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The morning sky was clear, and the drive was familiar. Nick Larigakis was heading toward Washington on Interstate 395, listening to the first reports of a plane striking the World Trade Center in New York. 

Then came a deafening noise. Larigakis looked to his left. An American Airlines passenger jet was flying startlingly low and fast, he recalled. For a moment, he struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. Within seconds, the plane passed in front of him and crashed into the Pentagon. 

Traffic stopped. Drivers stepped out of their cars and stared at one another. 

“What the hell did we just see?” Larigakis remembered. “It was like something out of a movie.” 

A woman looks at names on the South Pool at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, U.S., September 9, 2026. REUTERS/Dan Fastenberg

Twenty five years later, Larigakis, the president and chief executive of the American Hellenic Institute (AHI) in Washington, says the scene has never left him. “It is as clear to me today as it was on that day.” 

At the same institute, Will Martin has no comparable memory. He had not yet been born. Martin grew up in Arkansas in an America already transformed by the attacks. He learned about Sept. 11 in school.  

Some of his earliest memories of music are country songs about the attacks and the surge of patriotism that followed. The Global War on Terror, he said, dominated both the American ethos and popular culture. Terrorism seemed to be the country’s defining enemy. 

Now the two men work in the same Washington institution, but stand on opposite sides of a widening generational divide. 

In an August YouGov survey, 90 percent of Americans age 30 and older said they remembered where they were when they first learned of the attacks. Among adults younger than 30, just 15 percent did. 

The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses after the twin towers were hit by hijacked planes during the attacks in New York City, U.S., September 11, 2001. REUTERS/Petra Beter

The divide does not necessarily mean that Americans who lived through Sept. 11 are forgetting it. In 2002, 97 percent said they could remember where they were or what they were doing when they heard the news. Fourteen years later, the figure was still 91 percent. 

What has changed is that millions of Americans have reached adulthood without ever having possessed such a memory. 

Martin, now a legislative assistant at the American Hellenic Institute, grew up surrounded by the consequences of Sept. 11. Yet the event itself has receded from the consciousness of many people his age. 

“Older people probably think about it, but my generation does not, really, at all,” he said. “I do not want to say it is simply in the past, but it is certainly not something I think about all that often.” He remembers not the day itself, but the world that followed.  

Larigakis remembers both. He recalls the months after the attacks as a period when the country, however briefly, seemed less divided. American flags appeared outside homes. Shock and anger were accompanied by an unusual sense of common purpose. 

“You felt that there were no divisions,” he said. That sense of unity was measurable. In October 2001, 60 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government, roughly twice the level recorded earlier that year. 

TV grab 11 September 2001 shows clouds of smoke and dust spreading over New York as the second tower of the World Trade Center collapses after having an aircraft crash into it, in an apparent terrorist attack.. An aircraft crashed into each of the twin towers, which have both since collapsed EPA PHOTO AF,PI/LCI

But it was never experienced equally. 

Muslims, Arab Americans, Sikhs, South Asian Americans and others perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin faced a wave of violence and discrimination. Federal authorities investigated more than 800 incidents involving violence, threats, vandalism and arson. 

When Larigakis is asked what time does to the memory of Sept. 11, he reaches back to another date Americans once carried as lived experience: Dec. 7, 1941. 

Pearl Harbor. “Who today is going to remember?” he asked. 

People still remember the historical fact, Larigakis said, but it no longer carries “the same deeply scarring emotion” for generations removed from those who experienced it. “It is the same here,” he said. “It has been a quarter of a century.” 

People attend the 9/11 Memorial & Museum ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, U.S., August 31, 2026. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Jake Sotiriadis, a former United States Air Force officer, measures those 25 years differently. 

He was a sophomore at a military college on the morning of the attacks, already preparing for a career as an Air Force officer. He had finished class and gone to get a cup of coffee when he saw on television that the first plane had hit. 

At first, he assumed it was an accident. A crowd formed around the television. Then they watched the second plane strike. “We knew it was a terrorist attack,” he said. 

Sept. 11 reinforced his decision to pursue a military career. For some of his classmates, the years that followed would lead to Iraq and Afghanistan. “I lost classmates in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. 

Sotiriadis now describes Sept. 11 as “the end of innocence,” particularly for Americans of his generation who were in their twenties when the attacks occurred. “We were the generation that bore the brunt of the costs of fighting the wars that followed,” he said. 

At Arlington National Cemetery, that cost is not abstract. “When I walk through Arlington National Cemetery, I can see my best friend’s grave,” Sotiriadis said. “I can see the graves of classmates who are buried there.” 

He thinks, too, of the civilians killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. His judgment of the American response to Sept. 11 has grown sharply critical. He argues that the conflicts that followed damaged the United States and left unresolved questions about when and how the country should use military force. 

But when he talks about the legacy of those years, he also looks closer to home. His children did not live through Sept. 11. “It feels very distant to them,” he said. “It is just a story.” 

What was once a nearly universal American experience is therefore becoming something that must be conveyed. 

At Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, Andrew Veniopoulos sees that process unfold every day. As executive director of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine, he meets visitors from across the United States, Greece and elsewhere. Many had no direct connection to the attacks. Some experienced them only from afar. Others are too young to remember them. 

But once they arrive, Veniopoulos said, the distance can narrow. 

They visit the memorial and enter the museum. At St. Nicholas, they encounter inscriptions drawn from the Gospel of John and the Funeral Oration of Pericles, along with imagery honoring sacrifice and the first responders who climbed toward danger while thousands of others tried to escape. 

Veniopoulos watches visitors cry. “The experience triggers something within them,” he said, “a grief that they may have carried but never expressed before.” 

He believes the victims’ families, St. Nicholas and the places of remembrance at the World Trade Center will keep the story alive long after the 25th anniversary. “It will always be part of the fabric of New York City and of America more broadly,” he said. 

With every anniversary, though, more of the people who arrive at Ground Zero will have no memory of where they were on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. They will come carrying other people’s memories.