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About This Episode In this special bonus episode of Tapped In, host David Figueroa-Martinez steps away from martial arts mats to mark the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001. Drawing on vivid personal memories, David reflects on what it was like experiencing that day as a young man serving in the U.S. Army Reserve and working at an alpha-pager call center. He discusses the emotional intensity of transcribing urgent messages during a national blackout, packing his duffel bag in anticipation of deployment, the profound shift in everyday liberties and airport security, and the complicated aftermath that brought both short-lived national unity and misplaced blame on targeted communities.

3 Key Takeaways

• A Ground-Level Window into Crisis Communication: Working at an alpha-pager center provided a unique, frontline perspective of the raw fear, uncertainty, and emotional weight carried across the country during the unfolding attacks.
• The Immediate Shift in Reality for Service Members: Being young and in the Army Reserve meant facing sudden, sobering adulthood overnight—packing duffels and accepting the imminent reality of war without knowing what came next.
• The Dual Nature of Post-9/11 Culture: While the tragedy initially spurred rare national unity, it simultaneously gave rise to reactionary discrimination against Muslim, Middle Eastern, and brown communities, alongside permanent changes to personal freedoms and civil travel.

Chapters

• 00:00 – Introduction & Context of a Special Bonus Episode
• 01:13 – 2001 Reality: Early Military Life & The Pager Era
• 02:59 – The Human Side of Transcribing Messages
• 04:36 – September 11: The Morning of the Attacks
• 05:40 – Relaying Desperate Messages Through the Blur
• 06:58 – The Air Travel Freeze & The Pre-9/11 Airport Experience
• 08:15 – Packing the Duffel Bag & Accepting the Reality of War
• 09:31 – Unity, Fear, and the Spike in Discrimination
• 11:23 – Reflecting on 25 Years of Impact & Closing

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David Figueroa-Martinez

Founder, DFM Coaching Bjj

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Full Transcript

**** Welcome to Tapped In, my name is David Figueroa-Martinez of DFM Coaching, and today we're going to be discussing the 25th anniversary of 9/11. This is not going to be a jiu-jitsu episode, so if you want to skip it, I completely understand. This is going to be a bonus episode that I'm dropping on 9/11.

**** Um, and this isn't, uh, groundbreaking or anything. I think it's just to kind of take a moment and reflect on what occurred on that day and sooner after, how it affected lives—my life, everyone else's lives. Uh, many of you that might be in jiu-jitsu or listening to this may not have lived through it, or were too young to know the significance of it.

**** I'm 45. Uh, I graduated high school in '99. I entered the Army Reserves, um, so I was technically working for the Army and in high school. My parents had to sign off. All I did was show up one weekend a month, and that was pretty much it. But I was signed in.

**** So let me backtrack. Uh, at one point you only had landlines, and then they created this thing called a pager, and I'm dating myself. And on the pager, you would call the number, and then you would dial your phone numbers to have a call back from recipient. Recipient will call you back, blah, blah, blah. Uh, people got hip to that and started making little codes that would let you know of a short message, and you can decipher the code on the screen and then go about your day, call them back if you wanted to, or just know whatever the fuck was going on.

**** Um, I remember 143, 911, which was like call home, or sometimes you went 911 and then, then the phone number or a code for a specific person. Uh, I don't remember any of the other codes, it's been a long time. And then they created alpha-pagers. Alpha-pagers had a wider screen, it was like a little rectangle, and you had to call a call center, and the, the attendant would look up the person that you had, uh, that you were trying to message, and then they would type out your message and send it.

**** I worked at this place, I want to say, 3 years. Again, my sense of time is shit since COVID, but I, I liked working at that place. It was fun. It was fun by, you know, however you can describe work. It was an interesting job. I liked the people that I worked with. Um, I liked the some of the interactions. Most of them are mundane and had nothing great to write about.

**** Every once in a while, you would get a couple that was arguing, and they would go back and forth on this thing, and you would potentially get parts of it, or maybe more than other people. Like let's say if it was a slow day, and there weren't a whole lot of people working, the odds of you picking up the, the couple were higher. So sometimes you would get hers, sometimes you get his. Sometimes the messages will continue, and then you would catch another part and you're just like, "Man, I'm missing part of this story." It was genuinely an interesting job to have.

