Generation 9/11 »

Bryan Gamez was in the middle of a writing exercise in his fifth-grade classroom in Rockville, Md., when his principal's voice suddenly boomed over the PA system to announce that school would be closing early that day. His teacher turned on the television just as news of the attacks on the World Trade Center erupted. It was impossible to comprehend. "They were saying 'terrorists,' but we thought they were saying 'tourists,' " says Gamez. "My teacher was freaking out. We were just all confused." Gamez was 10 years old at the time, and the sights and sounds of September 11, 2001, have stuck vividly in his young mind: smoke billowing from the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, people jumping from their offices, bodies covered in ash. "Just a lot of screams and a lot of tears," he says. "I was in shock."

Ten is a formative age—not yet a teenager, no longer a little kid. Becoming independent, but still deeply attached to family. Aware of the world, but not yet cognizant of how it works. The events of 9/11 destroyed a sense of security for this cohort of children. Born as the Cold War ended, they grew up in a decade that saw massive economic growth, the dawning of the World Wide Web and a culture riddled with cynicism. Members of the "millennial" generation—born between 1982 and about 2004—they tend to be sheltered, close to their parents, and confident, says Neil Howe, who with William Strauss wrote Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. The attacks brought terror to their doorsteps: "9/11 was the beginning of a new fear in America about chaos and uncontrolled disorder in the world," says Howe. Children saw their teachers and parents worried and, in some cases, emotionally wrecked. They watched police officers and firefighters—community protectors—dying in piles of rubble. They got caught up in a collective sense of national dread: what next? And that was a question nobody, not even the highest officials in the country, could answer. Now, as the United States marks the eighth anniversary of 9/11, these children are turning 18 and entering adulthood, and they offer a unique glimpse into the mindset of a group of Americans coming of age under the shadow of terrorism.

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