, when he received a message from a friend that one of the twin towers had been struck in New York City.

“I didn’t believe it,” he said. So, he and a co-worker ran over to a hotel where they could get to a TV to see for themselves. They had just gotten there when they heard about the Pentagon strike and saw the towers fall.

“We sat down in this beautiful oceanfront hotel on a beautiful day at the beach watching all these lives changing forever,” he said. “It was so surreal. It had a profound effect on me.”

Henson said he felt disbelief that something like that could happen in America and he was just trying to put the pieces together.

“I saw what makes America great when that happened and now I see stupid things like someone not standing for the Pledge of Allegiance,” he said. “I felt that sense of pride and it is still affecting me today. I’m saddened that we don’t have the community and patriotism today that we have seen when something major like that happens where it seems we all pull together.”

Henson said even today when he sees something on TV about the terror attacks it has a profound impact on him. When he had an opportunity to visit the site where the towers stood in Manhattan a few months ago, he left with a different state of mind.

“The feeling I got there, it made it a lot more real. I stood and looked at the giant holes in the ground and stone layouts with names on them. I don’t think there is any way to describe it. You think about what happened there, you are looking into two holes and it just made it more real,” he said.

Dan Antonelli

Only 10 years old at the time, Dan Antonelli’s life would forever be affected by the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Now 24, Antonelli remembers the students in his fifth-grade class jumping from their seats to look out the window as an unusually low flying plane flew over their Brooklyn, N.Y., school. Little did they know at the time that plane would become the source of a horrendous terrorist attack on American soil.

“We didn’t get picked up from school right away so I was really nervous, although they didn’t tell us what was happening,” he recalled.

Since his dad was with the NYPD, the family did not see him much for the following months.

“That affected me a lot. I just didn’t know what was fully going on. Every day we didn’t know what was going to happen. There were so many stories spiraling,” he said.

Antonelli said the incident changed his viewpoint on feeling secure. “I didn’t feel secure for a very long time. However, looking back now, I think it is good to have been a part of that history that they are now teaching in schools. I’m glad I was old enough to understand but not fully understand. I will always remember that time.”

This story was originally published September 7, 2016 at 7:23 PM with the headline "Americans shaken by 9/11 terrorist attacks share their memories 15 years later."