On #September11 I was in Grand Junction, Colorado, working my first TV job as a news and sports reporter for KKCO, the NBC affiliate there. I lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment.

I woke up and went to my computer, but my internet was incredibly slow, pages hardly loading at all. I called my internet service provider to complain, and the guy said, "Yeah, our whole network is really slow, apparently a plane crashed into the World Trade Center."

I said, "In New York City? Why on earth would that affect the network in Western Colorado?" The guy said he had no idea. I hung up and turned on my television--and stared in utter disbelief at the images I was seeing.

I watched the second tower collapse on CNN, with Aaron Brown saying what I was thinking. "Good lord. There are no words." Standing by myself in that little apartment, bawling like a baby.

I stood there for a few more minutes, not knowing what to do. Finally, I called into the station and Jean Reynolds, the news director, answered the phone.

"Jean, it's Drew, should I just come in?"

"Yeah, Drew, just come in. We... we're not sure what we're going to do."

I walked into the newsroom to find almost every employee of the station already there at 9:00 a.m. People were alternately staring at the national news coverage and rushing around trying to figure out what we would do, if anything.

I got paired with Debra Tomlinson, another news reporter, and we set about trying to find someone who could give us some perspective on what was happening. Someone knew a retired Marine Corps general named Hageman who lived near town. We called him and he agreed to an interview.

General Hageman looked to be in his 70s but still absolutely looked like a Marine. At this point, we still understood very little about what had happened, but the general knew.

He said, "The terrorists have awakened a great sleeping giant." I will never forget that moment.

Debra and I returned to the station to work on our individual stories, not even knowing if the national news was going to break long enough for us to have a local newscast that night.

We soon learned that all air traffic nationwide had been grounded, but we still wondered if the attacks had really stopped. We kept wondering if we would hear new reports about new explosions in different cities.

The newsroom was keyed up all day. Even though we were 2,000 miles away, we all felt the stress and the anxiety of wondering just what had happened. And how it could have happened.

I had visited New York City once before and I had stood on the roof of one of the World Trade Center towers. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that someone had intentionally flown planes into both of them -- and that both of them had collapsed.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, two of the guys in the newsroom got into an argument. It was about something trivial, like who was going to be next to use one of the edit bays, but it quickly ramped up and the guys started screaming at each other.

One of them asked the other to step outside and I thought we were going to have an actual fight in the newsroom. Both of them were squared up when one of the interns rushed into the newsroom and yelled out, "They just closed the Mesa Mall!" The only mall in Grand Junction.

There was a long beat as everyone turned and stared at the intern. Then someone said, "Well, that's a relief. After the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I'm sure the Mesa Mall was the next target!"

We all started laughing, and then we started laughing harder, and then we laughed until we cried. The two guys shook hands. And we all went back to work.

I don't think I'll ever forget a moment of that day.