United Flight 93 memorial in Union City, Calif. Courtesy Union City.

It was easily the most surreal day of my life.

Journalists love anniversaries, so you’ve already heard more than enough about the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. It got boosted by the proximity of the recent U.S. pullout of Afghanistan. It feels like a long time and it feels like last week.

But as much as we write, I’ve hardly seen anyone really explain what it was like that day.

Maybe I can’t either. But if anyone has ever been in a hospital and been on pain medication, you may know sometimes it gives you freakishlyvreal nightmares. I was once in such a situation, having a bad dream about menacing, melting creatures surrounding me. When I woke up, for about 30 seconds, the faces were still melting and coming toward me, only then they were in the real hospital room, under the real hospital furniture.

I never took those meds again.

And I never want another day like 9/11. It was exactly like waking up with a nightmare somehow lapping over into reality, causing one to question that reality.

My immediate questions were: Is this real? And, if so, how the hell is it happening?

If you weren’t alive, or too young to remember, the easiest description is saying it was a disaster movie coming alive. But that can’t begin to cover it. And that’s coming from someone who was on the West Coast, 3,000 miles away from where our mightiest buildings were being brought down like crippled animals and the Pentagon–the Pentagon–was in flames. The headquarters of the mightiest military the world has ever known in the most secure building on the planet (at least we thought so) was in flames.

That’s what I first saw when I flipped on the TV as I was getting dressed for work. I just spent five years working on the news side of the Contra Costa Times and was two weeks into a new gig as the newspaper’s music critic. I was used to flipping on the news, just to get an idea of what was happening at work.

What was happening … such an incredible understatement.

I called into work, which every reporter in America was doing or already did, if they weren’t there when it started. I won’t lie–as terrifying as it was, it was also exciting. Even if my duties that day only encompassed calling all the venues in the Bay Area to see who was canceling shows that night, which was a big waste of time, because everything stopped. Everything.

Yes it was such a big deal, they even canceled the Weezer show I was supposed to review that night.

Watching that day unspool: one tower falls, another falls, the Pentagon is hit, the reports of other planes in the air, one is headed for the Capitol and/or the White House … it was just hammer blow after hammer blow.  I’m a history nerd, especially when it comes to the Pacific theater of World War II, and it felt a lot like what I read about Dec. 7, 1941 and how it unfolded. Unbelievable reality mixed with stories and speculation spreading like forest fires, all of which taking years of unraveling to get any truth (if that’s what we did, which many still don’t believe of either day).

Everyone was looking for Flight 93, which was headed to the Bay Area but ended up in a Pennsylvania field, downed by its own incredibly brave passengers (one of whom–Mark Bingham was a close friend of someone I dated a few years earlier and with whom I’d partied in college and of whom, it could easily be said, was the nicest human on the planet). My colleagues on the news side were scrambling to find who was on that plane. The Capitol and the White House were being evacuated on live TV. Everyone was waiting for the next explosion, or crash, or … we didn’t know. It was unreal.

Scary is an overused word, but it’s the best one-word description of 9/11. No one ever believed that could happen (obviously our government didn’t). Because it was the closest most of us ever came to real war at that point. It wasn’t like anyone was going to dive bomb my three-bedroom starter home in Cordelia, but San Francisco was a ripe target and a big part of my life back then.

I also lived in the flight path of Travis Air Force Base, right where the military planes made their eastbound turn to approach the base. As air traffic all over the rest of the country came to a halt, it increased by about tenfold in the ensuing weeks over my house. The military was preparing for war, and I heard the preparation all day and night for months over my otherwise safe corner of the planet.

Everyone knew war was coming–which was a first in my lifetime. Everyone knew they were about to know someone who could die in that war. No one knew what was coming next, or what was already in the U.S., just waiting to explode.

It was exciting. It was terrifying. And, as the days, months and years went on, got sadder and sadder. Everyone says we need to remember 9/11, and they’re right, but maybe not for the reasons they believe. Twenty years was far too long to be at war. That’s what I hope people remember. That and the fact that, really, only sadness and suffering remain after all those years. Please remember that.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.