(slow piano music) - 20 years after 9/11, a day when three hijacked passenger planes sailed calmly out of clear blue skies and deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, monumental symbols of US power.

A fourth plane went down in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.

The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people.

161 were from Connecticut or had close ties to the state.

I'm Diane Orson, this is "Cutline."

(slow music) Here's where many people gathered on September 11th, 2001.

From Sherwood Island State Park in Westport, you could see smoke from the Twin Towers rise above the New York City skyline.

Now it's Connecticut's 9/11 Living Memorial, a place to come and remember those who died.

20 years on, let's talk about memorials, memory, and meaning.

How has 9/11 shaped our understanding of who we are as Americans today?

Coming up, I'll speak with an historian, a veteran of the War of Afghanistan, a Muslim leader, and young people about growing up after September 11th.

To begin, a first responder.

Marc Hartog is Deputy Director of Westport's Emergency Medical Service.

- For me, it was a day that started just helping my wife get our two kids ready for preschool.

I had worked the night before, and didn't have the radio or TV on while we were getting everything together, and after we got the kids off to school, I realized I had left a book I was reading back at work, so I called there to ask somebody to find the book and just hide it away for me.

And the first thing that person said when they heard my voice and knowing my background said, "You must be glad you're not in New York City."

- Let's talk about that for a minute.

So you were a first responder in New York City before moving to Connecticut?

- I was, I worked as a New York City paramedic, EMT initially, and then a paramedic for 18 years, plus my two years as a volunteer in the city.

- So you had moved to Connecticut before 9/11?

- Yes, I was born and raised in New York City, and then after getting married, about a year later, we moved up to Westport in 1990 and had kids, and I continued to work down in the city for another 10 years doing that horrible, horrible commute.

I was very involved with training for weapons of mass destruction throughout the EMS system, training first responders, everybody, police, fire, EMS.

- So back to 9/11.

- Yeah, so after my initial shock of the whole thing, I actually called down to the guy who took over my job as the director of the paramedic service of the hospital, and I said, "You guys need help, should I come down?"

And he said, "Absolutely, we're putting on extra units."

And then about 10, 15 minutes later, the first building came down, South Building came down.

With my experience from the first Trade Center bombing and knowing that had 1,000 patients that were taken to hospitals, or either made their way to hospitals or transported by ambulance, I looked at that picture and I just said, "There's not gonna be lot of patients to be taken to hospitals."

And right around that time, my boss here in Westport EMS called me and said, "We need you to come in," I wasn't on the schedule, but, "we need you to come in, we're pulling in everybody because we're expecting to have patients coming up on the trains and we're gonna need extra units."

And that never transpired either, unfortunately.

- Did you come down here to Sherwood Island State Park?

- I did, later in the day when we realized that we were not gonna be getting patients, and we realized the magnitude of the tragedy, the magnitude of the disaster, really.

I was told, "Okay, we're not gonna need you, go home, get some rest."

And I remembered, having been down here many times, that on a nice clear day, you could actually see the Manhattan skyline.

So I took the drive down here and joined a lot of other people who were down here already, looking down there and just seeing the smoke rising and it was dead silent.

The only thing you heard was, I mean, there was a large crowd there, but it was dead silent, the only thing you heard was the birds, (bird caws) like you just heard now.

But other than the occasional sniffle from people who were crying, there was no conversation.

I experienced that kind of somberness once before in my life when, with a school trip as a high school student with our school chorus, we did a concert tour of Poland for three weeks, and one of the places that we stopped was Auschwitz.

And we had a couple busloads of kids, 40, 50 kids and teachers, and normally those bus rides between places were loud and noisy and laughing, and for the hour and a half going back to the hotel, dead silence.

- As a first responder, what were you thinking that day?

- I was thinking about some of the people that I knew who were down there who were still working in the city and who I had no doubt were in the middle of that.

And I knew several people that were, several friends, coworkers.

I knew a couple of the EMS people who died, a former paramedic partner who became a firefighter who I was pretty close with died.

So I was thinking about that and what they were going through, and just the images that I saw before leaving, those horrible images of people jumping out of the buildings, knowing that there was no way that they were gonna survive that jump, but doing it anyway.

I don't know what else was going through my mind, just a sense of disbelief that it actually happened.

- Do you think 9/11 changed our sense of safety or security as Americans?

- Yeah, absolutely, there's no question about it, I mean, TSA coming into existence because of 9/11.

I still remember going through security at airports and it was always private companies that were running security, so now you had TSA, and Homeland Security came into being, which didn't exist before.

