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P Rajendran in New York
Judy Sharp's son, who worked at a naval base, hadn't called in. She was desperate to get in touch with him, to know that the contractor her son worked for had sent him home. She feared that another plane would be falling, this time on Fort Dietrich, United States.
Sharp described her panic: "They're hitting the World Trade Centre, they're hitting the Pentagon. Everything's going up!"
"There's botulism and things like that out there. If that gets out it'll ruin the whole place," she said, waving her hands ineffectually in frustration.
It was a common feeling across the US: Disbelief not yet morphed into indignation. Classes were stopped at many universities and children sent home from school. People were clustered about televisions, watching the scenes of destruction, too stunned often to react. A few shook their heads, but silence was the common response.
The media first played up the story, and later began to try and assuage the people, perhaps realising the level of panic.
The CBS stressed that the pictures they were showing didn't describe the whole city.
But reporter Harold Dow, holed up in a subway after the first of the towers collapsed, didn't know what was expected of him. "People ran away from their shoes," he said.
Diane Witt, a professor, described how she was at the National Institutes of Health when the Oklahoma bombings occurred on May 4, 1995. Then she paused...
"If they can hit the Pentagon, they can hit anything," she said. The media commentators began getting particularly caustic about airport security. One commentator said they were all napping.
Finally, there was perhaps a lull in the number of panic calls being made and the phones worked awhile. Sharp got through. Her son was safe; in fact, he'd been shooed off the base, she said, naturally, not at all upset about it
Then she got on the phone and told a friend: "We are at war with these guys."
The Attack on America: The Complete Coverage
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