Twenty-five years ago this morning, I was lying in bed in a dorm room at Bluefield College.

It was the fall semester of what would eventually turn out to be my first senior year. One of my roommates had gotten up before me and gone into the bathroom to take a shower. He turned on the radio, and I remember listening to it over the sound of the running water while I continued doing my best to avoid actually getting out of bed.

It was a Tuesday morning. I was 21 years old. I had classes to attend. As far as I knew when I woke up, September 11, 2001 was going to be another perfectly ordinary day. Then I heard something on the radio about an airplane hitting one of the towers of the World Trade Center. That got me out of bed.

My first thought was that I must have misunderstood something. I turned on the television and found the Today show. And there it was: a distant shot of the World Trade Center with thick, black smoke pouring from high above the Manhattan skyline. My second thought was probably the same thought millions of other people were having. What a crazy accident.

Then the second plane hit. And everything changed.

The Moment We Knew

There are images from that morning that I don’t think I’ll ever lose. I can close my eyes today and still see that second airplane flying into the South Tower. I can see the explosion. I can see the towers burning. I can see one building collapse and, later, the other. I can see the enormous cloud of dust and debris chasing people through the streets of lower Manhattan.

I remember television coverage shifting to the Pentagon after another airplane crashed there. Then came the news that a fourth airplane had gone down in a field in Pennsylvania.

Mostly, I remember chaos.

Twenty-five years later, we know the timeline. American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 that morning. United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower at 9:03. American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon at 9:37. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59. United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 after passengers and crew members fought back against the hijackers. The North Tower collapsed at 10:28.

Those are facts. Living through those 102 minutes didn’t feel anything like reading a timeline. We didn’t know what was coming next. After the first plane hit, we wondered whether it had been an accident. After the second, I think anyone watching understood almost instantly that we were witnessing an attack. Then came an entirely different set of questions.

How many people were in those buildings? How many had gotten out? How many were missing? Were there more airplanes? Was another attack coming? What happened now?

There were no smartphones in our pockets offering instant answers. There were television networks, radio stations, telephone calls, reporters scrambling for information, and a tremendous amount of speculation. We flipped among the networks, CNN, and MSNBC, trying to absorb whatever information was available. Sometimes there wasn’t any new information. So we watched the same images again. And again. And again.

An Ordinary Tuesday Disappears

Classes at Bluefield weren’t officially canceled that day, although I don’t remember attending any of mine. I remember one of my professors saying during lunch in the cafeteria that he was glad the college hadn’t canceled classes. His thinking was that shutting everything down was exactly what the terrorists wanted. They wanted to disrupt our lives and frighten us into stopping. He had a point.

I also couldn’t imagine sitting in a classroom that afternoon and concentrating on Church History or Abnormal Psychology. There was something almost absurd about the idea that the normal Tuesday we’d awakened expecting was somehow supposed to continue. An assignment that might have seemed important on Monday suddenly wasn’t very high on the priority list.

I spent most of the day with friends and roommates. I don’t specifically remember talking to my parents, although I’m sure I must have called them at some point. They were home in Roanoke, safely removed from what was happening. Mom would have already been at work when the first plane hit. Dad was retired and on disability by then, so he was probably watching everything unfold from home just as we were watching from school.

I wasn’t afraid for my own immediate safety. I was worried about people who were there.

I knew one person with even a loose connection to the World Trade Center, a young man I knew through Bluefield who had graduated the year before. He and his wife lived in New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan. As I remember it, he occasionally worked in the World Trade Center, although thankfully he wasn’t there that morning.

For countless other families, there would be no such relief. The attacks killed 2,977 people from more than 90 nations. Of those, 2,753 were killed in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 aboard Flight 93. Numbers like that communicate the scale of a tragedy, but they don’t really communicate the tragedy.

Each one represents a person who woke up that Tuesday morning expecting a Tuesday. Someone went to work. Someone boarded an airplane. Someone kissed a spouse goodbye. Someone dropped off a child. Someone had plans for that evening, that weekend, or the rest of a life they had every reason to believe was waiting for them.

Then there were the people who ran toward the danger.

Look for the Helpers

Fred Rogers famously shared something his mother told him when he encountered frightening things in the news as a child: “Look for the helpers.”

There were helpers everywhere on September 11. Firefighters climbed stairwells while thousands of people were trying desperately to get down them. Police officers, paramedics, emergency personnel, military personnel, ordinary civilians, and complete strangers helped people they might never have met before that morning.

Passengers and crew aboard Flight 93, having learned what had happened to the other hijacked planes, fought back. Their plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania rather than reaching the hijackers’ intended target in Washington.

That kind of courage is difficult for me to comprehend. It’s easy to imagine ourselves being brave when we’re safely sitting at home. Real courage is something different. Real courage is recognizing that you’re in danger and choosing to help anyway. And for many of those helpers, September 11 didn’t end on September 11.

The rescue and recovery effort at Ground Zero continued until May 30, 2002. In the years since, responders, recovery workers, survivors, and others exposed to the disaster have suffered serious physical and mental health consequences. Today, the federal World Trade Center Health Program serves nearly 150,000 people across the country.

