Nikki Ferguson was 10 years old on Sept. 11, 2001. Her memories are vivid.
“Oof. So I watched the entirety of it live,” she said.
She remembers sitting in her fifth-grade class at Mooresville Intermediate School when a teacher rushed into the room and exchanged hushed words with her teacher.
“They wheel in this TV on those big carts and they put on the news, and the smoke was coming out of the first tower,” Ferguson said.
There she sat, watching adults in business suits, pencil skirts, neon vests and uniforms sprint through the streets in terror as the towers twisted and fell, and the skies rained rubble and ash.
“I remember the people jumping out of the building,” Ferguson said. “And I remember the cameras not being able to cut away fast enough.”
She says she couldn’t fully grasp what she was seeing.
“But I think it was kind of, like, subconscious, like — wow, I didn’t think that that was something that would be possible,” she said.
Throughout the country — and the world — adults watched the devastation in horror. But millennials saw it from a unique perspective: as children and adolescents. The attacks scarred their youth. Then they came of age as the U.S. launched its war on terrorism.
Mary Miller was 13 years old at the time.
“I remember my dad saying, while he was watching the TV, ‘Nothing is ever going to be the same,’” Miller said.
“When he said that, I was confused and a little freaked out. I was like, ‘What do you mean?’”
Months later, she found out when she went to the airport for a school trip. She encountered something new and ominous: Transportation Security Administration agents screening passengers and luggage.
That was an immediate change. The ensuing years did more to color her view of the world.
“I think we also probably developed — I don’t want to say a sense of distrust — but definitely questioning things more than an older generation would,” Miller said.
Less than a month after the attacks, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban. In 2003, the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq on claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction. Those claims later proved false.
Ferguson, who watched the attacks with her fifth-grade class, says several of her classmates later joined the military and fought overseas.
“One of the guys that I went to school with, he lost both of his legs to a land mine,” Ferguson said.
That was Cpl. Garrett Carnes, a Marine who was injured when he stepped on an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2012. Ferguson says the wars made her far more cynical about her country.
“It’s continued to make me see America as a country that goes into places, disrupts, and then takes what they want and leaves,” she said.
The patriotism that swelled after 9/11 carried an undercurrent of revenge. It was sometimes aimed at innocent people, even children, simply because they were Muslim.
Mustafa Asfar was also in the fifth grade on 9/11. He and his family had left Palestine and settled in Charlotte in the mid-1990s.
“I was too young to understand what was going on, but teachers’ reactions were just very severe. That’s what I remember,” Asfar said.
He remembers his teacher’s demeanor toward him changing the very next day.
“Just very mean. Very cold towards me. Would just literally stare me down, you know?” he said.
For years afterward, Asfar says classmates made Osama bin Laden and Taliban jokes at his expense. But he says the experience strengthened his resolve to never feel ashamed of his Muslim faith.
Other millennials can draw a direct line from that day to the adults they’ve become.
Eric Gaestel was a high school senior in Wayne, New Jersey, about 25 miles west of Manhattan. His school sent him home. From there, he watched smoke rise from Ground Zero.
“For me, to see that smoke from my bedroom was unreal,” Gaestel said.
The experience inspired him to study geopolitics and become a social studies teacher. He now teaches sixth grade at McClintock Middle School in Charlotte.
“My students actually just left for their elective classes, so it’s kind of perfect timing,” Gaestel said during an interview from his classroom.
Most of his students were born more than a decade after the attacks. To them, 9/11 can feel like distant history — like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — until Gaestel shares his own memories.
“I try to use the event as an example of how something that seems like it was so far away from us, how greatly it can affect our lives, even today,” he said.
And in the future as well.
One day, Gaestel’s students will be part of the last generation to have heard about 9/11 directly from people who lived through it. He wants them to carry his and others’ memories — and to learn from them.
