NEW YORK -- The world solemnly marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, grieving lost lives and shattered American unity in commemorations that unfolded just weeks after the bloody end of the Afghanistan war that began in response to the terror attacks.
Victims' relatives and four U.S. presidents paid respects at the sites where hijacked planes killed nearly 3,000 people in the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » arkansasonline.com/912wtcvisit/]
"It felt like an evil specter had descended on our world, but it was also a time when many people acted above and beyond the ordinary," said Mike Low, whose daughter, Sara Low, was a flight attendant on the first plane that hit a New York City tower.
"As we carry these 20 years forward, I find sustenance in a continuing appreciation for all of those who rose to be more than ordinary people," the father told a ground zero crowd.
At the 9/11 memorial plaza Saturday morning in lower Manhattan, Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, stood shoulder to shoulder with two pairs of their Democratic predecessors, Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Nearby was Rudy Giuliani, an ally of former President Donald Trump who was the mayor of New York during the attacks.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » arkansasonline.com/912bidendc/]
All of them watched as relatives of the victims read the names of the dead, an annual recitation that paused for moments of silence marking the times when the hijacked planes hit their targets and when the twin towers eventually fell. As the plaza fell silent, church bells rang.
Many of those who read names at the memorial were children, either born after the attacks or too young to remember the friends and family members who died.
Ariana and Briana Mendoza, 13, arrived in lower Manhattan from the Bronx with their sister Dephaney to pay their respects. "I was only 2 when it happened," said Dephaney, 22. "But I have learned a lot about it, and now I am teaching them."
Bruce Springsteen and Broadway actors Kelli O'Hara and Chris Jackson sang at the commemoration, but by tradition, no politicians spoke there.
In a video released Friday night, Biden said Sept. 11 illustrated that "unity is our greatest strength."
Unity is "the thing that's going to affect our well-being more than anything else," he added while visiting a volunteer firehouse Saturday after laying a wreath at the 9/11 crash site near Shanksville, Pa. He later took a moment of silence at the third site, the Pentagon.
The anniversary was observed under the pall of a pandemic and in the shadow of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is now ruled by the same Taliban militant group that gave safe haven to the 9/11 plotters.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » arkansasonline.com/912trumpnyc/]
"It's hard, because you hoped that this would just be a different time and a different world. But sometimes history starts to repeat itself and not in the best of ways," Thea Trinidad, who lost her father in the attacks, said before reading victims' names at the ceremony.
CALL TO COME TOGETHER
At the Pennsylvania site -- where passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93 fought to regain control of a plane believed to have been targeted at the U.S. Capitol or the White House -- the fading spirit of 9/11 was invoked most forcefully by the president at the time of the attacks, George W. Bush, who said, "That is the America I know."
Bush said Sept. 11 showed that Americans can come together despite their differences.
"So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment," said the president who was in office on 9/11. "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."
"It is the truest version of ourselves. It is what we have been and what we can be again," he added.
Speaking to hundreds of family members and friends of the 40 passengers and crew, Bush said we learned on 9/11 that Americans were vulnerable but not fragile, and that they "possess a core of strength that survives the worst that life could bring."
"Here the intended target became the instruments of rescue," Bush said. "And many who are now alive owe a vast unconscious debt to the defiance displayed in the skies above this field."
Bush reminded the audience that "the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within."
Although Bush did not say so outright, the reference to insurrectionists who on Jan. 6 laid siege to the U.S. Capitol -- the likely target of Flight 93 -- was difficult to miss.
"There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home," he said. "But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols -- they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them."
At the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department, which responded to the crash of United Flight 93, Biden praised Bush's comments in his only public remarks of the day, saying the Republican "made a really good speech today -- genuinely," and wondered aloud what those who died that day would think of today's rancor.
[Gallery not loading above? Click here for more photos » arkansasonline.com/91221/]
"I'm thinking what ... would the people who died, what would they be thinking," he said. "Would they think this makes sense for us to be doing this kind of thing where you ride down the street and someone has a sign saying 'f- so-and-so?'"
Relatives of those who died questioned whether the country had gone off course.
Calvin Wilson said a polarized country has "missed the message" of the heroism of United 93's passengers and crew, which included his brother-in-law, LeRoy Homer.
"We don't focus on the damage. We don't focus on the hate. We don't focus on retaliation. We don't focus on revenge," Wilson said before the ceremony. "We focus on the good that all of our loved ones have done."
"Are we worthy of their sacrifice?" asked Gordon Felt, whose brother, Edward, was a passenger on the doomed flight. "Do we as individuals, communities and as a country conduct ourselves in a manner that would make those that sacrificed so much and fought so hard proud of who we've become?"
AFGHANISTAN'S SHADOW
Bush and the presidents who have followed have often used 9/11 as an opportunity for chest-beating bravado, with threats to rain down fury upon U.S. enemies.
But with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the chaotic American exit only weeks old, there was far less of that than usual.
While Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley vowed at a Pentagon commemoration that "no terrorist anywhere on Earth can ever destroy" American ideals, he also noted that feelings among U.S. service members were "very conflicted" this year, after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The country, after all, had lost 2,461 troops, including 13 who died in a suicide attack just two weeks ago. More than 20,000 had been injured, and countless more were afflicted, he said, "by the invisible wounds of war."