And for a while, it was probably, I don't want to say too much security, but there was a real sense of paranoia, and a real sense of panic and concern and was this gonna happen again?

And that happened for years.

And I think after 20 years, we're finally kind of away from that sense of... Perpetual sense of fear and boding of what might happen.

But now we may be a little bit too far away from it, I think, we've forgotten a lot of that.

It's like a pendulum, it's constantly going back and forth, right, we went to real paranoia against people that were not Americans and now I think we've kind of gone, as far as security goes, maybe... security is still there, there's no question about it, but I think a lot of people have kind of forgotten about it, except for on the anniversaries.

And obviously, this being the 20th anniversary, that's a big one, were people gonna remember about it.

But one of the things that concerns me is, my parents are both Holocaust survivors.

They were not in camps, but they were European Jews who were on the run for quite a while, forced out of their homes, and my daughter, who's just turning 30, just reminded us the other day that she had a camp friend who was taught that the Holocaust didn't exist, it was all a fake story.

My father, who's still alive at 93, is here to tell you, both my parents are 93, here to tell you, it's not a fake story, and I worry that as we move further and further away from this, that are people gonna really remember what the Trade Center was and what it represented and what happened on that day?

- But what do you think 9/11 represented to you?

- It's a day that, for a long time, I had a lot of... for me personally, I had a lot of trouble...

I don't want to call it survivor's guilt, but I had a lot of trouble dealing with the fact that I was a New Yorker, that I was a paramedic, a New York paramedic, and I wasn't there when so many of my coworkers were there.

I know it's a silly thing to feel, but that's something that's stuck with me for quite a long time.

It was years before I could go back down there.

I've been back to Manhattan so many times, but it wasn't until probably about, I want to say maybe four years ago, three, four years ago that we finally went down there with my family and we went to Ground Zero, we went to the museum.

It was tough, it was tough seeing the names.

I found the names of people that I knew who died, and it actually helped, having been down there and seeing that.

- What will you be doing on the 20th anniversary this year?

- I will be working.

I will take a few minutes out of my day, like I have every year, to drive down here and walk out to the Connecticut 9/11 Memorial out there and look at the names, and look down and see if I can see the skyline.

Actually, I don't think we really can today, and think about the people that I knew who are no longer with us, and think about the people I know who were down there who did everything they could for others, and at some point, go home and kiss my wife, and remember that we have it pretty good up here right now.

- Marc Hartog, thanks for coming in.

- You're welcome, thank you for having me.

- My name is Hillary O'Neil.

I am 19 years old, I go to Villanova University, I'm going into my third year, and I was born on September 11th, 2001.

My parents never tried to hide the fact to me that I was born on such a tragic day.

It was always something that they wanted me to understand and kind of grow up knowing that.

Obviously, growing up, every little kid, their birthday is their favorite day of the year.

You look forward to it, you have your birthday party, but since I was born on 9/11, and obviously my birthday is a day that means something very different to so many people across the country and is such a tragic day, it's always been kind of hard to reconcile those two with each other, especially immediately after my parents would talk about, they didn't want to put balloons on the mailbox on the one year anniversary of 9/11, the things that you do normally for a kid on their birthday, they were kind of more wary about.

But kind of as I've grown older, my family and I... or honestly, since I was born, my family and I have adopted the mindset that me being born on that day is a sign of hope, and something positive that came out of something otherwise so tragic.

And so that's kind of what we latch onto, the aspect of hope that's part of it, and that's kind of sort of the spirit that we try to carry through on my birthday every year.

- Memorials, memory, and meaning, my next guest has written beautifully about all three.

He's an historian and an advisor to the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero.

His book, "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom," won a 2019 Pulitzer.

David Blight has long stressed the need to understand 9/11's role in American history and its impact on our American story.

He's also written on memorials.

David Blight is the Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University.

David Blight, welcome to "Cutline."

- Thank you, Diane, it's great to be here in this setting.

- And we're here at the 9/11 Living Memorial in Connecticut.

You were an advisor to the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero.

What's behind this human impulse to create memorials?

- Well, it is probably as old an instinct as we have.

It may be hard wired into us, perhaps even as much as storytelling.

The urge to memorialize, the urge to leave markers about ourselves, our people, our tribe, our country, is as old as ancient times.

When the Israelites were wandering out of Egypt and then into Babylonia, Moses told them to lay memory stones, which is a way it's translated, along the way to mark their path, to know where they had been.

We can find all kinds of other ancient examples of this.

Neuroscientists have told us, I think convincingly, that we are, as humans, wired for story, that we can't really function without a story to live within, and one of the first things we do with a child is tell stories.

