this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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I’m completely positive about where I was and how it went down, but I’m also in NJ where we were affected more than most places. I was in school, my father was working in midtown Manhattan. I can still remember the teachers stopping instruction while they talked in the hallway. Even at that young age I remember being able to tell that something was really off. I was lucky enough that I was able to hear my dad was ok by lunch time but man, what a nerve wracking time. The craziest part was that my dad had just taken me to the observation deck of the twin towers just a few months prior on take your kid to work day.
I was on leave from the Navy, visiting my parents. Under other circumstances I probably wouldn't remember, but I remember waking up to my mom yelling at me to come watch the news. Then I remember watching the second plane hit. Then I got a call from my command asking me to cut my leave short. This was all before 10am central time after I was up drinking (illegally, but who is counting) until like 3.
I got a plane ticket for first thing the next morning. My brother and I drank and talked shit all afternoon, about anything except what was happening.
What's really crazy about the idea of flashbulb memories is how certain people are of them. I remember reading about one exercise in a journal--it might be the same one referred to in the article above--where students were asked to write things down about 11 September the day after it happened. A year-ish later they were asked about their memories; most had details incorrect, and some were entirely wrong, and even argued that what they had written down at the time was wrong, or it wasn't what they'd actually written down.
I'm positive that I remember the Challenger accident; I'm sure that I was watching it at school, since a teacher was on board (the first teacher in space!). The teachers were in shock when it happened; about half the students just shrugged and made shitty jokes (because middle school). But how can I be sure that my memories of that event are accurate, without some kind of contemporary record of them? Do I have details wrong? I know that when I talk to my parents, they remember things from when I was growing up very differently than I do.