I woke up early about 5:30 AM to get a load of Jolly Rancher Candy I had picked up 3 days prior in Denver at what was then the factory, and made for Mechanicsburg PA to a small Hershey holding warehouse. I drove on I-76 near Shanksville PA (flight #93) around 06:20 AM. When I reached Mechanicsburg I dropped my load and cleaned out my trailer (Customers won’t accept trailers that are not clean inside), 07:10 AM.
After that, I checked in with dispatch and was directed to go to Hershey Warehouse #3 near Harrisburg PA. I started to there around 07:45 AM I arrived at Warehouse #3 just as the first plane hit, I say about as I heard it from the Harrisburg NPR station, that means it happened around 5 minutes before I heard it. The Description was vague, and merely referred to a plane hitting one of the towers, it sounded like they meant a small plane (they really didn’t know).
At Warehouse #3 I proceeded to drop my trailer and as I drove to my trailer drop position, I caught sight of the trailer I was picking up so I put my truck under it and hooked everything up and went in to the office for the bills of lading. This had to have been one of the fastest trailer swap outs I’ve ever heard of, because I wasn’t there more that 15 minutes, I know this because as I approached the exit, Harrisburg NPR announced the 2nd plane had gone in.
It was at that moment, everything changed!
We were under attack, and no one, had any kind of handle on the moment, not the US Government , or anyone.
At that point, I had my load so I went to the local Flying J and hit the weigh scales to confirm my load balance and drove across the street to a Williams Truck stop, there I fueled and I went into the fuel desk to pay, where I and at least 200 other drivers were looking at the monitors above the fuel desk showing the Terrorist attack live. Normally those monitors were there to display loads looking for a truck and driver to pickup. But not that day, it was carnage live on CNN, Fox news, CBS, ABC, NBC, all of them. Each monitor was on a different news station.
Meanwhile, United Flight 93 was struggling to overcome their hijackers and crashed into the ground near Shanksville PA that is estimated to have happened at 10:02:30 hrs.
It was surreal, I remember as the first tower went down, thinking, the last time someone pulled this kind of SHIT, we dropped two Atomic weapons on them.
I then got breakfast at the Truck stop with another driver I knew, and wow, life went on, and We as a country recoiled at the new horror before us and the war on terror had officially just kicked off.