“It feels like something that we learned in history books, something like World War Two,” said Christina Liu, 22, from New York City. Ten years later, 97% of Americans 8 or older at the time could remember exactly where they were when they heard the news, according to a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center.įor many young people, though, 9/11 is a subject learned secondhand. Thayer, despite his near-photographic memory, can only recall some scenes from the day of the attacks.įor older Americans, in contrast, 9/11 remains a vivid memory. Nineteen years later, Thayer is a fifth-year undergraduate student at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, where he triple-majors in physics, mathematics and German. That day, 2,977 people died, as did all 19 of the al-Qaida hijackers, in the single deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. “I just remembered that clip looping over and over again, of just seeing the second plane, not very far away, hitting the tower.” “There was this one shaky cam, grainy footage, of the second plane hitting the second tower … constantly on the news,” said the younger Thayer, now 22. She set Thayer in front of the TV while she desperately attempted to call his father, Bradley Thayer, who was working at the Pentagon that day but evacuated successfully. She drove to the family home in Springfield, Virginia, a 15-minute drive from the Pentagon. ![]() ![]() Thayer’s mother picked him up from preschool in the middle of the day, frantic. Passengers on the fourth plane, likely bound for the White House, retook control of the aircraft and crashed it into a field in Pennsylvania. Two of the planes crashed into the Twin Towers of New York City’s World Trade Center, while a third was flown into the Pentagon, the Department of Defense headquarters, near Washington. He was just 3 years old when the terrorist group al-Qaida launched a series of four coordinated attacks against the United States using four hijacked passenger airplanes. The morning of September 11, 2001, is one of Aidan Thayer’s first memories.
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