ST. LOUIS, MO – September 6, 2026 (STL.News) Twenty-five years later, the images still feel hard to watch if you choose to view them. Many of the videos are restricted because of their emotional impact.
The airplanes. The smoke pouring from the World Trade Center. People running through the streets of lower Manhattan. Firefighters climbing stairways while thousands of people desperately tried to descend. Police officers and emergency personnel rushing toward a catastrophe while nearly everyone else was trying to escape it.
Then the towers collapsed.
And among the thousands of photographs taken that morning is one image that remains especially difficult to confront: the photograph commonly known as “The Falling Man.”
It shows a single human being falling from the World Trade Center.
The photograph is disturbing not because it shows the enormous scale of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, but because it does exactly the opposite. It reduces an event involving skyscrapers, airplanes, thousands of deaths, international terrorism, and eventually wars spanning decades to something painfully simple.
One person.
One life.
One human being caught in circumstances almost impossible for those of us who were not there to comprehend.
As America approaches the 25th anniversary of September 11, perhaps remembrance should begin there—not with politics, arguments about what followed, or the historical terminology that has accumulated over the past quarter-century, but with people.
The people who went to work that Tuesday morning.
The passengers and crews who boarded four airplanes.
The firefighters who entered burning buildings.
The police officers and emergency personnel who responded.
The families who waited for telephone calls that never came.
The survivors who carried what they experienced with them for the rest of their lives.
The rescue and recovery workers who spent months at Ground Zero.
And the American men and women who later went to war, some never returning home.
Nearly 3,000 People Were Killed on September 11
The official death toll from the September 11 attacks is 2,977 victims, excluding the 19 hijackers.
According to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, 2,753 people were killed in New York, 184 were killed at the Pentagon, and 40 passengers and crew members aboard United Airlines Flight 93 were killed when the aircraft crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Those numbers communicate the magnitude of the tragedy.
They cannot communicate what it meant.
Every number represented a person.
Someone had spoken with them the previous day.
Someone expected them home that evening.
Someone had plans with them for the weekend.
Someone knew their telephone number.
Someone recognized their voice.
Someone loved them.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as September 11 moves from lived memory into history.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum notes that approximately 100 million Americans are now too young to remember September 11, 2001. For an increasingly large portion of the population, 9/11 is something learned from textbooks, documentaries, photographs, videos, and the recollections of parents and grandparents.
For those old enough to remember it, however, September 11 can still feel remarkably immediate.
Remembering September 11 From St. Louis
I was living in St. Louis when the attacks occurred.
New York City was hundreds of miles away, but on that morning distance did not seem to matter very much.
I knew several people at Cantor Fitzgerald whom I spoke with regularly by telephone. They were among those who died.
Twenty-five years later, watching the videos remains no easier for me than watching the events unfold on television when they actually happened.
There are ways September 11 changed my life that I cannot adequately describe. There are other ways I choose not to describe because they are too personal.
What I can say is that it changed my life forever.
And I know I was hardly alone.
Nothing about the experience of watching September 11 from St. Louis should be compared with what the people trapped inside the World Trade Center endured, or with what their families experienced. There is no comparison.
But September 11’s impact did not stop at the boundaries of Manhattan, the Pentagon, or a field in Pennsylvania.
People in the Midwest were frightened.
People across America were frightened.
We did not know whether the attacks were over. We didn’t know whether another airplane was heading toward another American city. We didn’t know exactly who was responsible. We didn’t know what would happen next.
Mostly, we could not believe what we were watching.
America Watched Together
For many Americans, television became almost impossible to turn off.
People watched for hours. Then they watched for days.
Perhaps we were searching for information. Perhaps we were searching for reassurance. Maybe we believed that if we watched long enough, somebody would finally explain how something so incomprehensible could have happened.
But no explanation could make the images understandable.
Many Americans can probably remember exactly where they were when they first heard that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center.
Then came the second airplane.
That changed everything.
This wasn’t an aviation accident.
America was under attack.
The Pentagon was struck.
Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew members fought back against the hijackers.
The South Tower collapsed.
