Just as Sept. 11 was unthinkable, Sunday was inevitable: the 10th anniversary of a day that stands alone. In history. In memory.

Three-thousand six-hundred fifty-two days have now passed. At 8:46 a.m., the time when the first plane slammed into 1 World Trade Center, 87,648 hours will have gone by. Another 5,258,880 minutes. Another 315,532,800 seconds.

Once more, the families gathered at ground zero, where 2,749 died, and in Washington and in Pennsylvania, paying tribute to the 224 who died there.

Once more, there was an outpouring of grief. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that the attacks had turned “a perfect blue-sky morning” into “the blackest of nights."

President Obama read Psalm 46, which talks about God as “our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,” and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York read from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, the famous “four freedoms” speech, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear “anywhere in the world.”

Former President George W. Bush quoted Abraham Lincoln on the casualties in the Civil War as Mr. Bush commemorated those who died on Sept. 11. “I pray that our heavenly father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement,” Mr. Bush read, quoting from a letter Lincoln wrote in 1864 to a mother whose five sons had died in the war.

There were also long moments of silence, first at 8:46 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 11 struck 1 World Trade Center, and again at 9:03 a.m., when United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the other tower. Another silence, at ground zero and at the Pentagon, came at 9:37 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into what had been considered the unshakable nerve center of the world’s most powerful military.

“There are no words to ease the pain that you still feel,” Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta told relatives of the 184 people who died there.

Another moment of silence, at 10:03 a.m., marked the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa., the plane on which passengers to fight back, storming the cockpit and attempting to take control of the plane from the terrorists who had hijacked it. “There is nothing with which to compare the passenger uprising of 10 years ago,” said Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania. “It has no companion in history in my mind.” He added: “Their uprising marks the moment in history when Americans showed what makes us different. We refuse to be victims. We refuse to settle for the term ‘survivor.’ Captivity will not suit us.”

The silver bell at ground zero was rung to remember those passengers, as it had been rung through the morning to remember the passengers on the other hijacked airliners and the people inside the twin towers, office workers, custodians, people having at breakfast in the restaurant a quarter-mile above the street.

The bell tolled again at 10:28 a.m. “North Tower falls,” read the large letters on the video monitors, three short words for the destruction of one of the world’s largest buildings, one that had taken some six years to complete.

That silence was the longest, perhaps two minutes, and the last one scheduled for ground zero. But the vigilant did not pause. On a construction scaffold of 1 World Trade Center, on a deck of the World Financial Center, on the post office building across from the site, police officers with binoculars scanned the crowd below and the sky above.

Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was approaching the end of his tenure on Sept. 11, and who provoked criticism for seeking an extension , stepped to the lectern. “The perspective that we need and have needed to get through the last 10 years and the years that remain are best expressed by the words inscribed by God in the book of Ecclesiastes,” he said before reading the famous passage that begins, “To everything there is a season.”

The 10th anniversary dawned on a city and a nation that has changed immutably, with continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and persistent security worries at home. And no longer is ground zero a scarred reminder of what was, but a symbol of resurgence, with the National September 11 Memorial about to open and a not-yet-finished skyscraper. It now stands 961 feet above the street where thousands fell.

This Sept. 11 began with the towers that will take their place of the ones that were destroyed a decade ago illuminated in red, white and blue stripes.

One measure of how Sept. 11 changed everything was how little grumbling there was last week as motorists waited to crawl through police checkpoints. Sept. 11 redefined the bridges and tunnels beyond those checkpoints as something that generations of commuters had never imagined: potential targets. Sept. 11 redefined so much more.

At Pentagon, no words will fill void

WASHINGTON--Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Sunday told the families of the 184 men, women and children killed at the Pentagon a decade ago that “I know what it is like to receive that call out of the blue when the dearest thing in your life is gone.”

Mr. Biden, who was referring to the call he got when his wife and infant daughter were killed in a car crash decades ago, presided over the 10th anniversary service commemorating the horrific morning when an American Airlines Boeing 757, Flight 77, crashed into the seemingly impregnable headquarters of the world’s most powerful military.

“No memorial, no ceremony, no words will ever fill the void left in your hearts by their loss,” Mr. Biden said.

“My prayer for you is that 10 years later,” he said, “when you think of them, that it brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.”

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who introduced Mr. Biden at the ceremony, told the crowd that “no words can ease the pain you still feel.” He said that the country would never forget the human cost paid by this generation, including “the more than 6,200 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines lost in the line of duty” since 9/11.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “Today, we stand on this hallowed ground to honor those who still live on in our hearts.”

