By Ryen Hale

Eagle View Contributor

September 11th, 2001–this day will never be forgotten. It began as an ordinary day for everyone. People went to work, and parents dropped their kids off at school. Doctors prepared for surgeries and lawyers mentally assessed cases to soon be fought for clients.

Just like the rest of the United States, mother of two, Dawn Hale, woke up late that day. She had her three-year-old and three-month-old in the living room of their small home in northeast Arkansas. Dawn said she turned on the tv-with her three-month-old in her lap- seeing on the news that the first tower had just been hit. She immediately called her husband and asked him if he knew about the news. She asked him to come home because she was scared, and she reminded him that her family worked in the New York area. He couldn’t make it home immediately, but saying he would be back later. Dawn was in disbelief at what she was seeing.

After getting off the phone with her husband, Dawn called her aunt who worked at the Twin Towers. Dawn was relieved to find that her aunt did not have to go into the city that day. About 10 minutes after the first tower was struck, the second tower was hit, Dawn recalled. Dawn continued to make phone calls to her family discussing the unbelievable things they were seeing. As if things could not have escalated more, the Pentagon was hit with an additional plane that was hijacked within the same hour of the Twin Towers being struck.

The New York State Museum in Albany, New York, includes an exhibit related to the Sept. 11 attacks. The museum is home to the largest and most comprehensive collection of artifacts pertaining to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The collection encompasses materials from the World Trade Center, including building materials and objects of daily office life; a significant number of artifacts pertaining to the heroic efforts of first responders; fragments of the aircraft; and material documenting the tremendous global response to the attacks.

— Photo by Ryen Hale

As many people would have hoped that these flights be empty, the flights were full. Dawn stated there was a fourth plane that was also headed towards Washington that people were able to take over; that flight crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

Air traffic controllers on that day were looking for United 93 when a responder asked, “ United 93, you got information on that yet?” a responder conversed back saying, “Yeah he’s down” The lady responder asked when he landed and she was informed he did not land, he was down “somewhere up northeast of Camp David.”

Dawn said passengers on United 93 did not know if they would live much longer and many phone calls were made on the flight that crashed in the field. She said later on that several recordings came out of people contacting their families saying, “Our plane is being hijacked and they didn’t know if they were going to make it but to tell their families they loved them.”

Dawn stated, “I have never seen our country more patriotic; there were American flags everywhere.” She said she felt that the support of the attack wasn’t going to last long. To her surprise, her neighbors down the street were supportive and painted a massive American flag on his roof. The support from all walks of life was unending.

Interviews and recordings from that day make one listening now feel as if they were a part of all the chaos and its devastation. The attacks happened so fast, quickly known by thousands of people within several states, leaving them to question what would happen next. This day will forever be marked as a historical event, one that will never be forgotten, and will still be talked about for years to come.

Ryen Hale is a student in the fall 2024 Media Writing class at NWACC. She interviewed her mother, Dawn, for this blog post.