re: #344 Timothy Watson

I was a freshman in high school. I remember, distinctly, coming out of gym class around noon for lunch and noticed that the staff was definitely on edge. The exit doors for the men’s locker room was right next to one of the school’s exit doors where the buses parked and there was a staff member there watching the doors.

After lunch, I was in one of the bathrooms and two students were saying someone had bombed the Pentagon. I dismissed it at the time because I figured it was bullshit.

In my next class, however, at the beginning of class the teacher sat down and explained that someone had flown airplanes into the World Trade Center. He didn’t mentioned that the towers had collapsed and I imagined at the time when he said “airplanes”, it was something like a Cessna and not commercial airliners.

It wasn’t until I got home that I found out the extent of the attacks. We had televisions in each of the classrooms, but no cable or over-the-air TV service, just “Channel One News” and that was always taped a day or two in advance IIRC.

They sent us home early that day. I was a freshman too. It was gosh only the second week of high school. And then the follpwing fall we had Muhammad and Malvo sniping everyone so we couldn’t go outside as much for gym, I got a little bit of dark humor from that since I hated and still do hate running.