A child walks through Empty Sky, the 9/11 memorial in Jersey City, N.J., on Aug.23.
In the distance are One World Trade Center and Lower Manhattan.Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption When the 9/11 terrorist attacks began on a blue-sky morning 25 years ago, the Rev.
Eric Olsen was working in upstate New York.The National Guard unit where Olsen served as chaplain scrambled to deploy and served for months on a security detail around the massive pile of wreckage at ground zero, site of the World Trade Center's fallen twin towers in New York City."There was all this uncertainty," Olsen recalls.
"Are there going to be more attacks? Is this just the forerunner?"A quarter century later, a politically and culturally divided United States is commemorating a day of violence, loss and heroism that altered the trajectory of the nation, sending people's lives spiraling in directions they could never have expected."I intend to take some time to myself to pray, contemplate and grieve," says Olsen, who served a harrowing tour in Iraq and spent more than a decade of active Guard service counseling military personnel caught up in ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."I did a lot of death notifications for families who lost sons and daughters.It was just a very sad time," he says, now 68 and retired.The toll from 9/11 and the events that followed has been devastating.
On Sept.11, 2001, terrorists affiliated with al-Qaida, an Islamic extremist group, hijacked four commercial airliners.
Two planes were flown deliberately into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan.A third jetliner slammed into its target, the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia.
A fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.Historians say at least 2,977 people died in the initial attack.A study by Brown University found that an additional 7,000 U.S.
service members died...