Memorialization may be second only to storytelling, in terms of something virtually instinctive.

I'm not a neuroscientist, so I can't vouch for that, but I do think the urge to memorialize is deeply human, especially events that are traumatic, that are violent, and that are transforming.

- Well, let's talk about 9/11 and the story Americans had told themselves of their history and how that may have been changed after 9/11.

- 9/11 is a classic example of what many of us call the shock of events.

It's a shocking event that came out of nowhere.

We didn't even know the name of the enemy.

It was done with our own technology, airplanes, on our own soil, as the phrase goes.

And immediately, people searched for analogies.

Was this like Pearl Harbor, an attack on our own soil, was it some sort of Fort Sumter at the beginning of the Civil War, or what did we compare it to?

I mean, we always search for analogies, historically, whenever something like this happens.

And it was a shock as well because it was an attack on the center of capitalism, lower Manhattan, the tallest buildings in the city, and then the Pentagon, and likely, the US Capitol and the White House, as well.

And immediately, most Americans had a sense of, how could this happen?

How could we have let our defenses down?

Who did this, why would they attack us?

Or immediately, why do they hate us?

Now, that's a perfectly understandable set of reactions.

With a little time and a little analysis, of course, context and recent history and longer term history shows us that... which we do not think about in the immediate moment, of course, but a little bit of context and a little bit of history shows us that attacks like this on civilians is nothing new.

Throughout history, the slaughter of civilians, unfortunately, tragically, horribly, has been part of warfare.

It has been part of what societies will do to each other, especially when they have rendered the people they're doing it to a mortal enemy.

When an enemy is deemed utterly existential, then we humans will do anything to obliterate them, and we need, as Americans, to remember, and I am in no way justifying the attack on 9/11, it was a horrible crime against humanity.

But Americans do need to realize, we also are the only nation to use atomic weapons on civilian populations, we did it to end World War II.

We, along with the Germans and the Japanese, showed the world what carpet bombing can do to cities.

We showed it again in Vietnam, where we dropped more tonnage of bombs than in all of World War II.

So the slaughter of civilians is as old as the Trojan War, if you like, and even older than that, both in reality and in literature.

- And how do you think, in terms of where we are now, how do you think 9/11 changed our historical narrative here in the US?

- Yeah, well, in America, we have a tendency, whatever happens to us, to revert, collectively, now, not all of us, but we have a tendency to revert collectively to a narrative of progress.

We collectively, and I'm using the we here rather loosely, but we tend to demand a story of improvement in America.

We still want to be the nation becoming, the nation founded out of some very special creeds, and they are, the four first principles of the Declaration of Independence are creeds.

We are a credal nation, in that sense.

We have a covenant, if you like, in that enlightenment document.

Now, we have violated it and violated it, and we were violating it at the time by slavery.

We fought an all-out and horrific Civil War to try to settle that problem of slavery, we didn't fully settle it.

We have a history full of as much tragedy, exploitation, destruction, and self destruction as most other countries.

But in America, this land that seemed, in its beginnings, to be boundless, our boundless West, our boundless territory to expand to, we were always somehow a people who could begin again.

- And now we're in a moment in the US where we're rethinking our national story, we're rethinking how we teach history, we're rethinking how we incorporate some of these examples you've just given, periods in American history that were genuinely awful and genuinely tragic.

Can you talk about that?

- Well, sure, I mean, I've been teaching, I hate to admit it, 40 some years and more.

I started as a high school teacher in the 1970s, a whole bunch of us were sort of young Turks out of the '60s, and we were inventing something called black history in public high school classrooms.

I mean, it's in some ways the greatest experience I ever had, I didn't know what I was doing, but it may be the most important teaching I ever did.

That's how old this process is, about teaching the black experience, for example, which is so controversial, suddenly, again.

But what is hard for a segment of America to grasp, big segment of America to grasp, is that you can actually teach about tragedies and terrible experiences, misguided policies, evil systems that we have ourselves created because we're humans, we're human beings.

You can teach about those in ways that only reinforce, if you do it well and if you know... as they say in schools now, if you know the content and you have good teachers to present, you can teach about those terrible elements of the past without ruining a child's or a teenager's vision of their country.

- So let me ask you, as we wrap up, what kinds of questions should we, as Americans, be asking about 9/11 in 2021?

- Well, I think what we should be asking about 9/11 in 2021 are what are its legacies now?

What have they been for these 20 years, how shall we teach the new generations now with no memory of it?

It is the history beyond memory, and there's a very real difference between history and memory.

- What is that difference?