**** I learned how to type relatively fast. Um, I learned how to decipher like what people were saying and be able to read it back to them pretty easily. Um, and then every once in a while, you had people that were uh, wanted to be a little spicy and said messages that were of the adult nature. And the thing was, we couldn't send anything that was rated R. Uh, we had to keep things PC, we had to keep things uh, respectful and professional. So when like people were arguing, we like they would just be, "Fuck that, and this and that," and you were like, "I'm sorry, sir, I can't write that." It's like, "All right, so just say this. So how do you want to write it?" And, and they would get frustrated because they're on a, they're on one, they want to send out the message the way they want to send it out, you got to pull them back and be a bit more professional. It was a weird thing.

**** Uh, so you also got a lot of like the sweet messages, people just missing each other and that sort of thing. Most of it was business-oriented and not that interesting to write about or to talk about. It was an interesting job. I learned, it was the first, you know, other than military, the first civilian job that I had, I believe. And the different type of people that we had there was interesting, because usually at a certain job, sometimes you get a specific look or a specific type of person in a in a job. This was very, very American, if I can put it that way. A little bit of everything: men, women, different races, different ages. I had friends that were 20 years older than me. Um, I had friends from backgrounds that I did not ever associate with or was connected to. Again, I was younger, so you take that into account.

**** Uh, so I woke up that morning, uh, I was getting ready for work, I had to ride the bus in, and I remember—I can't remember if it was one plane or two—but I remember looking at the TV screen like, "Oh shit." And I think it may have been one, and I was puzzled by what was going on. And I if I remember correct, again, I'm 45, it's been a long time, I remember getting to work, checking the the feed in the break room, and being like, "Oh, shit's getting really fucked up." I don't remember, I don't think I saw the collapse live.

**** Um, I think I was either moving from one from like home to work, or I was on the phone lines and then came back to the break room. I do not remember watching it live, so there wasn't this like this gasp for me, like like if you saw it live. But there was a when I started hearing things and I'm like, "No, no way."

**** Uh, so what I remember vividly, and I do not remember the details of these conversations, uh, I remember the the weight of the the emotional weight, the emotional concern that people had for one another. We were getting these messages, and again, the country unlike when there's a natural disaster, a segment or that location is completely affected; the rest of the world or the rest of the country continues to move about its day and do whatever the fuck it does. Uh, this created a pause, and this affected everyone watching. Everyone.

**** And we were getting messages from people who were desperately looking for other people. People who wanted, "Hey, just let me know you're okay. Hey, I know you live in New York, I know you're around that area, or whatever, let me know that you're good." I remember those types of messages. I don't remember anything specific, I don't remember a specific person, I don't remember a specific voice, but we were getting a lot of these messages messages of just like concern, worry, "Let me know you're okay, is everything okay?" And part of the day was just a giant blur of sending these messages over and over. Something to the same effect.

**** And if you had lived through it, it was a moment where you didn't know what was coming next, and you didn't know how far-reaching this actually was. You, in the beginning, you thought it was New York, and then you find out, oh, the Pentagon, oh, Flight 93, oh. And then you there was a bunch of rumors and concerns of this and that, and you didn't know what was real and what was not. At the time, we did not have the internet like we have it now, we didn't have, again, we didn't have text messaging like we have it now, we didn't have web browsing on our phones like we have it now, and there was just a lot of shit going on.

**** And I could only imagine what it would have been like as the president, or as high-ranking official within the government, and you're part of the military or the security apparatus, and you have to figure out what the fuck is going on. I remember as a citizen working in this specific job, we had no clue. And there was you could feel the the concern, and the worry, and the "What's happening, and what's next?" And it was a lot. It was a lot.

**** And I remember I would take a break and go into the break room and kind of watch, and the country shut down. Uh, there were no flights after a while. Um, and I'm skipping around a little bit, but they eventually shut down all flights. They shut down, uh, you if you were vacationing somewhere, if you were going somewhere for business, you were stuck unless you can drive.