Then the North Tower disappeared into an enormous cloud of debris.
Those moments became permanently embedded in millions of people’s memories.
Twenty-five years later, Americans old enough to remember that morning may still be able to answer questions that would ordinarily have disappeared from memory long ago.
Where were you?
Who told you?
What television station were you watching?
Who did you telephone?
Were your children at school?
When did you realize the first crash wasn’t an accident?
When did you understand that the United States was under attack?
Those are individual memories, but collectively they form part of America’s memory.
The Firefighters Who Went Up
One of the enduring images of September 11 is the sight of firefighters entering the World Trade Center as civilians escaped.
The Fire Department of the City of New York lost 343 members on September 11, 2001.
The New York Police Department lost 23 members. Thirty-seven Port Authority Police Department officers were also killed. New York City’s 2026 remembrance proclamation notes that 71 law enforcement officers from multiple agencies made the ultimate sacrifice in New York that day.
It is difficult to contemplate what first responders were being asked to do.
People were desperately trying to get out.
They were going in.
Firefighters climbed stairways carrying equipment toward fires hundreds of feet above the ground. Police officers, paramedics, and other emergency workers assisted evacuations and tried to establish order amid conditions that rapidly exceeded anything an emergency response system could realistically prepare for.
Some undoubtedly understood the danger.
They continued.
Their sacrifice deserves remembrance not as an abstract symbol but as an example of extraordinary human courage.
They had families.
They had children.
They had plans for September 12.
They went to work that morning expecting to return home.
Hundreds did not.
And September 11 continued taking members of the first-responder community long after the towers were gone. FDNY reported in 2025 that more than 400 of its members had subsequently died from World Trade Center-related illnesses.
New York City also reports that hundreds of thousands of people were exposed or potentially exposed to dust and environmental contaminants from the disaster, while responders, residents, workers, and schoolchildren experienced long-term physical and psychological consequences.
For many families, therefore, September 11 did not end on September 11.
The Falling Man
Among the images documenting that morning, the photograph known as “The Falling Man” remains one of the hardest to view.
The identity of the individual in the famous photograph has never been established with certainty.
Perhaps that uncertainty has given the photograph an even broader meaning over time.
The man is not a building.
He is not an explosion.
He is not a military target, government policy, or historical statistic.
He is a human being.
The photograph confronts viewers with a reality that television coverage from a distance could sometimes obscure: people were trapped in conditions so horrific that those safely watching from hundreds of miles away cannot reasonably claim to understand what they experienced.
We should therefore be careful with our language.
We do not know everything that happened in those final moments. We cannot know what choices were available—or whether meaningful choices remained available at all.
The photograph deserves to be viewed with dignity, not sensationalism.
It represents one person’s final moments, but it also forces us to remember that the thousands of people described collectively as “9/11 victims” experienced the catastrophe individually.
Each person was one life.
Remembering Those Who Went to War
September 11 also changed the lives of another generation of Americans.
Young men and women joined the United States military.
Others were already serving when the attacks occurred and soon found themselves deployed overseas.
American forces entered Afghanistan in October 2001. The war ultimately became the longest in American history.
Thousands of American military personnel died during the conflicts and operations that followed September 11, and tens of thousands were wounded.
The Department of Defense has reported 2,461 U.S. military deaths associated with the war in Afghanistan.
The human consequences extend much further.
There are veterans living today with physical injuries that will never disappear.
Veterans carry memories most civilians cannot understand.
Military spouses endured deployment after deployment.
Children grew up while a parent was overseas.
And there are families who watched a uniformed military representative approach their front door and knew, before a word was spoken, that their lives had changed forever.
Whatever Americans may believe today about the political decisions, strategies, and wars that followed September 11, the service and sacrifice of the men and women sent to fight should be remembered separately from those debates.
They answered their country’s call.
Some gave everything.
They belong in America’s remembrance of September 11.
A Country That Came Together
Something else happened after September 11 that can be hard for America to reconcile with in 2026.
The country came together.
Not perfectly. Not universally. And not without serious mistakes, fear, prejudice, and political disagreement.