- Yeah, history tends to be what historians do.

It's a reasoned reconstruction of the past based on rules of evidence.

It doesn't mean it's a science, per se.

Memory, though, comes from a community, it comes from family, it comes from a past that is passed on through generations, it's more powerful.

We're from somewhere, there's usually a narrative about where we're from.

We may have grown up in a religion that gives us a whole set of values and rituals.

There's nothing more powerful than ritual.

Memory is more powerful than history and there's far more of it.

It can be beautiful, the rituals of family, religion, and culture can be beautiful, the stuff of festivals.

It can also sometimes get in the way of understanding the past, of understanding what actually happened in the past, of understanding what the American Civil War actually meant and what it was fought over, of understanding just how World War II came about in the world, and so on.

9/11 is there for us to keep measuring.

What is this American narrative?

What's the American story, what is American history?

Is it just a story that makes us feel good?

Is it just a story that makes young people proud, that somehow creates patriots, or is it a story that teaches us to be critical of ourselves, that teaches us skepticism, that teaches us to learn both, both love of country, but also a chastened, tragic worldview that understands that Americans are part of the same story as all people?

- David Blight, thank you so much.

- Thank you, Diane.

- My name is Nicholas Marini, I am 24 years old, a senior at UConn Stamford, and I am the president of the College Republicans at UConn Stamford.

I think 9/11 has affected my generation specifically, is that we grew up knowing that America is in a bubble, knowing that we are... that the United States isn't separate from the world, that the United States is within the world, contained within it, and we're not immune to the things... You hear a lot about what happens in other countries, about people passing away in all these tragedies, but I think my generation fully understood that we aren't immune to that, and that American is in a bubble, and that we make a conscious decision to stay in it.

- As we remember those who died on September 11th, 2001, let's turn now to the military and security response that followed.

After learning that the international terrorist group, Al Qaeda, planned and directed the attacks from Afghanistan, US led forces invaded that country a few weeks later.

By 2003, the focus shifted to the global war on terror, and US led forces invaded Iraq.

The cost of these wars has been astronomically high, in casualties, lives upended, trillions of dollars.

By 2011, the US officially left Iraq, but remains involved to this day, and now, in 2021, after two deca conflict, US Troops have left Afghanistan And America's longest war is end as it began.

The Taliban rule Afghanistan.

My next guest is a Connecticut veteran.

Alyssa Kelleher spent just over two years deployed in Afghanistan, she's now the Director of the University of Connecticut's Office of Veterans Affairs and Military Programs.

Our conversation took place befo the fall of Afghanistan.

Alyssa Kelleher, welcome to "Cutline."

- Thank you.

- What inspired you to join the military, and was 9/11 a part of that?

- So I actually joined prior to 9/11, so 9/11 was not a consideration.

I joined initially right after I graduated high school and I was in my first year of college at UConn.

I think that it was one of those things where I was looking for...

I had always played team sports, and I missed that team camaraderie, and I was looking for something to challenge myself, and the National Guard kind of came into my view and it seemed like a good fit.

And 9/11 actually happened while I was at basic training.

So I was at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and it's kind of a strange version of 9/11 for me because I never got to see any of the news stories, anything that anyone else was watching live.

I never saw any of that.

They just came on the loudspeaker in the barracks one night and said, "Hey, this happened," and we thought it was fake at first, like part of the training.

And then over the next few days, realized that it was real.

- And how did that affect your training?

- It definitely became a lot more focused, and you realize that you were there for more of a reason than you were before.

The rumor mill was rampant, of course.

All of the brand new privates were saying, "Everyone's gonna leave here and deploy immediately," so none of that was true, of course, knowing what I know now, but.

- And how long after 9/11 were you deployed to Afghanistan?

- So my first deployment, I actually finished college and commissioned as an officer, and then went into the regular Army, and then I deployed my first time from the regular Army, so that was in 2006.

- Can you talk about your responsibilities when you were in Afghanistan?

- Sure, so the first time that I was deployed, I was a platoon leader, and that meant that I had about 50 soldiers that were working for me, and I was a logistics officer.

And so what we did was basically, we supported the infantry directly, and we would do everything from the maintenance on vehicles to recovering any vehicles that were blown up or disabled on the battlefield, as well as all of the food service.

So we ran the dining facility, we ran all of the refuel operations, all of the resupply operations, both bringing supplies to the FOB that we were at, and then pushing supplies forward to units that were in the field.

- FOB?

- Yeah, so that was the Forward Operating Base.

And so we first were at FOB Ghazni, and then we moved partway through to FOB Mehtar Lam.

