Airman shares first-hand 9/11 experience

  • Published
  • By SrA. Kelly Galloway
  • 439th AW Public Affairs
WESTOVER, Mass. --  SrA. Elias Aponte, 439th Security Forces Squadron, was attending John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City on September 11, 2001.
 
"When I got to my class around 7 a.m., there was a posting on the bulletin board notifying us that classes had been cancelled," he remembers. "I didn't think anything of it and took the subway to downtown where I was working at the U.S. Attorney General's office," SrA. Aponte said. To this day, he still does not know why classes were cancelled so early.

"When I came out from the subway I could see the post office and behind that, the towers. It was then that I saw smoke and papers and other stuff flying out from the tower. I walked down to the attorney general's building, but when I got there they were already evacuating the building. Again, I didn't think much of it considering accidents happen all the time,
especially in New York," he said.

He and a few friends then decided to walk down to the Brooklyn Bridge to get a better view of what was going on.

"We were young, curious, and wanted to see what happened to the towers," SrA. Aponte said. From the bridge he could see all of the East River, Lower Manhattan, and the Twin Towers. "We weren't on the bridge for very long when I saw the second plane hit. I actually watched the plane come in and smash into the building. To me, the towers at that moment looked like two chimneys smoking. From anywhere in the city you could look up and see
the trail of smoke from the tops of the towers."

SrA. Aponte's eyes shifted downward, his voice lowered; he and his friends were front-line witnesses to what would become our nation's largest tragedy to date.

They stood on the Brooklyn Bridge for awhile after the towers came down. "That image will never leave my memory; especially the huge cloud of smoke and debris that rushed out from everywhere, engulfing everything," he said. "It was literally like a tsunami of dust and dirt."

SrA. Aponte and his friends walked up Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive. "There were so many people just walking up FDR, all I could see was a sea of people. The city was in a state of total gridlock, people were bumper to bumper. New York is a city that centers around the idea of 'anything to make a buck' and that rang true for the taxis. They were
charging $200 just to drive people around the city. I saw taxis with five, six, seven people in them. Some were sitting on the roof," he said.

"I made my way home safely. To be honest, the reality of what just occurred didn't set in until the next day when the World Trade Center, one of the most prominent symbols representing New York City, was no longer there. Instead of seeing those two towers, there was just a big gaping hole."