9/11

Some because of who you were with.

And then there are days you remember simply because, for a few extraordinary hours, the entire world appeared to stop.

September 11, 2001 was one of those days.

Twenty-five years later, I can still remember watching it unfold.

I remember the disbelief.

I remember trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

And, above everything else, I remember the shock.

It is strange how memory works.

Twenty-five years is a long time. Cars change. Technology changes. Families grow. Jobs come and go. Whole chapters of life pass quietly into history.

Yet certain moments refuse to fade.

For me, the images of September 11 are among them.

I remember seeing the television coverage from New York and initially struggling to comprehend what was happening.

Smoke pouring from one of the towers of the World Trade Center.

News presenters trying to understand the situation in real time.

Nobody yet knowing the scale of what was taking place.

Then the second aircraft appeared.

And suddenly everything changed.

This wasn't an accident.

We were witnessing something almost impossible to comprehend.

I can still remember that feeling.

Not the overused version of the word we throw around today, but genuine disbelief.

Watching something happening thousands of miles away and somehow knowing immediately that the world had just changed.

At 8:46am New York time, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03am, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower.

At 9:37am, American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon.

At 9:59am, the South Tower collapsed.

United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03am after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

Then, at 10:28am, the North Tower collapsed.

All of it happened in less than two hours. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

That fact still seems extraordinary.

A normal Tuesday morning had become one of the defining days of the modern age.

There are images from that day that hardly need describing.

The Manhattan skyline with smoke pouring into a perfect blue sky.

People standing in streets looking upwards.

Emergency vehicles heading toward danger.

Paper drifting through the air.

The towers burning.

And finally the enormous clouds of dust rolling through Lower Manhattan after the buildings collapsed.

Those images became part of our collective memory.

But behind every image were people.

People who had gone to work.

People boarding ordinary morning flights.

People answering emergency calls.

People sitting at desks.

People saying goodbye to families without knowing it would be for the final time.

On September 11, 2001, 2,977 people were killed in the terrorist attacks. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

Numbers can tell us the scale.

They cannot tell us the loss.

One of the things I have always found most powerful about September 11 is what happened while thousands were desperately trying to escape.

Others were going the opposite way.

Firefighters.

Police officers.

Paramedics.

Emergency workers.

Ordinary people helping complete strangers.

The attack on the World Trade Center triggered the largest rescue operation in New York City's history, with roughly 2,000 police officers and nearly 1,000 firefighters deployed. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}

They walked into smoke, fire and chaos because somebody needed help.

Many never walked back out.

That courage deserves remembering every bit as much as the horror of the attack itself.

Perhaps more.

There is another part of September 11 that has always stayed with me.

United Airlines Flight 93.

Once passengers and crew began discovering what had happened to the other aircraft that morning, they realised their own aircraft was likely intended to be used as another weapon.

They fought back.

The aircraft crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania rather than reaching its intended target. :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3}

We will never know exactly what thoughts went through their minds during those final minutes.

But we know what they did.

Faced with an unimaginable situation, ordinary people made an extraordinary decision.

It is difficult now to explain just how profoundly September 11 changed the world.

Air travel changed.

Security changed.

Foreign policy changed.

Wars followed.

Governments reorganised around the threat of terrorism.

Words such as Ground Zero, Homeland Security and War on Terror entered everyday language.

For those of us old enough to remember the world before September 11, there is almost a dividing line.

History sometimes creeps forward quietly.

That day it arrived all at once.

Today marks twenty-five years.

A quarter of a century.

And perhaps one of the most sobering facts is that there is now an enormous generation of people who have no personal memory of September 11 at all.

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum estimates around 100 million Americans are now too young to remember the attacks. :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}

For them, 9/11 is history.

For those of us who watched it happen, it doesn't feel entirely like history.

I can still picture that television screen.

I can still remember the confusion when the first tower was burning.

I can still remember seeing the second aircraft.

And I can still remember the horrible realisation that what we were watching was deliberate.

Twenty-five years have passed.

That feeling hasn't completely disappeared.

Today at the 9/11 Memorial in New York, families once again gathered at the footprints of the Twin Towers.

The names were read aloud.

Moments of silence marked the times the aircraft struck, the towers fell, the Pentagon was attacked and Flight 93 crashed.

The ceremony continues a tradition that matters enormously because underneath all the politics, documentaries, photographs, investigations and history books lies something much simpler.

People lost people they loved.

The names matter.

The lives matter.

The remembering matters. :contentReference[oaicite:5]{index=5}

“Never Forget” became inseparable from September 11.

Twenty-five years later, perhaps those two words carry even more importance.

Remember the victims.

Remember the emergency workers.

Remember the passengers and crew of Flight 93.

Remember the families whose lives changed that morning.

Remember those who later became ill because of their work at Ground Zero.

And remember that among some of the darkest moments imaginable, there were remarkable examples of courage, humanity and ordinary people helping one another.

I watched September 11 unfold on television 25 years ago.

I was shocked then.

Looking back at it today, I still am.

Some events fade into history.

Some remain with you forever.

11 SEPTEMBER 2001

25 YEARS

REMEMBERED