- When you think about your time in Afghanistan, what jumps to mind?

- I think in general that I always kind of classify it as the absolute best and absolute worst time of my life.

It was the best because I got to do things that I never thought I would ever be doing.

- [Diane] Such as?

- Such as, I mean, doing multiple convoys in a combat zone every day, such as getting to lead soldiers in those challenging combat situations.

If you would have asked me when I was 16, 17 years old if I would be doing that in five years from then, no way, I would have never expected that.

And building lifelong friendships with the people that you're there with and that you serve with, which, to me, is also one of the best things about the military, is the people, and then maintaining those relationships over time, and watching them grow, personally, professionally, all of that.

And then obviously the worst, too, for reasons I'm sure you can imagine.

You're away from family and friends, you're in a place that's not comfortable, and you're experiencing stressful things and seeing people you care about get hurt or killed, and that's never a positive, so... - Could you talk for a minute about the experience of being a female leader in the military, and also a female leader in Afghanistan?

- Sure, so in the military overall, I mean, this is I think consistent throughout anyone that I've spoken to about this, is that I've been really blessed to have a very positive experience in the military.

I know that's not the case for everybody, but for me, it has been 100% a positive experience.

And something I really appreciate about the military is that I think that it's all about your competence, and you showing that you want be a part of the team, and you caring about your soldiers and other people, and that all of the kind of demographic things don't really matter as much, as long as you have that competence and your dedication to your team.

So I think that early on, I did feel a need to prove myself, but kind of after working through that and getting some experience under my belt, I don't think being a female, in general, in the military, was any different than any other leader.

I mean, there's definitely some stories from Afghanistan that are directly related to being a female, positive and negative.

- Could you share one?

- Sure, a short one, one of the negative ones, was that whenever we would be out on a convoy, I would have to, a lot of times, have my platoon sergeant, who was a man, interact with the locals through our interpreter because even though my interpreter was a male Afghan interpreter, a lot of times the locals would not want to speak to me, even though I was the one trying to say, ask questions, or get information from them, it wasn't working because they didn't see me as someone who could possibly have any kind of authority in that group.

- We're at a moment where we're watching the US withdraw from Afghanistan and the Taliban advance.

Can you talk about what... Can you talk about your thoughts?

- I mean, it's definitely one of those issues where I see many sides, and obviously, have a personal connection, and I understand the need to withdraw.

And it's, in some ways, disappointing to me because you know people who were your friends and people you served with who have a lasting impact, or some of them who are no longer with us because of being either killed there, or something happening afterwards.

And it's frustrating to see that in Afghanistan, women and children still are facing struggles, which is part of the reason we went there, and the government is still struggling, which is part of the reason we went there.

So it's frustrating to see that those things haven't been fully realized as we had hoped.

- By about 2003, the focus had shifted to a larger global War on Terror and the US invaded Iraq.

How did that impact those in Afghanistan?

- So it impacted us directly because we were there, like I said, that first deployment in 2006, and we were set to come home after a year of being in country, and because the war in Iraq was really heating up and they were focusing a lot of resources and soldiers there, we ended up getting extended for an additional six months.

And I remember, that's one of those things that you'll never forget, where my soldiers and I had packed up all of our stuff, and it was weeks until we were going home, and the commander I was working for called me in and told me that we had been extended, and at first, I didn't believe him, I thought he was trying to pull a fast one on me, and it was true.

And I remember going back and telling my platoon sergeant, Sergeant Biford, and we kind of said, "All right, we gotta tell the platoon," and had to go in and tell everybody.

And the reactions, I'll always remember, 'cause some of them took it well, some of them, I mean, grown men started crying because they thought they were gonna go home to see their family after being gone for a year.

So the focus on Iraq definitely affected us directly.

And I remember too that it was a very kind of economy of force, austere environment, in terms of the number of troops that we had in Afghanistan at the time, versus what was going on in Iraq.

We had a taskforce that we worked with of maybe 150 soldiers, and we were responsible for an area the size of Wisconsin, which was a lot because they're just, at that point in 2006, there weren't as many troops in Afghanistan, in terms of density for the area.

- You were deployed a second time.

- Yes.

- Can you talk about what led you to go back a second time?

- So I came out of the regular Army and into the National Guard, the Connecticut National Guard, which I still serve with today, and I was a company commander, and so the battalion that I was a company commander within was deploying to Afghanistan, so of course, I mean, I'm gonna go with them.

So it was a very similar mission for me, but just on a larger scale, so instead of 50 soldiers, it was 125 soldiers across five different bases, providing the same kinds of logistics support.

And yeah, I mean, it was my job to go back, so of course I went back.

- So you entered the military before 9/11.

Now you work at UConn with a lot of young people.

What do you see as the reasons people are enlisting now in the military?

Can you talk about what's inspiring people now to join?

- I think there's a wide range of reasons people are still joining.

I think a lot of them still are patriotic, probably not related directly to 9/11, because as you mentioned, a lot of them have been born either just prior to or since 9/11 at this point, but it's still a sense of wanting to serve their country.

Of course, some people are... there's excellent benefits, as well, so some people are joining for that reason.

Some people joined during the challenging job market, so I think there's a wide range of reasons why people are still joining the military.

- So as we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, how do you think that experience has affected those in the military, and the way they understand what they do, if it's affected them, and how it has affected how we see ourselves as Americans?

- So I think that it's good that you asked the question that way because I think there is, for a lot of people, kind of a distinct difference, right?

Because you'll have those who have served in the military or have some kind of connection, family member, friend, etc.

I can think of the people that I know who are close to me, of course they were affected, but there's a lot of people who, at this point, I think it's kind of a distant memory, which is somewhat unfortunate because I think that somebody said that they would never want another 9/11, but they would love another 9/12 because of the unity and the patriotism and all of those things that our country did to pull together that we could definitely use even right now, with the challenges that we're facing with the pandemic and everything else going on, all of the other challenges we're facing in our country right now, I think that sense of unity, togetherness, common goals would be really helpful.

- As we wrap up, I know you're a mom of a three-year-old.

What do you hope she understands about 9/11?

- That's a hard question.

(laughs) I hope she understands that it was a day that America was attacked, and that we responded.

I hope that she understands that both me and her dad, who also serves in the military, have been committed to the military before that and since then.

And I hope that she is proud of the place that she lives, and sees that as part of her personal history, but also part of American history.

- Alyssa Kelleher, thanks for coming in.

- Thank you.

- So my name is Chatwan Mongkol.

I am 20 years old and I'm a senior at Quinnipiac University and I'm also an intern at Connecticut Public.

So I grew up in Thailand, in Bangkok, Thailand, I was there for my whole life, and I just came here for high school when I was 17, so that was three years ago.

Growing up in Thailand, I didn't know about 9/11 much, but I heard of the event, but then I learned about it through watching a movie.

It was called United 73, or 93, I think.

Every time I see movies that took place in 2001 or after that, they always mention 9/11, and I see that people in the movie, even in the movies, were affected by the event.

So I'm studying journalism, so I want to be an international reporter.

So I want to be in different countries, not just the US, but I like to travel around.

I know that there are many events in the world that happened that I didn't know of, but it's important for people in those countries, and it's important for me to learn to be a world citizen.

- My name is Alyssa Mesaros, I am 22 years old, and I'm a student at Quinnipiac University, studying to get my MBA.

I think the US lost its innocence after the event occurred.

I think going into airports, the security has really amped up.

You've seen guards, armed guards even now, and we'll never know the ease of accessibility of just walking into an airport.

And I also think while that security was amped up, our personal insecurities grew, even substantially.

And with that being said, we mistrust now so much easier than before, and are more skeptical of people than before, as well.

- The 9/11 attacks were carried out by Al Qaeda, a terrorist organization violently opposed to the US because America was not governed along the group's extremist interpretation of Islam.

In the aftermath of September 11th, with a nation reeling and widespread ignorance here of Islam, fear of Muslims spread fast.

In that climate of distrust and bigotry, my next guest, a Connecticut doctor and American citizen, stood up and reached out to support his community, working with interfaith leaders, politicians, and police departments to help them understand what it means to be a Muslim.

Dr. Reza Mansoor is a cardiologist at Hartford Hospital.

He's also President of the Muslim Coalition of Connecticut and the Islamic Association of Greater Hartford.

Dr. Reza Mansoor, welcome to "Cutline."

- Thank you, Diane, thank you for inviting me.

- What are your memories of September 11th, 2001?

- Yeah, it's a day that nobody forgets, right?

When I was actually rounding at Hartford Hospital and I was with a sick patient who was probably... What turned out was he was dying, and we were struggling to resuscitate him, and at the same time, the images of 9/11 were on the television, and we were torn because we are aggressively attending to this person, while at the same time, the whole nation is suffering this tragedy and this terrorist attack that we were praying that wasn't involving Muslims because it was so antithetical to Islam to have something like this happen.

- Can you talk about your response when you discovered it in fact involved violent extremism?

