An American flag standing at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, honouring the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. (Credit to Pixels)
By Reagan Thorn – Staff Writer
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (Sept. 18, 2026) – On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as news broke that planes had struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Americans everywhere stopped-watching and listening, trying to make sense of the unimaginable.
Twenty-five years later, from classrooms to work, living rooms to military bases, local residents remember exactly where they were and how they felt when the nation forever changed that day.
Greg McGhee, Montgomery resident, was a freshman in college when the planes hit the towers. He was in the cafeteria at the University of Alabama at Birmingham when he watched the second plane hit the second tower. McGhee then enlisted into the Air Force not long after watching 9/11 happen.
“9/11 could have been prevented,” he added. McGhee was deployed in 2012 to Afghanistan and then in Qatar in 2017 as a Civil Engineering Operation Specialist. He was in ISIS territory for seven months each. He currently works at Maxwell Air Force Base.
The official death toll of 9/11 was 2,977, as noted in Britannica.com, not including the 19 hijackers. Due to the massive destruction and hot fires, the remains of many people were undiscovered and some remained unidentifiable. The real number of the deaths of 9/11 still remains unanswered.
This event personally affected some while some were too young to understand it till they grew older. AUM student Chase Vandertulip was not born when the 9/11 attacks happened but said he is still impacted by the attacks. Vandertulip’s dad was a firefighter in New York when the attacks happened.
“9/11 means a lot to me and our family because we see how much my dad is affected by it with the friends that he lost in it,” said Vandertulip. “He can’t even look at the TV on 9/11 because all of the memories of that come back to him and make him sad.”
Nicole O’Brien was working at Sabel Steel in Alabama. Her parents called her from New York devastated. Her oldest daughter was 14 months at the time and did not know if she would see her family again.
“My dad was a paramedic and went to ground zero with the ambulance he volunteered for,” said O’Brien. “They spent five days helping recover bodies and treating fire fighters and cops that were also reviving bodies. He cried for months after returning home.”
Summer Vaughn was 11-year-old in the sixth grade at Floyd Middle Magnet that was located in Old Cloverdale. Twenty-five years later, her daughter is now the same age at the same school she was that very day. Vaughn was in the school library which was the only room in the building to have a TV.
“We watched the second plane hit,” said Vaughn, filled with goosebumps. “We had international students and the Middle Eastern students were not treated well after the attack. I knew then that they had nothing to do with it and I felt bad.”
Kim Maze, a California native who moved to Alabama in 1991, was 30 at the time of the attacks. She was the director of the Learning Tree in Millbrook. That morning she was shopping at Winn-Dixie because the center was out of milk. As she was checking out people were mentioning a plane hit one of the towers but it was just an accident. On her way back to the center they heard on the radio the second tower got hit and it was not an accident.
“It is hard to put into words the horror of what I was seeing and feeling,” said Maze. “The U.S. is a military superpower and I never thought being attacked on our own soil was a possibility.”
“We watched the second plane hit,” said Will Smith, first grader at Highland Home at the time of the attacks. “Football was canceled and we did not understand what was happening.”
Twenty-five years later the attacks of 9/11 are being taught in history class. For most college students they only know of what their parents tell them about that day. The echoes of their stories will remain and passed on for generations as the attacks of 9/11 are taught for continuing decades.
“He was too young to really understand,” said Maze, talking about her oldest son Andrew Cripple. “I had a lot of fear and anxiety for him and how our world changed that morning.”
The AUMnibus remembers the brave people who passed away on 9/11 and due to 9/11.
