The precise moment many say America lost its innocence: Sept. 11, 2001, 8:46:40 a.m.

Patrick Cahill, an undecided sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, lost his innocence 102 minutes later.

Cahill’s 30-year-old brother, Scott, died when the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. Scott sold municipal bonds for Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm formerly headquartered in the north tower, which was hit at 8:46 a.m. and fell at 10:28 a.m.

‘I had to grow up a lot faster,’ Cahill said.

Every generation has a watershed moment. The Silent Generation has Pearl Harbor. Baby Boomers have the Kennedy assassination. And Generation Y has 9/11. But for many, the events of 9/11 were more than historical — they were personal. People from New York City, Washington, D.C., and Somerset County, Penn., lived the attacks firsthand and were forced to take stock of their lives. And 10 years later, Syracuse University students from those areas or nearby can still remember every vivid detail.

Cahill was in fourth grade at the time and lived in West Caldwell, N.J., about 20 miles outside of the city. Someone came into Cahill’s class that morning to announce school would only be a half day. The explanation: high pollen count outside. Cahill didn’t think anything of it.

He waited for his mother to pick him up, but she never came. His best friend’s mom came for him and told him that his mother was busy. The friend’s mother promised to take the boys to KB Toys, but the store was closed for the day.

At the end of the day, Cahill was dropped off at home. And that’s when he found out about the attacks that killed his brother.

‘My parents were probably scared to tell me,’ he said.

Cahill’s father was lucky to make it home unscathed. He worked a block away from the World Trade Center and told his family he had to run through debris to get to safety.

Kathryn McCool, a senior psychology major, lost her innocence when the reality of her father’s dangerous life as a New York City firefighter was thrust upon her.

An announcement came over the loudspeaker as McCool sat in social studies class during her first weeks of sixth grade in Westchester, N.Y., about 30 miles outside of the city. The message was vague: There was a plane crash, and students were going to be sent home early.

One or two students were pulled aside, the rest — McCool among them — unaware as to why. Then, McCool was brought into the main office, too. While waiting to be told why she was called in, she overhead adults talking and realized what happened was more than a simple plane crash, but still lacked specifics.

Administrators told McCool her parents were not home and that she would have to go home with a family friend. One guidance counselor approached her to calm her even though she did not yet fully understand what she should be worried about.

‘It’s OK. You’re dad’s fighting the fire, but he’s going to be fine,’ McCool recalled the counselor saying. ‘And I was like, ‘What does this mean? What fire? What’s going on?”

McCool’s older sister was in the office, too, and filled in the gaps. The guidance counselor was partially mistaken. When the planes hit the twin towers, McCool’s father and a group of 50 other firefighters happened to be golfing in the Poconos, in northeastern Pennsylvania. They rushed back to help but didn’t make it there until about 5 p.m. — long after both towers fell.

McCool’s father escaped the risk of having the towers fall on him, but his colleagues were not so lucky. His best friend was one of the first responders and stood in the lobby of the second tower as it collapsed.

Still, there was much rescue work to be done when McCool’s father arrived. In the first 24 hours after the incident, he was among groups of firefighters who saved a few lives. After that, work turned to finding missing bodies. For the next few days, McCool’s father was either at the site or resting at his firehouse and only had brief moments to reassure his daughter over the phone.

A year later, McCool visited ground zero — by then nothing but a gaping hole — and could only think of her father: ‘Since then, if I think a little bit too much about when my dad’s at work, I get really nervous. Now, it’s the reality that these terrible things happen.’

Ivory Sherman, a senior radio, television and film major, lost her innocence and realized the danger her life could be put in during her 10 a.m. sixth-grade science class.

Sherman attended middle school three blocks away from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. During her class, someone came on the intercom to tell everyone to go downstairs to the gym converted from a bomb shelter.

Teachers who had friends and family in New York City struggled to keep themselves together. Other than saying planes hit the World Trade Center, teachers gave little information to the students to abate fears. But news of the Pentagon being hit and rumors that the Capitol or the metro station were next spread throughout the gym.

A number of the students’ parents were in the military and worked at the Pentagon. The gym was divided between pacing students worried about their parents’ safety and children who saw the evacuation as an opportunity for extra recess.

‘I kind of was in the middle,’ Sherman said. ‘I just wanted my mom.’

Sherman’s mom ran into the school at around 2 p.m. in tears. ‘She was fighting for my life,’ Sherman recalled.

The plane feared to be heading toward the Capitol never made it there. The story of United Airlines Flight 93 has been told and retold: a heroic group of passengers attempted to retake control of the plane from the hijackers, ultimately causing it to crash in a field in Shanksville, Penn.

Eight miles away from Shanksville in Somerset, Penn., Laura Beachy, a senior television, radio and film major, lost her innocence when she found out even a small town nobody has heard of is not immune to terrorism.

Beachy was walking to her sixth-grade English class after a violin lesson when the teacher ushered all the students in, quickly locked the door and switched on a TV. A memo had gone out to teachers across Somerset County, where both towns are located, not to show students of any grade footage of the attacks, so other teachers began knocking on the door, telling her to shut it off.

‘You need to watch what’s happening. America is under attack,’ Beachy remembered the teacher saying as everything that happened after the second plane hit the towers unfolded in front of the young students.

‘I just remember thinking, ‘This must be a joke,” Beachy said.

Beachy panicked as she thought about her aunt, who works near the World Trade Center in the financial district. She called her mother, who told her she would try to get in touch with her aunt. Hours later, Beachy’s aunt finally called back. But the conversation caught Beachy’s family off guard.

‘Didn’t you guys hear a plane went down in Shanksville?’ the aunt asked, concerned about their safety.

They were in disbelief until they turned on their TV and saw the downed plane, reduced to bits after barreling down at more than 500 mph. ‘It’s kind of surreal because everyone in Somerset will say it, this is the last place for anything to happen,’ Beachy said.

No one had ever heard of Shanksville or Somerset. Now the area was in the national spotlight. A couple of days later, a candlelit vigil was held at the courthouse. About 3,000 to 5,000 people showed up, and Beachy remembers sitting on the sidewalk after soccer practice, not being able to see an end to the sea of people.

Ten years on, the area is still all but defined by that day. Beachy, who is working on a documentary about the town’s reaction to 9/11, handed out directions to the crash site multiple times during the five years she worked at a local diner. Pieces of human remains and plane wreckage still fall out of trees, and community members go every year to try to finish the clean up once and for all. Beachy said she thinks last year the group filled three garbage bags.

And with that constant reminder of the attacks, Beachy understands 9/11’s profound effect — not just on her, not just on her town, not just on New York or Washington, D.C. — but on the nation as a whole.

Said Beachy: ‘All of a sudden, our innocence was stripped away from us.’

rhkheel@syr.edu

Published on September 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm