The two 911 Memorial Pools sit on the exact footprint of the former North and South Twin Towers. Photo: Gary Bembridge via Creative Commons
By Tiffani Bourque
Twenty-five years is a long time. Long enough for children to grow up, careers to be built and an entire generation of Americans to reach adulthood knowing Sept. 11, 2001, only through photographs, documentaries and history books.
But ask someone who remembers that Tuesday morning where they were when they heard the news, and suddenly, 25 years does not seem very long at all.
For longtime Sanford resident Teena Bourque, the memory begins with a telephone ringing.
She was working in Portland as a manager for a Wall Street financial firm, often working directly with branches in the World Trade Center. Running late for a meeting, she answered a call from a coworker’s wife.
A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. While they were still on the phone, the second plane struck.
Then came the news from Washington.
“What I remember most about the moment I first realized something was wrong, after a plane crashed into the Pentagon, is a feeling of panic that I was in Portland and my two young daughters were in Sanford,” Bourque recalled.
Like millions of Americans, Bourque watched as something initially incomprehensible became horrifyingly clear. She remembers people trapped high inside the towers, first responders climbing toward danger while others fled from it, the passengers of Flight 93 fighting back and people running through Manhattan with an enormous cloud of dust behind them.
Nearly 500 miles away, another woman with deep Sanford roots was experiencing that morning from an unimaginably close vantage point.
Katlin Huttunen, a 1986 graduate of Sanford High School, was working in the Washington, D.C., area as a defense contractor supporting the Office of the Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. The Pentagon was a familiar part of her work.
In fact, she was supposed to be there that morning. Instead, Huttunen had been wait-listed for a training class in Ashburn, VA. A spot opened, placing her in a training room about 30 miles away when America changed.
“The Pentagon — a place I knew well and where I should have been that morning — had been attacked,” Huttunen recalled. “It felt like the entire Washington, D.C. area was under attack.”
Flight 77 struck the west side of the Pentagon, the section where Huttunen had expected to be that morning. “I still think about how different that day could have been if I had not been added to that training class,” she said.
Perhaps that is one of the strange things about remembering Sept. 11. Alongside the enormous numbers and historic consequences are millions of intensely personal memories — a phone call, a child waiting at school, a meeting someone missed, a training class someone almost didn’t get into.
For Bourque, the immediate fear eventually gave way to grief.
“I felt confusion, disbelief, and fear,” she said. “As the days and weeks went by, my feelings changed slightly. I still felt all those emotions, but they were joined with deep sadness for all the innocent lives that were lost and sadness for the loss of our sense of security.”
But she remembers something else, too: Americans turned toward one another. Here at home, people stopped to talk with friends, neighbors, acquaintances and strangers. They checked on one another and found comfort in a shared experience.
“People were kinder and more concerned about each other,” Bourque said. “We all shared a common grief with an unsettling underlying sense of fear.”
For Huttunen, Sept. 11 also changed the direction of her life’s work. As a cyber analyst, she had already worked to protect the Pentagon’s network infrastructure and prepare for emergencies. After Sept. 11, those responsibilities no longer felt abstract.
“Cybersecurity wasn’t just about protecting computers and networks,” she said. “It was about protecting critical infrastructure, communications, government operations and, ultimately, national security.”
In the aftermath, Huttunen helped restore computer and telecommunications capabilities and supported emergency planning. She was later given a commemorative coin recognizing that work. She still has it.
“To me, it represents much more than a memento,” Huttunen said. “It reminds me of the people who were there, the people who never came home, and the responsibility so many people carried in the days and years that followed.”
A quarter-century later, perhaps remembering Sept. 11 also means confronting how much has changed. For those who grew up before it, there was a before and an after.
Bourque remembers growing up with feelings of safety, security, and optimism. On Sept. 11, those feelings were shattered.
“It feels like it was yesterday,” she said. “That day took away a sense of safety and security that I had previously taken for granted.”
Bourque hopes younger generations understand the fragility of life, the extraordinary heroism displayed that day and the way Americans cared for one another afterward. She hopes we can recapture “the strong sense of patriotism and caring about our neighbors that we experienced in the days and weeks following 9/11/2001.”
For Huttunen, remembrance carries a similar weight. “I will never forget Sept. 11, the people we lost, or the people who worked tirelessly to keep things going,” she said.
Twenty-five years later, the details may belong to history. The memories still belong to us.
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