On September 11, 2001, I was a new employee at the 12-story Houston Cole Library at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, having joined their staff in August. On that morning I was in my office in Acquisitions, in the basement of the building. Shortly after the first plane struck the first World Trade Center building, the manager of audiovisual came into our offices and told us. They had been watching the news on their television. I immediately followed him into their offices and watched, horrified, as the scenes of that morning played out, first in NYC and then in Washington at the Pentagon. I returned to my office before the towers fell, before the plane went down in Pennsylvania. When I arrived back at my desk, an email was waiting for me from my friend and high school classmate Roy Williams. Roy and I stayed in touch, as we both were writers, he at the Birmingham News and I was a former journalist at our hometown weekly. Roy had a twin brother, as well as two older brothers, one of whom we called “Fish.” Fish, whose name was Dwayne, was a US Army Major, an Army Ranger and paratrooper who fought in the Gulf and had been assigned to the Pentagon two months earlier. In high school he excelled in sports and was popular with all. Roy’s news was that they had not heard from Fish after the plane went into the Pentagon. At the time, they were not alarmed, as all was chaos and cell phone signals were hard to get. But that initial email was followed by more over the course of 10 days. Ten days. Let that sink in. Each email exchange with Roy was cautiously optimistic that Fish was alive but was just unable to reach the family. All included messages of faith that he would be found and that the family, including their parents and Fish’s wife and children, continued to pray for good news. How was their mom? She was doing as well as could be expected. She was a woman of great faith. On September 21, at last a message came that they thought they had located Fish's remains but DNA testing would be required. Later, Roy sent an email that confirmed the tragedy-- Major Dwayne "Fish" Williams had indeed perished at the Pentagon. As the news spread and sank in, it felt surreal that one of US from a small college town in Northeast Alabama was among the victims. It rocked our town. The entire town rallied around the family and participated in memorials. Although he was eventually interred at Arlington, there was a memorial established at the city cemetery, not just for Major Dwayne 
“Fish” Williams but for other soldiers killed in the line of duty. We continue to gather annually at the memorial on September 11th to remember our hometown hero.

As the years pass, I have realized that not all victims of September 11th were in the Twin Towers, or at the Pentagon, or in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, or even within the families of those who perished. On September 11, 2001, I was a single mom of two junior high aged daughters. They are 39 and 38 years old today. As I experienced my own memories of September 11, 2001, they were experiencing it in their classrooms across town. As the aftermath played out we talked about those experiences and memories. It was eleven years after September 11th, 2001 that I received a phone call that terrified me. My older daughter, who had now graduated college and was herself working in the same library I had worked in on that fateful day, rang into my office on the other side of campus. When I answered the phone, knowing it was her, I heard nothing but screams and a full panic attack. The only words I could make out as I begged her to tell me what was wrong was, "Mom! Those people! Those people!" As the screams and gasps continued, one of her coworkers came on the line and told me that the fire alarm had gone off in the library and that it had triggered a meltdown in my strong, beautiful, compassionate, smart daughter. She had to be physically helped from her office on the 11th floor down to the lobby as the alarm blared nonstop. When I rushed to the library and at last she was able to speak again, she told me that the alarm was the same alarm that she had heard in the background of all the news footage of people making their way down the stairs of the Twin Towers on September 11th. I wish I could say that was the first triggering event for her, but if she hears that same alarm type to this day, she goes into full meltdown. I have received calls from her coworkers at the high school where she is a teacher. She has had them in her classroom, in front of her students. Her fellow teachers now know that when a fire drill is planned, someone will need to take her classroom and she will need to exist the building in order to get out of earshot of the alarms. Each time I receive that phone call now, my mother's heart breaks and I think of the pain that the mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and children of those whose loved ones perished on that day felt and must continue to feel as we get farther away from that awful day. We, like they, will never forget.