College Student Remembers Sept. 11, 2001

This week, Woburn Patch remembers the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 with a series of stories. 

She remembers the roar of jets flying over her school, the all day. The shriek of fire truck sirens, too.

She remembers that teachers were acting “differently” that day. Students were asking if something was happening, the then-10-year old said, but she doesn’t remember that they were told what was going on.

When she got home, Katelyn Caldwell, then a fifth-grader, told her mother about what she had heard all day at school, on Sept. 11, 2001, and asked her what was happening. Her mother told her, Caldwell said, that “Planes were taken over and hit the World Trade Center.”  Her mother was particularly concerned, Caldwell said, because two of her uncles lived six blocks from the World Trade Center. And someone her mother knew was supposed to be on one of the planes that crashed that day.

“I, as a child, didn’t fully understand” what was going on, Caldwell said.

Woburn Patch sought several 20-somethings to share their memories of Sept. 11, 2001 and how they see the day’s events now, a decade later.  Most said they didn’t remember.

Caldwell did. After school, she went to dance class. She thinks dance students talked about what was going on that day.

She remembers then-President George W. Bush urging people to light a candle for people who had lost their lives in the day’s attacks. The students at the dance class arranged a vigil. They brought music –  speeches with musical accompaniment, like Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream,” patriotic songs like God Bless America – outside and played them. Her mother got red, white and blue balloons and they let them soar into the sky. People in the neighborhood came to see, she said, what they were doing.

Was she afraid? Caldwell, now 20, starting her junior year at  Bridgewater State University, studying elementary education and dance, said she was more scared that hijackers took over a plane that flew out of Boston.

Caldwell described the day as a “huge catastrophe for our country.“

“It changed the way everyone lives,” she said, citing airport security as one example.

“You can’t go a day without seeing some result” from 9/11, Caldwell continued, for example, “in the way people treat one another.”  They were stereotyping, she said, especially right after Sept. 11, 01. Even now, she said, some of that behavior continues.

When she was a high school sophomore, Caldwell did a project, she said, on the effects of Sept. 11.  “We went to war,” she said, and people in New York suffered breathing problems because of the ash from the Trade Center towers.

Caldwell’s uncles were fine. They called one family member to let her spread the news. Caldwell’s mother couldn’t reach them by phone directly, though, for several weeks after the attack, Caldwell said. All the phones were out.

The person the Caldwells knew, who was supposed to be on one of the planes that crashed that day had, Caldwell said, changed flights.

But some of her classmates knew people, she said, on one of those planes that never reached their destinations because of the hijackings and crashes.