That cost became a source of quiet tension for some within the audience gathered in Shanksville, with Air Force Academy classmates of LeRoy Homer Jr., the co-pilot on Flight 93, speaking about his heroism and then quietly questioning how and why the United States left Afghanistan.
One classmate, Scott Hoffman, had deployed within days of 9/11. His son was in second grade, and he told his wife as he prepared for his mission to avenge the attacks: "I'll do this so our children don't have to."
Last month, that son, now Capt. Christopher Hoffman, was among the Americans to pilot a C17 filled with Afghans fleeing a country taken over by the Taliban.
"I feel sick to my stomach," Scott Hoffman said about the Afghan evacuation. "Our chance to stand up to the Nazis of our time and we turned our back."
Trump visited a New York City police station and a firehouse, praising responders' bravery while continuing to criticize Biden over the pullout from Afghanistan.
"It was gross incompetence," Trump said.
In remarks at the firehouse, Biden defended the withdrawal, which culminated with a huge airlift to evacuate more than 110,000 Americans and allies -- but still resulted in many being left behind for an uncertain future under Taliban rule.
"Could al-Qaida come back? Yeah. But guess what, it's already back other places," Biden said. "What's the strategy? Every place where al-Qaida is, we're going to invade and have troops stay in? C'mon."
OVER THE YEARS
Biden became the fourth president to console the nation on the anniversary of that dark day, one that has shaped many of the most consequential domestic and foreign-policy decisions made by the chief executives over the past two decades.
Bush was reading a book to Florida schoolchildren when the planes slammed into the World Trade Center. He spent that day being kept out of Washington for security reasons -- a decision then-Sen. Biden urged him to reconsider, the current president has written -- and then delivered a brief, halting speech that night from the White House to a terrified nation.
The terrorist attack would define Bush's presidency. The following year, he chose Ellis Island as the site to deliver his first anniversary address, the Statue of Liberty over his shoulder as he pledged, "What our enemies have begun, we will finish."
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were still deadly when Obama visited the Pentagon to mark his first Sept. 11 in office in 2009.
By the time Obama spoke at the 10th anniversary, attack mastermind Osama bin Laden was dead, killed in a May 2011 Navy SEAL raid. Though the nation remained entangled overseas, and vigilant against threats, the anniversary became more about healing.
Trump pledged to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan, but his words during his first Sept. 11 anniversary ceremony in 2017 were a vivid warning to terrorists, telling "these savage killers that there is no dark corner beyond our reach, no sanctuary beyond our grasp, and nowhere to hide anywhere on this very large earth."
'WAR ON TERROR'
The attacks ushered in a new era of fear, war, patriotism and, eventually, polarization. They also redefined security, changing airport checkpoints, police practices and the government's surveillance powers.
A "war on terror" led to invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the longest U.S. war ended last month with the evacuation punctuated by a suicide bombing that killed at least 169 Afghans and 13 American service members and was attributed to a branch of the Islamic State extremist group. The body Marine Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo was taken Saturday to her hometown of Lawrence, Mass., where people lined the streets as the flag-draped casket passed by.
The U.S. is now concerned that al-Qaida, the terror network behind 9/11, may regroup in Afghanistan, where the Taliban flag once again flew over the presidential palace on Saturday.
Two decades after helping to triage and treat injured colleagues at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, retired Army Col. Malcolm Bruce Westcott is saddened and frustrated by the continued threat of terrorism.
"I always felt that my generation, my military cohort, would take care of it -- we wouldn't pass it on to anybody else," said Westcott of Greensboro, Ga. "And we passed it on."
At ground zero, victims' relatives thanked the troops who fought in Afghanistan, while Melissa Pullis said she was just happy they were finally home.
"We can't lose any more military. We don't even know why we're fighting, and 20 years went down the drain," said Pullis, who lost her husband, Edward, and whose son Edward Jr. is serving on the USS Ronald Reagan.
The families spoke of lives cut short, milestones missed and a loss that still feels immediate. Several pleaded for a return of the solidarity that surged for a time after Sept. 11 but soon gave way.
"In our grief and our strength, we were not divided based on our voting preference, the color of our skin or our moral or religious beliefs," said Sally Maler, the sister-in-law of victim Alfred Russell Maler.
Yet in the years that followed, Muslim Americans endured suspicion, surveillance and hate crimes. Schisms and bitterness grew over the balance between tolerance and vigilance, the meaning of patriotism, the proper way to honor the dead and the scope of a promise to "never forget."
Trinidad was 10 when she overheard her dad, Michael, saying goodbye to her mother by phone from the burning trade center. She remembers the pain but also the fellowship of the days that followed, when all of New York "felt like it was family."
"Now, when I feel like the world is so divided, I just wish that we can go back to that," said Trinidad of Orlando, Fla. "I feel like it would have been such a different world if we had just been able to hang on to that feeling."
Information for this article was contributed by Jennifer Peltz, Bobby Caina Calvan, Michael Rubinkam, David Klepper, Jill Colvin, Alexandra Jaffe, Zeke Miller and Aamer Madhani of The Associated Press; by Julian Roth of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS); by Michael Gold and Katie Rogers of The New York Times; and by Shayna Jacobs, Christine Spolar, Griff Witte, Jada Yuan, Marissa J. Lang, Kurt Shillinger, Miranda Green, Shibani Mahtani, Karla Adam, Amy B. Wang, Timothy Bella, Caroline Anders and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post.
