Looking back and ahead, America remembers 9/11

LARRY NEUMEISTER, SAMANTHA GROSS

Asso­ci­ated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Deter­mined never to for­get but per­haps ready to move on, the nation gen­tly handed Sept. 11 over to his­tory Sun­day and etched its mem­ory on a new gen­er­a­tion. A stark memo­r­ial took its place where twin tow­ers once stood, and the names of the lost resounded from chil­dren too young to remem­ber ter­ror from a decade ago.

In New York, Wash­ing­ton and Penn­syl­va­nia, across the United States and the world, peo­ple car­ried out rit­u­als now as famil­iar as they are heart­break­ing: Amer­i­can flags unfurled at the new World Trade Cen­ter tower and the Eif­fel Tower, and tears shed at the base of the Pen­ta­gon and a base in Iraq.

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama quoted the Bible and spoke of find­ing strength in fear. George W. Bush, still new to the pres­i­dency that day, invoked the national sac­ri­fice of the Civil War. Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden said hope must grow from tragedy.

And Jes­sica Rhodes talked about her niece, Kathryn L. LaBorie, the lead flight atten­dant on the plane that hit the south tower. She remem­bered a radi­ant smile and infi­nite com­pas­sion, and sug­gested that now, 10 years on, it is time to turn a corner.

“Although she may not ever be found, she will never ever be lost to her fam­ily and her friends,” Rhodes said after she read a seg­ment of the list of the dead at ground zero. “Today we honor her by let­ting go of the sad­ness over los­ing her and embrac­ing the joy of hav­ing known her.”

It was the 10th time the nation has paused to remem­ber a defin­ing day. In doing so, it closed a decade that pro­duced two wars, deep changes in national secu­rity, shifts in every­day life — and, months before it ended, the death at Amer­i­can hands of the elu­sive ter­ror­ist who mas­ter­minded the attack.

“These past 10 years tell a story of resilience,” Obama said at a memo­r­ial con­cert at the Kennedy Cen­ter after he vis­ited all three attack sites.

“It will be said of us that we kept that faith; that we took a painful blow, and emerged stronger,” he said.

The anniver­sary took place under height­ened secu­rity. In New York and Wash­ing­ton espe­cially, author­i­ties were on alert. Ahead of the anniver­sary, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment warned those cities of a tip about a pos­si­ble car-bomb plot. Police searched trucks in New York, and streets near the trade cen­ter were blocked. To walk within blocks of the site, peo­ple had to go through checkpoints.

The names of the fallen — 2,983 of them, includ­ing all the vic­tims from the three Sept. 11 attack sites and six peo­ple who died when ter­ror­ists set off a truck bomb under the tow­ers in 1993 — echoed across a place utterly transformed.

In the exact foot­prints of the two tow­ers was a stately memo­r­ial, two great, weep­ing water­falls, unveiled for the first time and, at least on the first day, open only to the rel­a­tives of the vic­tims. Around the square perime­ter of each were bronze para­pets, etched with names.

Some of the rel­a­tives were dressed in fune­real suits and oth­ers in fire depart­ment T-shirts. They traced the names with pen­cils and paper, and some left pic­tures or flow­ers, fit­ting the stems into the recessed lettering.

At the south tower pool, an acre in area and 30 feet deep, Mary Dwyer, of Brook­lyn, remem­bered her sis­ter, Lucy Fish­man, who worked for Aon Corp., an insur­ance com­pany that occu­pied seven floors near the very top.

“It’s the clos­est I’ll ever get to her again,” she said.

One Sept. 11 rel­a­tive pro­nounced the memo­r­ial breath­tak­ing. An under­ground sec­tion and a museum won’t open until next year, but for many of the fam­i­lies, the names were enough.

“It breaks me up,” said David Mar­tinez, who watched the attacks hap­pen from his office in Man­hat­tan, and later learned that he had lost a cousin and a brother, one in each tower.

At memo­r­ial ser­vices, peo­ple talked of grief and loss and war and jus­tice. But they also talked of mov­ing forward.

