Alumnus recalls 9/11 as senior at Duke

Remembering 9/11.... I was a senior at Duke University. I had a late night radio show on WXDU, so I got in and went to bed around 4 a.m. I was woken up by my roommates and told that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I went upstairs where they had the TV on and soon after I started watching, the second plane hit. Everyone started to realize that it was a terrorist attack. We continued watching for most of the morning, through the attack on the Pentagon and then as the towers collapsed. My dad was working in Midtown so I called my family to just make sure he was OK. Fortunately, mostly everyone I knew working in the city was not in harm’s way. Nobody really knew what was going on, especially in N.C., so classes had not been canceled. I had one political science class that afternoon. I decided to go, hoping that perhaps the professor would be able to put some of the things that were happening in context. After all, this was well before Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were household names. Unfortunately, after 10 minutes of unenlightening discussion, the class went back to business. I felt bad being so far removed from the people in N.Y. dealing with the tragedy. I thought back to just a few weeks earlier when I had been interning with SAP Global Marketing in downtown Manhattan. One morning we went on a photo shoot to observe the shoot, which was at the World Trade Center site. I don’t think I had ever actually been that up close to the towers. I remember just standing beneath them staring straight up in complete awe... amazed that such structures were even possible. I remember feeling proud to be a New Yorker at that moment... proud to be an American. Even 10 years later, that is one of the few things that hasn’t changed.

Craig Principe

Trinity ’02