But an unmistakable sense of national unity emerged.
American flags appeared everywhere.
Neighbors spoke with neighbors.
People donated blood.
Volunteers traveled to New York.
First responders came from communities across the country.
Americans thanked firefighters, police officers, and military personnel.
For a period of time, many of the divisions that ordinarily separated Americans seemed considerably less important.
We had been attacked.
We were Americans.
Twenty-five years later, the country is deeply divided politically and culturally. Americans disagree about institutions, government, wars, elections, immigration, economics and even basic interpretations of events.
Looking back at September 11 therefore carries an additional sadness.
We remember what was lost that morning.
But some may also remember what happened afterward, when Americans demonstrated that enormous differences did not necessarily prevent them from recognizing something they shared.
The history of the quarter-century following September 11 is extraordinarily complicated. It includes wars, terrorism, security policies, political changes, economic disruptions, and cultural transformations. Attributing America’s present divisions to any single event would be simplistic.
But September 11 unquestionably changed the United States’ trajectory.
America before September 11 and America after September 11 were not quite the same country.
Twenty-Five Years Later
On Friday, September 11, 2026, families will again gather at the National September 11 Memorial in lower Manhattan.
The 25th anniversary ceremony will include the reading of the victims’ names and moments of silence marking the attacks, the collapse of the towers, and those who subsequently died from 9/11-related illnesses and injuries.
There will be thousands of names.
But we should hear them as individuals.
A mother.
A father.
A daughter.
A son.
A husband.
A wife.
A firefighter.
A police officer.
A passenger.
A flight attendant.
An office worker.
A soldier.
A Marine.
A sailor.
An airman.
A friend.
A voice somebody expected to hear again.
For those of us who remember September 11, perhaps the approaching anniversary is also an opportunity to tell younger Americans what that day actually felt like.
Not simply what happened.
What it felt like.
Tell them about the confusion when the first airplane struck.
Tell them how everything changed when the second airplane appeared.
Tell them about watching the towers burn.
Tell them about the firefighters.
Tell them about Flight 93.
Tell them about waiting to learn whether another attack would happen.
Tell them about the photographs families taped to walls as they desperately searched for missing relatives.
Tell them about the silence when commercial aircraft disappeared from American skies.
Tell them about the people who lined streets with American flags.
Tell them about the men and women who volunteered for military service knowing they could be sent to war.
And tell them that the people who died were more than a number.
Never Forget
“Never forget” has been repeated so often over the past 25 years that the words risk becoming merely ceremonial.
They should mean more than that.
Never forget the 2,977 people killed on September 11, 2001.
Never forget the firefighters climbing the stairs.
Never forget the police officers, paramedics, and emergency personnel.
Never forget the passengers and crews aboard the four aircraft.
Never forget the courage demonstrated aboard Flight 93.
Never forget those who survived.
Never forget the rescue and recovery workers.
Never forget those who became sick years afterward.
Never forget the military personnel who served in the wars that followed.
Never forget those who came home wounded.
Never forget those who never came home.
Never forget their families.
And perhaps we should also remember something about ourselves.
September 11 demonstrated humanity at its worst.
But its aftermath also showed Americans extraordinary examples of humanity at its best—courage, sacrifice, compassion, service, and unity.
Twenty-five years have passed.
For some people, that morning has become history.
For others, it remains a memory.
And for thousands of families, it remains something much more personal.
For me, watching the images 25 years later still does not make what happened easier to comprehend. Perhaps it never will.
I was in St. Louis, far from the World Trade Center.
But September 11 reached St. Louis.
It reached communities throughout Missouri.
It reached cities and small towns throughout America.
It reached military families who would soon watch loved ones leave for distant wars.
It reached a generation of children who grew up in a country permanently changed by what happened that morning.
And it changed lives in ways that cannot always be explained.
The photograph of the Falling Man reminds us why remembrance matters.
Behind every enormous historical event are individual human beings.
Behind every number is a name.
Behind every name is a life.
Twenty-five years later, we remember them.
We honor them.
And we should never forget.