He was in the building when the plane hit and has said that it felt like an earthquake. “Two of my aides looked out the window and saw a 757 fly in under their feet,” Admiral Mullen told American Forces Press Service in a recent interview.

The west side of the Pentagon has long since been repaired, and a memorial to the victims opened three years ago, well ahead of the 9/11 memorial in New York, and with little of the argument that accompanied the design and planning of the two waterfall pools at the World Trade Center. The Pentagon memorial is nearly two acres outdoors with 184 benches, each inscribed with the name of a victim, shaded by 85 paperbark maple trees.

After Mr. Biden spoke, 184 members of the armed services each laid a single wreath of white flowers on a memorial bench, one by one, until every person fallen had been honored.

President Obama payed his respects at the Pentagon later in the day, after he dedicates the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan.

In a Pennsylvania field, memories of loved ones

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. --The sun rose brightly here Sunday morning, warming the mist that hovered over the field where United Airlines Flight 93, hurtling through the air at more than 575 miles an hour, crashed on Sept. 11, 2001. At the moment of impact, 10:03 a.m., no one was in the field.

On Sunday, by contrast, thousands of people gathered by this same field. And at 10:03 a.m., instead of the roar of a jet and a thunderous explosion, they paused for a moment of silence.

Earlier, visitors remembered the attacks at the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York that killed nearly 2,700 people and at the Pentagon, where 184 people died, pausing for moments of silence at 8:46 a.m., when the first hijacked plane struck the trade center’s north tower; 9:03 a.m., when the south tower was hit; and 9:37 a.m., when the Pentagon was attacked. President Obama has arrived to lay a wreath at the site.

The event here, marking the 10th anniversary of the attacks, was very much a memorial service for the 40 passengers and crew of Flight 93 who, in an extraordinary rebellion, organized and, after a democratic vote, stormed the cockpit and sought to wrest control of the plane from their captors. The passengers and crew failed to retake the plane, but they forced the Boeing 757 to crash in the field, preventing it from hitting its likely target, the United States Capitol, just 20 minutes away by air.

More than 700 members of the passengers’ and crew’s families have been here for several days of memorials. On Sunday morning, after their moment of silence at 10:03, they walked across the stage, one or two at a time, and read the names of their loved ones, sons, daughters, sisters, mothers, fathers, brothers. Bells tolled for each name.

Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania said the crash site and field here, part of a 2,200-acre national park in the rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania, is like no other place.

“There is nothing with which to compare the passenger uprising of 10 years ago,” he said. “It has no companion in history in my mind.” He added: “Their uprising marks the moment in history when Americans showed what makes us different. We refuse to be victims. We refuse to settle for the term ‘survivor.’ Captivity will not suit us.”

Former Gov. Tom Ridge, who after the attacks became the first secretary of homeland security, told the crowd, “Your very presence is a powerful message of comfort and understanding and love to this incredible group of assembled families.” At that point, the families rose from their seats in front of the podium and turned around to applaud the thousands of people behind them.

After the service, family members had another chance to view the marble wall of names, the memorial that was dedicated on Saturday. The families are holding a private funeral service on Monday to bury three coffins containing human remains at the crash site, formally turning it into a cemetery.

Terry L. Shaffer, chief of the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department, said that every time he sees the field, which is now blanketed with wildflowers, he cannot help but remember what it looked like the day of the crash.

He said that he and other firefighters often ask themselves the same question today that they asked 10 years ago: Could they have made the same decisions and acted as bravely as the passengers and crew of Flight 93, all in 30 minutes?

Bush and Obama: Side by side at Ground Zero

The presidents stood next to each other, with their wives, listening as the families of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks read the names of lost loved ones. Behind them a vast American flag billowed from One World Trade Center, the tower that is rising where two fell a decade ago.

It was the first time President Obama and former President George W. Bush had stood together at ground zero. Mr. Bush declined Mr. Obama’s invitation to join him at the site last spring, days after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

But on this bright morning, they stood shoulder to shoulder behind a bulletproof screen, two commanders in chief whose terms in office are bookends for considering how the United States has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, particularly in its response to terrorism.

The tableau was striking: the president who spent years hunting Bin Laden next to the one who finally got him. The president defined by his response to Sept. 11 standing alongside the one who has tried to take America beyond the lingering, complicated legacy of that day. (Source: The New York Times)

Story Date: September 12, 2011