Thinking back to 9/11, 20 years on

I remember my college roommate pointing at the TV screen as I entered the living room. He did it with one finger, in an almost nonchalant way.

On the TV screen was a skyscraper with a plume of smoke snaking out from its side. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. I knew very little about the World Trade Center in New York City, and the Twin Towers were not instantly recognizable to me as a 21-year-old kid from Minnesota.

I was so naive that day in 2001. Only the first plane had struck when I first started tuning into the news, and I just assumed it was some horrible accident. I don’t even remember what I was doing when the second plane hit, but even after that, I didn’t grasp the magnitude of what was happening.

I was a senior in college, and the student newspaper I was working at had just moved into new offices. I had a lot of work to do to set up computers, arrange desks and get all of our electronics plugged into the available outlets. I recall spending a lot of my morning crawling under desks and pulling power cords one way or another.

It was while I wasdoingthis thatIheardtheradioblare out the latest news. The Pentagon had also been hit by airplane. That’s when I really stopped and fully took in the horror of the day. “We’re under a full-scale attack,” I thought to myself. For awhile, it seemed like another plane could fall out of the sky and strike anywhere.

The rest of the day was kind of a blur. I paid attention to the unfolding events as much as I could between classes and tried to grasp the reality of what was happening. I was not one of those people who took the day off and sat in front of the TV, but I couldn’t completely ignore what was going on in, either.

Plus, we still had a weekly student newspaper to publish. Luckily, the staff rallied and put together a quality issue that really captured the mood on campus as students and staff watched the terror on TV screens. Our front page photo featured a pair of students — one with her head on her companion’s shoulder — as they watched a distant TV image.

For me, the event was best captured by my home state newspaper, The Star Tribune, which ran with a massive front page headline “Terrorized.” Among the many photos run by the paper was one that later became known as “The Falling Man.” In stark and horrifying detail, it shows a man falling head first from one of the towers. More than any other image, this photo tells the story of that wretched day.

I still have “The Falling Man” picture stored away as a reminder of the day we’re never supposed to forget. Twenty years later, it seems so distant yet still never that far away.

OUT FOR A WALK

KEVIN O’BRIEN

EDITOR