Where were you on Sept. 11, 2001?

The following are responses sent in via e-mail to the question: Where were you on Sept. 11, 2001? To add your own responses, go to www.nevadaappeal.com.

I will always remember where I was on that dreadful day.

I'm a communications operator for the Carson City Sheriff's Department, I was working graveyard, and we were listening to the news radio station. Paul Harvey was talking, then I remember him saying something about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers. I thought I'd missed part of his conversation, and that he was hypothetically speaking, so I just sort of passed it off.

He then said that a second plane has crashed! I immediately looked at my partner and she at me.

I think there was silence for about 30 seconds then we both were filled with emotion and disbelief and began listening to every word very carefully.

Shortly after that, the phones began to ring and 911 lines began to sound, people wanting reassurance that this really didn't happen. Sadly enough, we had to tell them that it was in fact true.

When I arrived home after shift, I felt numb. My legs felt weak and my emotions rushing. I immediately began calling my family to see how they were doing and to tell them I love them.

I remember my daughter in California saying she was not going to allow her son to go to school because she was afraid.

No, I shall never forget that day for as long as I live.

- Cindy Merrell

I was on active duty, in the United States Marine Corps, and living on the island of Okinawa, Japan.

We were in a Typhoon Condition (all military persons ordered to their quarters) and expecting the typhoon to come ashore within the next 24 hours.

Early in the morning I woke up and turned on the TV to a local Japanese channel hoping to get updated information on the storm.

The TV picture showed people running in the streets and smoke. I thought that maybe the Japanese were showing a Godzilla movie. I then began to channel surf and I came to an American broadcast, and it was then that I realized something big had happened in New York.

My first thought was that a plane had run into the Twin Towers by mistake, but I thought how can that happen with clear blue skies? Minutes later, the second plane went into the second tower. Then I knew this wasn't an accident.

I called the officer of the day to see if there were any instructions, asked if the Commanding General had been informed - he had. I then made some coffee, dressed, and reported for work.

Okinawa remained in a Typhoon Condition for the next few days, ironically, the typhoon never came ashore but went around the island.

- Mike MCClure

I was working in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia as a security officer for the Vinnell Corporation on Sept. 11, 2001. That day, my assignment was screening and escorting 42 local construction workers as they renovated quarters for the American military trainers on a secure American compound.

I had a partner, and our day was 12-hours long - routine, even in summer heat. The two of us met the workers, their foreman, and their engineer at the service gate, checked their equipment and searched the work force for weapons and explosives, and then walked them through document control where they were issued base passes.

The workers were required to be escorted at all times, for every American installation in the Middle East was at Force Protection Level Delta, the highest degree of alert.

A major terrorist attack on a United States installation was expected any minute - but in the Middle East.

I found out about the World Trade Center attack when my badly shaken operations manager drove to the construction site and told us that the Twin Towers had been blown up.

My partner and I were too busy to take part in the mass panic among the American staff, and information was very limited at first. There were those 42 workers that required our full attention - and I knew from past experience and from the company's operations procedures that the worker force was going to be denied access to the construction site for something like two weeks.

The news reached me about 3 p.m. Saudi time, and the workers left at their usual time of about 6. I had to drive from that compound to another compound where I lived, so I saw many Saudi subjects celebrating - they could have been celebrating anything.

I wasn't going to stop and ask.

- Alan Cranford

I was in Los Angeles when that happened, and there were people in the streets waving flags and parading at night and threatening mosques. There was a fear that Los Angeles was also going to be attacked, so people were acting very strangely, but that's par for the course because it's Los Angeles and people are always acting strangely down there.

- Dylan Riley

A friend, Tom Dickerson (a former owner of The Record-Courier) and I were on our annual pheasant-hunting trip in Nebraska and we stopped in my hometown of Gering, Neb., to take my then 90-year-old mother out to dinner.

We woke up on the morning of 9/11 planning to fly home out of Scottsbluff, Neb.

I turned on the TV about 7 a.m. and saw the replay of one the planes hitting the World Trade Center; I actually thought it was some kind of show made for TV. When we arrived at the Scottsbluff airport and learned that all planes were grounded, I immediately got on the phone and made reservations on Amtrack out of Denver on Sept. 12. Tom lives in Phoenix, Ariz., and of course there is very little in the way of transportation going south, and Avis refused to rent him a car so we just got back in our rental car and took off for Denver.

Tom paid something like a $750 drop-off fee for the privilege of misappropriating one of their cars. I got on the train on Sept. 12 feeling very smug at my quick thinking and enjoying the great Colorado scenery.

The next morning on Sept. 13 at about 5 a.m., after spending many hours in the club car the night before with about 10 other guys who were in my same position, we were rudely awakened when our train ran into another train outside of Wendover. (The Reno Gazette-Journal ran a picture of the train on page 16A on Friday Sept. 14).

Fortunately no one was seriously injured, but at this point I was getting a little shell-shocked as flames from the burning locomotive were shooting what seemed like a 100 feet in the air, quite a sight in the dark at 5:30 a.m.