“Every year it becomes more sig­nif­i­cant,” Bar­bara Gor­man said at a ser­vice for the Port Author­ity dead, which included 37 police offi­cers, one of them her hus­band, Thomas. “My kids are 25, 21, 18. They under­stand now. It’s not so much a tragedy any­more as his­tory, the his­tory of our country.”

In the decade between then and now, chil­dren have grown. The second-graders who were with Bush on the morn­ing of Sept. 11, 2001, will grad­u­ate high school next spring. And chil­dren who were in the cra­dle or the womb on that day are old enough to read names at the anniver­sary, old enough to bear the full bur­den of their grief.

“You will always be my hero,” Patri­cia Smith, 12, said of her mother.

Nicholas Gorki remem­bered his father, “who I never met because I was in my mother’s belly. I love you, Father. You gave me the gift of life, and I wish you could be here to enjoy it with me.”

Alex Zan­grilli said: “Dad, I wish you were here with me to give me advice, to be on the side­lines when I play sports like all the other dads. … I wish we had more time together.”

Made­line Hoff­man smiled as she said to her father: “Every­one always tells me I look and act just like you.” And Caitlin Roy, whose father was a fire­fighter, said: “I want to thank you for the nine years you spent as my dad. They were short but not with­out their ben­e­fits. We’re taken care of now. We’re happy.”

Obama, stand­ing behind bul­let­proof glass and in front of the white oak trees of the memo­r­ial, read a Bible pas­sage after a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., when the first jet­liner slammed into the north tower 10 years ago.

The pres­i­dent, quot­ing Psalm 46, invoked the pres­ence of God as an inspi­ra­tion to endure: “There­fore, we will not fear, even though the earth be removed, and though the moun­tains be car­ried into the midst of the sea.”

Obama and Bush, joined by their wives, walked up to one of the pools and put their hands to some of the names. Bush later read from a let­ter that Pres­i­dent Abra­ham Lin­coln wrote to a mother believed to have lost five sons in the Civil War: “I pray that our heav­enly father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement.”

In a cer­e­mony at the Pen­ta­gon, Biden paid trib­ute to “the 9/11 gen­er­a­tion of warriors.”

“Never before in our his­tory has Amer­ica asked so much over such a sus­tained period of an all-volunteer force,” he said. “So I can say with­out fear of con­tra­dic­tion or being accused of exag­ger­a­tion, the 9/11 gen­er­a­tion ranks among the great­est our nation has ever pro­duced, and it was born — it was born — it was born right here on 9/11.”

Defense Sec­re­tary Leon Panetta paid trib­ute to 6,200 mem­bers of the U.S. mil­i­tary who have died in the Iraq and Afghan wars. One hun­dred eighty-four peo­ple died at the Pentagon.

In Shanksville, Pa., a choir sang at the Flight 93 National Memo­r­ial, and a crowd of 5,000 lis­tened to a read­ing of the names of 40 pas­sen­gers and crew killed aboard the fourth jet­liner hijacked that day a decade ago. Obama and his wife trav­eled to the Penn­syl­va­nia town after their visit to New York and placed a wreath at the memorial.

Dur­ing the president’s visit, mem­bers of the crowd chanted, “USA! USA!” One man called out: “Thanks for get­ting bin Laden!” It was the first anniver­sary obser­vance since al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pak­istan in May.

In a brief scare, two mil­i­tary air­craft escorted a New York-bound Amer­i­can Air­lines flight from Los Ange­les. Three pas­sen­gers made repeated trips to the bath­room and some peo­ple thought they were using hand sig­nals to com­mu­ni­cate, but the men were cleared and sent on their way, said a law enforce­ment offi­cial who was not autho­rized to speak pub­licly and spoke on con­di­tion of anonymity. The offi­cial said ear­lier reports that the men had locked them­selves in the bath­room were incorrect.

Fighter jets also shad­owed a Denver-to-Detroit Fron­tier Air­lines flight after the crew reported that two peo­ple were spend­ing an unusual amount of time in the bath­room. The FBI said a search of the plane turned up noth­ing and three pas­sen­gers were questioned.