- Yeah, I mean, so we've always spoken about Islam, I've done public speaking at the Hartford Seminary and at other institutions before, and we always knew that the extremists in all our faith communities were the problem.

Immediately after 9/11, nobody knew that it was Muslims, right?

The initial reaction was that the media was playing this out 24/7, every day, and so we were hoping and praying that this wasn't Muslims who had done it, and I'm sure every faith community was hoping that it wasn't their faith community.

But there were all these terrorism specialists that came on, and they had been wrong in the past.

They called the Oklahoma City Bombing having the trademarks of Middle Eastern terror.

They were wrong in the past, but they were brought on immediately as terrorism specialists to talk about 9/11, and of course they pointed the finger at Muslims, and it was draining for us and shocking to find out that they were in fact Muslims because Islam doesn't give you the right to take any innocent life.

And many of us had...

I had just finished my training, cardiology training in 1999, and kind of just setting my roots in America as an immigrant from Sri Lanka.

And having witnessed some of this kind of nationalist fervor in Sri Lanka associated with Buddhism, and hoping that some of the stuff that you were hearing on the television, like, "Let's bomb Mecca and let's kill all Muslims," you heard this on national television, and it was scary for us.

- Can we talk a little bit more about the impact of a lack of understanding, and frankly, ignorance about Islam and its impact?

- Yeah, I think this was a really important issue.

To begin with, the demographics of Muslims in America, about 1/3rd African American and 2/3rds immigrant.

And so we were first and second generation Muslims that had just come to America.

I am a first generation Muslim, I had come to America in 1990, so this is 10 years after coming to America and doing my cardiology, first medicine training and then cardiology training.

So we had to really explain our faith, and this was... there weren't many specialists on Islam, and I was doing this even before 9/11, but to a much lesser extent, and we realized that we had to quickly become scholars of Islam to be able to represent ourselves because we certainly didn't want these terrorist specialists to be talking about us as though we were the problem, and we had to change that narrative, which is why I got involved in teaching in the mosques, I got involved in leadership, as well as in interfaith dialogue.

- How do you teach about violent extremism within Islam to young people?

- Yeah, it's a very good question, and I think one of the narratives that comes out of watching TV is that you have this false dichotomy of either you're a good American or a good Muslim, and that was the first thing that we had to change.

So after talking to them about the basics of Islam, I would talk about concepts like jihad, and debate with them what it means to be struggling for justice, as opposed to what the terrorists are doing and not understanding the faith because your principles have to be founded on the Koran, which are the guidelines of how we practice our faith.

So you had to differentiate between what Islam allowed and what the terrorists were doing.

So jihad is a concept that's very important, but what the terrorists were doing was completely bastardizing what the term meant.

So they were using the term jihad, but they were doing something completely opposite to what jihad was, and we had this debate and we had this discussion because the students that I teach are high school students.

So they very, very much want to understand these concepts.

And we had debates between... we divided the class into two, for example, and we would have a debate between Islamic values and cultural values because there's a difference between that.

Islam insists that you educate everybody.

Well, if you look at Afghanistan, the women aren't allowed to be educated for cultural reasons, and so we wanted to clarify that difference.

Islam, one of the principles of sharia, which are the guidelines of how Muslims follow the faith, one of the central principles out of six is education for all, and that's a central principle of sharia.

So how can you not educate half your population and say this is an Islamic value?

It's not, it's a cultural tradition that they had, wherever they were practicing cultural traditions, as opposed to the Islamic values.

- But I have to ask you one more question.

We're speaking at a moment where the US has just pulled out of Afghanistan, and we're hearing from the Taliban, at least what we're reading is that they talk about a kind of Islamic system that must be instituted, we hear about Islamic extremism beginning to proliferate across Africa.

How do you teach that, how do you talk about that?

What's your response to that?

- Well, so we need to go back to the basics of Islam, right?

When we heard politicians say, "No sharia in America," I wanted my youth to understand, okay, do they know what sharia means, and just contrast the US Constitution with sharia.

So there are six principles of sharia, the protection of life, right, your life, the protection of your family, the protection of your property or wealth, the right to an education, freedom of religion, and the right to individual dignity.

Those are the six principles of sharia.

And if you look at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it covers most of those.

So Muslims aren't asking for sharia to be instituted in America.

The people who are doing that don't understand the concept of sharia, nor do they understand the US Constitution, so they are saying something out of ignorance, and we would love to see sharia being practiced by Muslims, if it is the true sharia.

But if it is vigilante stoning to death of women in the streets of Afghanistan, we don't want that.

That's not Islam, that's something completely different.