That is another part of what we mean when we talk about the lives affected by 9/11. Some people escaped the towers only to carry that morning with them physically for the rest of their lives. Some people went to Ground Zero because strangers needed help and became sick years later. The losses accumulated long after the television cameras stopped showing us the smoking ruins every hour of every day.

What Happened the Next Morning?

By the evening of September 11, I remember feeling numb. We had never turned off the news. Eventually, after hours of watching the same horrifying images and absorbing one new piece of information after another, another question began creeping into my mind. What happens tomorrow?

Do we just go back to class? Do people go back to work? How do you watch thousands of people die on live television and then wake up the next morning and return to your regularly scheduled life?

The answer, of course, was that we carried on. At first, I think we had to force ourselves to do it. There were American flags everywhere. There were vigils and moments of silence. Churches filled. Television networks continued their nearly constant coverage before gradually returning to regular programming. And for a little while, there was something else.

Unity.

I don’t think the unity Americans felt after September 11 was imaginary, even if our memories sometimes romanticize it. People still disagreed. We certainly didn’t wake up on September 12 with every political, economic, religious, and philosophical difference magically erased. But something had happened to us. The United States had been attacked, and for a brief period, the emphasis seemed to fall more heavily on the word United. Twenty-five years later, I think that’s one of the things I miss most.

What Else Did We Lose?

September 11 did not fundamentally change me as a person. It did change the way I looked at the world. Even now, I think Americans have a tendency to feel almost untouchable. Wars happen somewhere else. Terrorist attacks happen somewhere else. Governments collapse somewhere else.

Obviously, we know intellectually that none of that is guaranteed. September 11 proved it in a way my generation had never experienced. Friends and I said it even as we watched the coverage that morning. “This is our Pearl Harbor.” “This is our JFK.” We knew immediately that this would become one of those events attached forever to a question: Where were you?

I will always have an answer.

September 11 also changed the country in ways far more complicated than I could have understood at 21. Wars followed. Government policies changed. Airport security changed. Our attitudes about privacy and national security changed. Fear followed the attacks, and that fear was understandable. Some of what people did with it wasn’t.

It was painful to watch anger directed indiscriminately toward Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim, as though millions of ordinary people somehow shared responsibility for the actions of 19 extremists. Fear can bring people together when they recognize a common danger. It can also make people suspicious of anyone they decide belongs outside their circle.

Both things happened. There are entire books to be written about the political decisions made after September 11, the wars that followed, and their consequences. I’m not going to pretend I can adequately address all of that here. But I don’t think we can commemorate the day honestly without acknowledging that September 11 changed much more than the Manhattan skyline.

Twenty-Five Years

What feels strangest to me today is that all of this happened 25 years ago. There are adults alive today who have no memory of September 11 because they hadn’t been born yet. For them, 9/11 is history.

I don’t mean that dismissively. The American Revolution is history. The Civil War is history. The Great Depression and Pearl Harbor are history. These are events people should learn about precisely because understanding our history helps us understand the country and world we’ve inherited.

But there’s a strange moment in your own life when something you remember happening becomes something younger generations only know from history books, documentaries, photographs, and stories told by people who were there.

I wasn’t there. That’s important for me to say. I wasn’t in New York. I wasn’t at the Pentagon. I wasn’t aboard one of those airplanes. I didn’t lose a parent, sibling, spouse, child, or friend that morning. I witnessed September 11 passively, through a television screen in a college dormitory hundreds of miles away. My memories cannot compare with those of someone who escaped one of the towers, someone who waited for a phone call that never came, or a child who grew up without a parent because of what happened that morning.

But I remember. I remember lying in bed and hearing that radio over the sound of the shower. I remember turning on the television. I remember seeing the smoke. I remember watching the second plane hit. I remember the buildings falling. I remember the people running. I remember the confusion. And I remember wondering what the world would look like tomorrow.

Remembering What United Felt Like

“Never Forget” has been repeated so many times over the past quarter-century that I sometimes wonder whether we stop to consider exactly what we’re promising not to forget. Certainly, we should remember the 2,977 people whose lives were taken that morning. We should remember the families who had empty chairs at dinner tables that night. We should remember the people whose health was damaged in the months and years afterward. We should remember the firefighters climbing the stairs. We should remember the police officers, paramedics, military personnel, rescue workers, volunteers, and ordinary people who helped complete strangers. We should remember the passengers who fought back.

And maybe we should remember what it felt like, however briefly, to believe that what connected us was more important than what divided us. I wish we’d held onto more of that.

Our political and philosophical divisions didn’t disappear after September 11. They returned, and in the quarter-century since, many of them have grown wider, louder, and uglier. Maybe expecting permanent national unity was always unrealistic. A country of hundreds of millions of people should contain disagreement. Democracy depends on it.

But disagreement doesn’t have to mean contempt. That’s something I wish we’d remembered. Twenty-five years later, September 11 remains a day of enormous loss. Some of that loss can be counted. Some of it cannot. So today, I’ll remember where I was. I’ll remember the people who never got to see September 12, 2001. I’ll remember the people who spent that day running toward danger because someone else needed help.

And when the world once again seems frightening, divided, or hopeless, I’ll try to remember the advice Fred Rogers’ mother gave him so many years ago. Look for the helpers. They were there. They always are.

Feature Photo by Garrison Gao