As the nation reflects on the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, emanations felt deep within the University draw focus on an amplified American spirit.
“It was eerily quiet,” Greg Giacopino said as he described the beautiful weather when he left his Coney Island high school early on Sept. 11, 2001.
Giacopino, communication studies senior, was 17 when the Twin Towers fell in nearby Manhattan.
James Moran, mass communication sophomore, also lived in New York at the time. Like many University students, though, Moran was only a child when the towers fell.
“As a nine-year-old, you just knew that something bad happened,” Moran said.
Both Giacopino and Moran were released from school early that day with neither explanation nor preparation for the news that awaited outside.
“They didn’t really know how to handle it,” Giacopino said of his high school, where it was ordered that all televisions and radios had to be turned off as administrators tried to avoid scaring the students.
Rumors spread, however, that the smoke could be seen from a third-story bathroom window. Although he didn’t get a chance to check for himself, Giacopino, like most Americans, was glued to the television for the rest of the day.
“They tried to make it feel normal,” Moran said of his elementary school. But as hard as they tried, the rooms soon filled with students either stunned or crying as the uncertain status of loved ones circulated.
They are far from alone in their reflection. A Pew Research Center poll released Sept. 1 ranks 9/11 as the most collectively remembered occurrence since the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Ninety-seven percent of Americans remember exactly where they were when they found out about the attacks on the towers, even after 10 years.
DECLARING WAR
As communities around the U.S. banded together in the days following the attacks, the dust in the air fell only to be replaced by a hunger for closure.
“Everyone was saying that he had to do something,” Giacopino said of President George W. Bush.
On Sept. 21, Gallup polls indicated an approval rating of 90 percent for Bush. With the nation behind him, the president commenced Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001.
No one could predict the nature and scale of the attacks, but to say the U.S. was unprepared for the coming warfare would be wrong.
In 1995, University Associate English Professor Rick Blackwood was called upon by the Pentagon to design war games that would prepare the nation’s finest for the next war.
The product, called the “Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Symposium,” portrayed a simulation war stretching from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to East Asia.
However prepared one can be for war, “nobody expected 9/11,” Blackwood said. “Not even remotely.”
Terrorism, he explained, was just too volatile to predict.
Blackwood left the Pentagon on Sept. 7, 2001, and coincidentally awoke Sept. 11 around 3 a.m. in Pearl Harbor to news of the suicide mission.
“Of course,” he thought, “they came up with something we’d never think of.”
Blackwood was promptly “functionally recalled.”
And as if fulfilling a prophecy, two years later on March 20, 2003, America invaded Iraq.
“The Bush administration got really giddy with their success in Afghanistan,” said Mark Gasiorowski, political science professor.
Gasiorowski stressed the monumental changes the terrorist attacks brought to U.S. foreign policy.
The nation’s involvement in Iraq “turned public opinion in the Middle East and throughout the world against us,” he said, describing the Iraq War as a “major disaster.”
Giacopino also felt the shifting tides back home as the war progressed.
When neither locating the suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq nor capturing Osama bin Laden came to fruition, the patriotic spirit faded, he said.
“Is there an end in sight?” was the sentiment of the community, Giacopino said.
LIFE DURING WARTIME
But Giacopino’s plea was left hanging as the splintering of al-Qaida brought a new series of what Gasiorowski calls “franchise al-Qaida groups,” who act independently throughout the world.
On March 11, 2004, 10 explosions occurred on four separate commuter trains in Madrid. On July 7, 2005, three bombs detonated in London’s underground, leaving three trains smoldering in the tunnels. Almost an hour later, a double-decker bus exploded in the streets.
In tapes broadcasted by Al Jazeera, one of the London bombers saluted the leaders of al-Qaida and called for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Extremist groups like these are connected to the al-Qaida of 10 years ago, but they are not the same organization, Gasiorowski said.
An ocean away, the following years saw a scarred U.S. on the move to recover the morale of its people.
In 2006, the foundation for the One World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower, was laid, and just more than a month later, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hanged outside of Baghdad.
On Jan. 10, 2007, as a war-torn Iraq placed second on Fund for Peace’s Failed State Index, second-term President Bush announced a “New Way Forward” — a surge of more than 20,000 soldiers sent to Iraq.
The War on Terror is not waged in vain, according to Gasiorowski. In fact, he called it “pretty damn successful.”
Al-Qaida, he said, “is really just a shadow of what it once was.”
But closure remained incomplete. Bin Laden had not met justice.
“[Support] waned as years passed, and we still had not found him,” Moran said. “Especially after we went into Iraq.”
After years of waiting, President Barack Obama announced the assassination of bin Laden on May 1.
Moran and Giacopino distinctly recalled where they were when they found out.
Giacopino heard about the assassination while on an airplane, where he said passengers began to cheer and clap.
“It was at last a time to celebrate something,” he said.
Moran was sitting in Middleton Library when he received word of the assassination through the chatting students.
The U.S. witnessed myriad responses to the announcement, from champagne and shouting to candlelight vigils at Ground Zero that night.
REMEMBRANCE
Bin Laden’s death will be heavy on American minds as they reflect on the decade since he changed Manhattan’s skyline, but the tragedy of Sept. 11 shouldn’t be the focus of the commemoration, Giacopino said.
“I don’t want to remember the events,” he said. “I would like people to remember the American spirit that followed.”
Moran and Giacopino remembered the days when American flags lined every street in their native New York, and in a statement Thursday, President Barack Obama joined them in hopes for such days to return.
“That’s the America we were on 9/11 and in the days that followed,” he wrote. “That’s the America we can and must always be.”
 
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Contact Clayton Crockett at [email protected]