It's like you see a lynching of a African American and say, "We don't want American law."

It's just vigilante law, and we have to be able to differentiate the two.

- So how do you remember 9/11 and its legacy?

- I think with everything that happens, Diane, it has to be viewed as a challenge.

Either you can cow down and say, "You know what, I'm gonna hide my head in the sand," or you can take it as a challenge to educate and make America a better place.

Islam encourages us to do exactly that, to make this nation that you live in a better place.

You serve humanity, you make the changes that are needed to make this nation better, and so that's what Muslims and the Muslim leadership wants to do, is to very much use it as a challenge to educate others about Islam, to build the coalitions, to really...

When I think of America, I always think of this place where there's that vibrancy of different faith communities, and we should take advantage of that, and diversity really is our strength if we can use it in the right way.

So I think yes, it was a sad day.

Certainly the 20th anniversary is a day when we remember those fallen, innocent people and their families, and we grieve for them, and we have to retreat the terrorism that happened that day as something that's completely antithetical to Islam, but we have to take it as a challenge, every opportunity as a challenge to make us a better place.

And I think if we can do that... and part of it is understanding each other better, I think there'll be a better union.

(laughs) - Dr. Reza Mansoor, thank you so much for coming in.

- Thank you, Diane, and hopefully we'll do this more often, thank you.

- My name is Ahla Amin, I'm 29 years old, and I'm a labor and delivery nurse at Manchester Memorial Hospital.

My parents came from Sudan in Northeast Africa.

After they got married, they came over to New York, and I was the first of three, and we've been here ever since.

So when 9/11 happened, I was in the fourth grade, I was nine years old, and I just remember feeling this, all of a sudden, this sense of urgency, this sense of fear.

So I am Muslim, and my parents decided to enroll me into Sunday School from a very young age up until college, and during the time, it was the Sunday School, the Muslim community, it was going to mosque on a weekly basis that made me feel secure, and made me kind of forget what the rest of the world was saying about Muslims everywhere.

And then when I graduated college, I started to feel like, okay, you're an adult in this world, what do you do with this?

I started taking steps towards becoming more comfortable with who I am, so I started to cover my hair at that point.

It was in 2015, is when I started to cover my hair.

So at work, people will sometimes ask me, whether it's patients, whether it's some of my coworkers or anyone that I come across, and then may say, "Oh, so can I just ask you a question?

Are you Muslim," and then when they start to ask those questions, that's when I know that there's a spark, there's something inside of them that they just want to know, they're curious.

And who am I to say, oh, they already know what they know, or they already think what they think because of what the media has told them, or what other people have shared with them about what they view about Muslims?

So what better than to ask someone who is in the faith, who grew up in it, and who will probably speak about it to what I know?

And to have those engaging conversations, just to create that little spark, like, "Hey, I made a connection with a Muslim today, and it was great, and I love what I learned," and this is just a reminder to all of us to just continue to learn about everyone, each other, whether it's different cultures, faiths, backgrounds, whatever it is, and really give each other that grace.

We're all the same, we're all here together, just living and coexisting.

This is all of our earth together, so we just have to live and learn, so yeah.

- 20 years after 9/11, we continue to live and learn.

Thanks for joining us for this hour, reflecting on an event that's impossible to fully understand.

Still, we hope that in the effort, we move close to a more just and humane world.

Let's wrap up with words written and spoken by historian David Blight.

This is an excerpt from his essay called, "Will it Rise, September 11th in American Memory."

- [David] The truth is that we cannot know the full, or even partial, meaning of an event like September 11th in a few years, a decade, or perhaps even a generation.

Any contemplation of 9/11 begins with its sense of loss; then, the trouble begins as we try to think in historical time.

Mass death is, of course, not new to Americans.

Nor are ruins.

As at Gettysburg, so also at Ground Zero a century and a half later, people have felt a terrible stillness in viewing the ruins slowly transformed into a beautiful Memorial, and they have had to face similarly unimaginable, fearful facts.

As the journalist John Trowbridge looked into the long rows of trenches still open and freshly dug for all of the dead at Gettysburg two years after the battle, he saw the ends of coffins protruding, he wrote, and pondered warily the awful uncertainty of the nation's rebirth.

"Will it rise," he asked, without knowing an answer.

How many Americans or tourists from abroad have stood over the ruins of Ground Zero, imagined the site as a graveyard, and pondered the uncertain character of the nation and the world emerging from 9/11?

Will it rise, what has risen?

Memorials are always about the past, but they're almost always also about the present in which they are erected.

The story of 9/11 is very old, as it also seems so very new.