The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tributes from New York, Pentagon, Shanksville,
‘We learned that bravery is more common than we imagined’
FROM THE PENTAGON
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says “we remember not just who our fallen teammates were, but the mission that they shared.”
Austin made the prepared remarks at a Pentagon ceremony Saturday marking the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
He continued, “We recall their common commitment to defend our republic ... and to squarely face new dangers.”
Austin noted that “almost a quarter of the citizens who we defend today were born after 9/11,” including many of the 13 American service members killed in the recent attack in Afghanistan.
He says that “as the years march on, we must ensure that all our fellow Americans know and understand what happened here on 9/11, and in Manhattan, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.”
He says, “We cannot know what the next 20 years will bring. We cannot know what new dangers they will carry. But we do know that America will always lead.”
FROM NEW YORK
The ceremony at Ground Zero began with the first moment of silence at 8:46 a.m. — the time Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The last moment of silence came at 10:28 a.m., in observance of the fall of the North Tower.
At 8:46 a.m., the minute when the first flight struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center two decades earlier, those in attendance stood in commemorative silence.
The moment of pause would be the first of six that day, as the nation remembered some of the day’s most horrific moments: the planes striking the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, the towers falling and the crash of Flight 93 into the Pennsylvania countryside.
After the first moment of silence in New York, Mike Low, the father of 28-year-old flight attendant Sarah Elizabeth Low, who was working on one of the crashed planes, said 20 years feels like both a long and short time.
“My memory goes back to that terrible day, when it felt like an evil specter had descended upon our world, but it was also a time when many people acted above and beyond the ordinary,” he said.
FROM SHANKSVILLE
Former President George W. Bush told people at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania that Americans learned much about themselves on Sept. 11.
“We learned that bravery is more common than we imagined, emerging with sudden splendor in the face of death,” Bush said Saturday at a ceremony on the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
Bush, who was president during the attacks, commended the courage of the Flight 93 passengers and crew who are believed to have foiled an attack on the U.S. Capitol by leading the plane to crash in rural Pennsylvania.
“The 33 passengers and seven crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all,” Bush said. “The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people.”
He encouraged Americans to put aside their political differences in the spirit of what he saw after 9/11.
“So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment,” Bush said. “On America’s day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab their neighbor’s hand and rally to the cause of one another.”