Twenty-Five Years Later: Telling a New Generation About 9/11

Twenty-five years on, most of us remember exactly where we stood. A whole generation now has to be told.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a hijacked airliner that had taken off from Dulles, here in Virginia, was turned around and flown into the Pentagon at 9:37. It struck the west wall in Arlington, on Virginia ground. One hundred and twenty-five people inside the building were killed. Fifty-nine more died aboard the plane.

That was one of four attacks that morning. In all, 2,977 innocent people were killed. We do not gather to remember the men who did it. We gather to remember the fallen, and to make sure the young people who never knew that morning understand what we mean when we say never forget.

Before you read further, a request. Set aside an evening this week and watch the day for yourself, and better still, watch it with someone too young to remember it. National Geographic built a six-part account of September 11 with the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, told entirely by the people who lived it. There is no politics in it and no commentary, only the day itself. Watching it is its own act of remembrance. Each part is below.

If you are old enough, you do not need to be reminded. You remember the sky that was too blue for it. You remember the phone calls, the televisions wheeled into classrooms and break rooms, the second plane, the towers coming down while people watched and could not believe it. You remember how quiet the skies were for days after, with every plane grounded.

But here is the plain arithmetic of twenty-five years. A whole generation of Virginians is now old enough to vote, to serve, to raise children of their own, and they were not yet born. To them, September 11 is a date in a schoolbook. It is history, the way Pearl Harbor was history to us. That is not their fault. It is simply time doing what time does. And it is why the remembering now falls to those of us who were there.

What happened on Virginia ground

We tend to picture New York, and rightly so. But part of that day happened here. Flight 77 left a Virginia airport full of ordinary people headed to California. It came back as a weapon. The people it killed at the Pentagon were our neighbors, soldiers and sailors and civilians who had gone to work that morning like anyone else.

Today, on the west side of the Pentagon, there is a memorial. It holds 184 benches, one for each person who died there, each one carved with a name. You can walk among them. The benches are arranged by the ages of the dead, from a three-year-old girl who was on the plane to a man of seventy-one. Standing there, the number stops being a number. It becomes a field of names.

What we owe the ones who come after

Evil is real. We saw it plainly that morning, and it does no good to pretend otherwise. But evil did not have the last word that day, and that is the part worth handing down. In the same hours, firefighters climbed stairs everyone else was running down. Strangers carried strangers. On one of the planes, ordinary passengers decided that the men who had taken it would not reach whatever they were aiming at, and they were right. Three hundred and forty-three firefighters died in New York doing their duty. That is also what happened on September 11.

So when you sit with a son or a daughter or a grandchild today, tell them both halves. Tell them what was done, and tell them what was answered. Tell them that a country can be struck and still stand, that grief and courage can occupy the same day, and that people made in the image of God will, more often than the cynics expect, lay down their lives for one another.

Never forget was never meant to be a slogan on a bumper sticker. It was a promise, made by people who watched it happen, to keep telling the truth of that day after they were gone. Keeping a promise like that means saying it out loud to someone who was not there. Today is a good day to do it.