**** Um, while the memory's still there, uh, this is in part why when you go to the airport, you have to drop people off at the at the front. Um, I remember going to the airport to annual training, I think the year before, and my dad walked me all the way—like at the time, there was no security the way it is now—they can your family can walk you all the way to the gate. They can watch you board, they can watch you walk through that little tunnel, they can watch the plane go away. That's how we lived back then. And the the the freedom of movement within airports, uh, completely different now. Now you you got TSA, you your people can only go so far. I know they're trying to change something with some security clearance, but it it was a different time. Different time.

**** And at the end of the day, I don't even remember if I worked a full day or if it was uh part-time, cuz I think I was part-time at the time. I ended up going home, and being that age, that young, not knowing what's coming next—I don't think anyone knew what's coming next, even if you were uh a veteran of multiple deployments—the scope of whatever this was, was different than anything else.

**** And I remember getting all my military shit, uh, folded and nicely packed and put in my duffel bag. Because in my world, that meant whatever was going on meant we were going to war. I had no idea what that would look like, I had no idea if that meant I was getting orders the following day, I didn't know if it was going to be orders in a couple of weeks, couple of months, I had no idea. The only thing that I knew was the country had been attacked, I happened to be in the military, and this is like nothing before it, who knows where we're going now.

**** And there was this heaviness, but there was also like a just, again, I was young and I was naive, I didn't really understand the scope of things, and it was like acceptance. I was like, "I guess I'm I'm going somewhere, wherever that is." And at the time, we had no clue. And it was just a such a strange time.

**** Uh, one of the interesting things that happened at the time was that there was a more unified front in America. I do not want to say it was completely unified, and I'll explain, but you saw more patriotism like I had never seen before in my life. You sensed more of what America was kind of supposed to be like: that we were you're supposed to feel like your countrymen have your back, like your countrymen care about you, regardless of race. And you got more of a sense of that at that time, and I'll explain why I don't say fully, but you got a little bit more of a sense of that. Um, racism, all the other shit, sexism, all still occurs, but there's just this feeling that was a little different than pre-9/11, at least for a short time.

**** Now what was occurring was that people who were of the Muslim faith, Middle Easterners, and anyone who looked that way, were getting shit on. Uh, we as a country try not to discuss that all that often, but it was happening, and it fucking sucked. Um, I had family that are Puerto Rican that look like they could be Middle Eastern, they got it. I know people were calling mosques with death threats and bomb threats, and people were being yelled at, and spit at, and talked down to.

**** And similarly to what happened during COVID when people wanted to take out their frustrations on Chinese people, simply because we thought it came from Wuhan or whatever, and because we don't have a target to really specify in 9/11 or during COVID, we lash out to the closest people to us. And unfortunately, it it occurs, and it occurred at that time. And it was unfair to those those people, it was unfair to anyone that looked like them, it it's un-American. And it was a hard thing to to watch, to see, to to know was her occurring.

**** And then we went to war. And we went to war for two decades. Wild times. Um, I do It it it was such a weird time. And if you're someone who lived through it, I you're going to have your stories, and you're going to have detailed stories, you're going to have stories of other people, you're going to have stories from things you heard about, and it was such a benchmark in that generational and that generation's lives, or generations' lives—multiple were alive at the time—uh, that it's hard to ignore, and it's hard to put away.

**** And I know time has passed, and uh, it doesn't have the same weight over time, obviously. Things lessen, your life gets longer, you start to experience other things, and you have to go through multitude of experiences. But there was a lot that went on that that day and during that time period, um, that I wished we had learned a bit more from.

**** Um, but uh, just 25 years is crazy. It is crazy. And to think where I was then, where I am now, uh, where the country is, where we are as a country now, is wild. Um, if you want to share your stories with me, if you want to send me uh a message about it, whatever, completely understand. Again, I know this is not a jiu-jitsu episode, uh, but I felt like 25 years was a big deal, and it deserved its moment, and some recollection and and thoughts on what we went through as a people and as a group. Um, until next time, thank you so much.