For the most part, in New York, away from the trade cen­ter, it was a pleas­ant Sep­tem­ber Sun­day. Peo­ple had brunch out­doors. Bicy­cles crowded the paths along the Hud­son River. Fam­i­lies strolled around. Sail­boats caught a river breeze and drifted past the dock where emer­gency ves­sels evac­u­ated trade cen­ter survivors.

Else­where in the nation, it was a day not to bring life to a stop, as it was 10 years ago, but to pause and reflect.

Out­side FedEx Field in Lan­dover, Md., fans got ready for the first Sun­day of the NFL sea­son, the Red­skins and Giants, Wash­ing­ton and New York. There was extra secu­rity at the sta­dium. Scott Mil­lar, a Red­skins sea­son ticket-holder, used the logic of post-Sept. 11 Amer­ica in decid­ing to go to the game.

“You’ve got to trust the secu­rity. You’ve got to trust the peo­ple who are here to pro­tect you,” he said. “We’re here to have a good time.”

In south­west Mis­souri, where 160 peo­ple died in May in the nation’s dead­liest tor­nado in six decades, New York fire­fight­ers and ground zero con­struc­tion work­ers joined sur­vivors in a trib­ute to the vic­tims of Sept. 11.

The New York con­tin­gent brought a 20-by-30-foot Amer­i­can flag recov­ered a decade ago from a build­ing near the trade cen­ter. Sur­vivors of a Greens­burg, Kan., tor­nado began repair­ing the flag in 2008, using rem­nants of flags from their town. The final stitches are being made in Joplin, Mo., and then the flag will go to the National 9/11 Memo­r­ial Museum. Mis­souri is the last stop on a 50-state tour to pro­mote national unity and volunteerism.

“We’re so far away from the World Trade Cen­ter,” said Miller, who brought her mother and two chil­dren to the Joplin trib­ute. “But it doesn’t mat­ter how far away you are.”

Some observed the day as a time to serve. Thou­sands cleaned parks, ren­o­vated com­mu­nity cen­ters and gave blood as they did in the days after the 2001 attacks. Some said they were try­ing to reclaim good will that they said has been lost amid polit­i­cal ran­cor and eco­nomic fear.

“As unfor­tu­nate as it was, it seemed like it put us all back into the frame of mind that life wasn’t just about me,” said Yvette Wind­ham, who joined 200 peo­ple to build seven new homes in a Nashville, Tenn., neighborhood.

The world offered ges­tures large and small. The Colos­seum in Rome, rarely lit up, glowed in sol­i­dar­ity. Pope Bene­dict XVI encour­aged peo­ple to resist “temp­ta­tion toward hatred” and focus on jus­tice and peace. Taps sounded in Bel­gium and in Bagram, Afghanistan. In Madrid, they planted 10 Amer­i­can oak trees in a park, led by a prince.

And in Malaysia, Path­mawathy Navarat­nam woke up Sun­day in her sub­ur­ban Kuala Lumpur home and did what she’s done every day for the past decade — say “good morn­ing” to her son, Vijayashanker Paramsothy, who was killed in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

“He is my sun­shine. He has lived life to the fullest, but I can’t accept that he is not here any­more,” Navarat­nam said. “I am still liv­ing, but I am dead inside.”

The Tal­iban marked the anniver­sary by vow­ing to keep fight­ing against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, insist­ing that they had no role in the Sept. 11 attacks. They railed against “Amer­i­can colo­nial­ism” and said Afghans have “end­less sta­mina” for war.

Hours later, a Tal­iban sui­cide bomber blew up a large truck at the gate of a Com­bat Out­post Sayed Abad in Afghanistan’s east­ern War­dak province, killing two civil­ians and injur­ing 77 U.S. troops.

“Some back home have asked why we are still here,” U.S. Ambas­sador Ryan Crocker said at a 9/11 memo­r­ial at the embassy in Kabul. “It’s been a long fight and peo­ple are tired.”

“We’re here,” he said, “so that there is never again another 9/11 com­ing from Afghan soil.”

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