Americans are looking back on the horror and legacy of 9/11, gathering Monday at memorials, firehouses, city halls and elsewhere to observe the 22nd anniversary of the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil.
Commemorations stretch from the attack sites — at New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania — to Alaska and beyond. President Joe Biden is due at a ceremony on a military base in Anchorage.
His visit, en route to Washington, D.C., from a trip to India and Vietnam, is a reminder that the impact of 9/11 was felt in every corner of the nation, however remote. The hijacked plane attacks claimed nearly 3,000 lives and reshaped American foreign policy and domestic fears.
I knew two people who died on board Pan Am 103. The younger brother of one of them died in a freak accident when he was only 7 or 8 years old.
My brother knew people who were at the airport in Rome on the day of the 1985 terrorist attacks.
Years ago my brother and I figured we knew folks that were impacted by half a dozen or so different terrorist attacks prior to 9/11. So yeah, I’m a bit jaded as well.
We did know somebody who almost flew out of Boston on that hijacked flight. She had a ticket on the same flight the next day, and her boss had pushed her to fly out a day earlier. Luckily she didn’t…