Since this was Amtrak's second accident in a week, they knew exactly what to do. They had buses on the way from Salt Lake City almost immediately, and it seemed like the buses arrived in Wendover before we did. We were taken to the community center in Wendover where Amtrak had a hundred or so cell phones waiting for us so we could call our families and let them know we were OK.

Amtrak also arranged with a casino to have an elaborate buffet waiting for us (only in Nevada). To make a long story short, we were loaded on the buses and headed home. The bus dropped me off at the airport in Reno so I could pick up my car in the parking garage. My car was one of a few cars left in the garage, and the police were keeping a close eye on all of them. It probably took me about 15 minutes to convince the authorities that I wasn't a terrorist and all I wanted was to pick up my car and drive home to Gardnerville.

A side note: I was on a hijacked plane in Las Vegas in July of 1971. My friend Tom and I still go on our annual hunting trip but he refuses to fly on the same plane with me for some odd reason.

- Bruce Reavis

Where was I on 9/11?

I was on board the USS Carl Vinson. We were west of India, in the Indian Ocean. It was about 5:30 p.m. if I remember correctly, I was up on the flight deck during shift change. One of my friends came over to me and told me that planes had hit the World Trade Center.

I thought to myself, what the heck are those. So I shrugged my shoulders and went down to my shop. The TV was on, and everyone was crowded around watching.

I saw the Pentagon burning, and I knew we wouldn't be going home anytime soon. I walked down to another shop to watch the TV some more, when I got there the towers had collapsed. I wandered down to the Mess Decks to get something to eat. All the TVs were on the news.

Then the skipper came over the 1MC and said that the flight schedule had been cancelled, all forms of communication were shut off, and he couldn't tell us where we were going.

Anyone who has ever been on an aircraft carrier will tell you when the ship goes full speed how it shakes. Well we hauled butt somewhere.

Well, for the next month a bunch of reporters came out to the ship. Finally in October, we got to strike back.

My squadron was the one to lead the attacks into Afghanistan. So we started the war.

- Aaron Brockway

My husband and I were on a cruise to Alaska to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. We had been been on the ship for three days, cruising the Inside Passage, and it was time to disembark the ship in the early morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

We were all told to meet in the large conference room of the ship. When we walked in the room and sat down, they brought in a very large TV and we started viewing the horrible scenes that took place that morning.

We had no idea what was happening. People in the room were shocked, some were crying. We were delayed for a few hours and could not leave the ship until all was clear.

We were in Skagway, Alaska, and were to continue on the rest of our journey by land for the next 11 days. We still were not sure if all would go smoothly the rest of our trip. We were to travel to Canada to the Yukon Territory, all passports and birth certificates were checked thoroughly upon our arrival at the Canadian border.

It was like we were in another world and still did not fully understand the impact of what was going on. As we came closer to the end of our trip, we were in Fairbanks and spoke to people at our hotel who were having trouble getting home due to the fact that no planes were flying yet. This was getting a little scary.

We had not spoken to our family back home, and our daughter was frantic that she would never see her parents again. Our final destination was Anchorage, Alaska. We were very fortunate that the airports were getting back to normal at this point, and we would be able to fly home.

The security was very high at the airport, which of course was all new . We could not believe what we had to go through just to board the airplane, but it was all worth it just to get home and see our family again.

Looking back, we feel we were very fortunate that the events of 9/11 did not ruin our very special anniversary trip that we had planned for so many months.

- Robin and Blayne Eaton

Where were we on 9/11/01?! We remember like it was yesterday.

I had back surgery in May 2001 in the town of Burbank, Calif. I had been there most of my life and my hubby lived there 16 years.

I worked for Disney studios for 28 years and hubby was a Teamster. We had come up here in the area the last seven years on vacations, and decided here was where we wanted to live. So in June we bought a house in the good town of Dayton.

Sept. 9, we moved from Burbank to Dayton. Had a house and no jobs to come to. Just got here and moved in, but were not unpacked when my girlfriend called me from Gardnerville that morning at 7:30. She told me the country was "under siege" and to turn on the TV.

Was that scary or what? No jobs, knew nobody and the whole country was freaked out. Boy did we just want to run back to Burbank.

We got a real good picture that morning of Dayton's beautiful sunrise about 6 a.m. and then we went back to bed but got the picture published in a coffee table book. Amazingly, it disappeared from our computer.

It was a pretty scary time for us not knowing what to do, but we loved the area and decided that we would not go back to the L.A. area. We're glad we made that decision.

We have made a lot of friends and love the Dayton area and have not regretted one day that we have lived here. It was just pretty frightening at the time being in a new place and knowing nobody.

We have gotten some unreal pictures of the Dayton sunrises and sunsets since then, which are so amazing and have met so many different characters that we will never forget that and make it all worthwhile. We are Daytonites now and will remain that way.

- Pam and Bill Brown