It was the very early morning around 3 am (I was living in Hawaii at the time). I remember channel surfing and coming across live news footage of one of the towers with billowing smoke. I distinctly remember the reporters speculating that the plane crash was a possible terrorist attack, but I thought the reporters were being a bit rash in making such speculation. It after the second plane hit the other tower that I knew it was some sort of terrorist attack and wasn’t an accident. Soon after the second plane crashed in the the tower, the reporters mentioned Al-Queda (pronounced Al-kai-eh-da at the time) and Osama as possibly being behind the attacks. Who were these people? How come I’ve never heard of these people until now? How did the reporters know they were possibly involved in the attacks?

I remember going on various internet chat rooms to see what other people’s reactions were. I recall one person mention that the Pentagon was hit, and I thought he just made that up. But soon after he mentioned that, the news confirmed that a plane did crash into the Pentagon. Another person mentioned some car bombs going off and mentioned some other mayhem, but I think he was such fabricating stuff. Anyhow, I thought to myself “What is going on here?” I’ve never felt so frightened and vulnerable in my life. I thought we were in the beginings of World War III.

I was on my second day at my pizza delivery job, but it was as if nothing out of the ordinary happened. None of my co-workers mentioned anything about the attack. Perhaps we were just in a collective shock and didn’t know what to say? We all knew what had happened, and we were all probrably just really scared to talk about it.

All day on 9/11, I listened to the Pennywise album called “Unknown Road” in my car while making deliveries. Most of the songs have themes that relate to the 9/11 attacks in some way (or at least my brain created some relation between 9/11 and the lyrics) with song titles such as “City Is Burning” and “Time to Burn”. Whenever I listen to that album, I experience flashbacks of the images and the emotions I experienced on 9/11 — I see the pain and carnage of the planes crashing into the tower, and I feel the various emotions from fear to anger.