When I think back to 9/11, it’s the visuals to rush to mind: the burning buildings that we could see from so many miles away; the cloud of smoke staring right at me in the middle of the night. The silent crowded streets.

Let me start from the beginning.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was covering local news at The Star-Ledger in New Jersey. My beat focused on government and schools in Central New Jersey, with a healthy dose of politics. I have no idea what I was supposed to work on that morning.

When I saw news of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, I was almost ready to leave the house. Like the rest of the world, I figured it must have been an accident. I finished getting dressed and, with a little urgency, was about to walk out the door when I heard about the second plane. Again like the rest of the world, I realized it was an attack.

I called my wife at work and told her the country was at war, I had to go and I didn’t know when I’d be home.

I raced to my office a few miles away. Until that morning, we hadn’t realized that we had a view of Lower Manhattan, if the skies were clear. But they were and we could see the smoking towers in the far distance.

We didn’t really know what to do at that moment, so we switched back and forth between watching TV and looking out the windows. We were receiving a steady stream of announcements that events were being postponed, school programs were being canceled and bridges and tunnels were being shut down.

We saw the horror of the collapsing towers through the window and on the TV screen simultaneously. And I remember asking the other reporters if the whole buildings had fallen or just the visible top floors. We all know what the response was.

The afternoon was spent talking to family members of commuters who wanted to know what we knew as much as we wanted to know what they knew. We tried to comfort our colleagues who had family members at the Twin Towers – or worse.

Soon, I was sent to church to cover a political prayer service. I called in my feed and was then given new instructions: they’re expecting more arrests, they’re arresting terrorists, get to JFK.

I grew up near Kennedy Airport in Queens, so I was sent to chase phantom terrorists who were being rounded up in phantom arrests. I went from hotel to hotel at JFK and found nothing. They sent me to LaGuardia. Nothing. So they sent me to Manhattan to see if maybe there would be press conference or something. Nothing. But with the cops and the strangely cut off streets, I was winding my way through a maze of Manhattan, first coming up alongside the Intrepid and then turning south and then east and then south and then west and then south, until I wound up looking right ahead at the smoke where the Towers used to be.

I didn’t really know what to do, so I parked and started collecting some scene color and quotes from people around the perimeter of Ground Zero.

I got home around 5 or 6 a.m. The world was totally different and it really felt that way.

Years later, when I covered the reconstruction of the World Trade Center, I would spend days and nights below ground, high above Ground Zero and all over the site of the attacks.

I still remember, though, what I saw that day, 25 years ago.

Josh Margolin is the chief investigative reporter at ABC News,

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Categories: 9/11, Covering 9/11, Jandoli Institute, Media