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      NEW YORK (AP) - Ten years on, Americans will come together
Sunday where the World Trade Center soared, where the Pentagon
stands as a fortress once breached, where United Airlines Flight 93
knifed into the earth.


      They will gather to pray in cathedrals in our greatest cities
and to lay roses before fire stations in our smallest towns, to
remember in countless ways the anniversary of the most devastating
terrorist attacks since the nation's founding, and in the process
mark the milestone as history itself.


      As in earlier observances, bells will toll again to mourn the
loss of those killed in the attacks. Ceremonies also will
consecrate new memorials in lower Manhattan, rural Pennsylvania and
elsewhere, concrete symbols of the resolve to remember and rebuild.


      But much of the weight of this year's ceremonies lies in what
will largely go unspoken - the anniversary's role in prompting
Americans to consider how the attacks changed them and the larger
world and the continuing struggle to understand 9/11's place in the
lore of the nation.


      "A lot's going on in the background," said Ken Foote, author
of "Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and
Tragedy," examining the role that veneration of sites of death and
disaster plays in modern life. "These anniversaries are
particularly critical in figuring out what story to tell, in
figuring out what this all means. It forces people to figure out
what happened to us."


      First, Saturday's dedication of the Flight 93 National Memorial
at a former strip mine near the town of Shanksville, in western
Pennsylvania.


      Former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and Vice
President Joe Biden joined families of the 40 passengers and crew
killed when their revolt against hijackers of the United Airlines
jet ended with its crash, stood under gray skies in a field soggy
from rain. Clinton likened the actions of those aboard Flight 93 to
the defenders of the Alamo in Texas or the Spartans at the Battle
of Thermopylae some 2,500 years ago, with a dramatic and telling
difference: "They were soldiers. They knew what they had to do."


      The Pennsylvania memorial park is years from completion. But the
dedication and a service to mark the 10th anniversary of the
attacks are critical milestones, said Sally Ware, one of the
volunteer "ambassadors" who has worked as a guide at the site
since the disaster.


      Ware, whose home about two miles away from the site was rocked
by the jet's explosion on impact, recalls how hundreds of people
flocked to the crash site in the days afterward to leave their own
mementos and memorials. She began volunteering after finding one
along the side of the road - a red rose placed atop a flight
attendant's uniform.


      "It really bothered me. I thought someone has to take care of
this," says Ware, a homemaker whose own daughter is a flight
attendant. Now, a decade later, she acknowledges the memorial may
do little to ease the grief of the families of those who died in
the crash. But the weekend's ceremonies recall a story with far
broader reach.


      The ceremonies honor those who "fought the first battle against
terrorism - and they won," Ware said. "It's something I don't
want to miss. It's become a part of my life."


      On Sunday, the nation's focus turns to ceremonies at the
Pentagon, just outside Washington, D.C., and in lower Manhattan for
the dedication of the national Sept. 11 memorial. President Barack
Obama planned to attend ceremonies at the sites of all three
attacks and was scheduled to speak Sunday evening at a service at
the Kennedy Center.


      The New York ceremony begins at 8:30 a.m., with a moment of
silence 16 minutes later - coinciding with the exact time a decade
ago when the first tower of the trade center was struck by a
hijacked jet. And then, one by one, the reading of the names of the
2,977 killed on Sept. 11 - those who perished in New York, as well
as those who died at the Pentagon and in rural Pennsylvania.


      They include the names of 37 of Lt. David Lim's fellow
officers from the police department of the Port Authority of New
York and New Jersey. Lim, assigned to patrol the trade center with
an explosives detection dog, rushed in to the north tower after it
was hit to help evacuate workers. He and a few others survived
despite still being inside a fifth-floor stairwell when the
building fell.


      In the years since, Lim said he has wrestled with survivor's
guilt, realizing the last of those he'd urged ahead of him were
crushed when the tower collapsed. He took shelter in selective
memory, visualizing the ground covered with women's shoes amid the
destruction.


      "That's how I got through that, because what was attached to
the shoes was a lot worse," Lim said.


      The 10th anniversary has forced Lim to revisit an experience
he's worried too many people have pushed from their minds. But the
approach of Sunday's ceremonies has convinced him of the value of
revisiting Sept.11, both for himself and others.


      When it happened, talking about the events of that day "wasn't
easy for me. This was very difficult. But it became ... a
catharsis," he says. "What I want is for people to remember what
happened."


      And so arrives a weekend dedicated to remembrance, with hundreds
of ceremonies across the country and around the globe - from a
memorial Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York to a ceremony
featuring nine-stories-tall replicas of the twin towers on a plaza
in Paris.


      But some of the most powerful ceremonies will likely be the
smallest and most personal.


      In Newtown, Conn., retired American Stock Exchange floor broker
Howard Lasher planned a ceremony Sunday morning under the canopy of
six maple trees standing alongside his gravel driveway; their
trunks are painted to resemble an American flag. Lasher
commissioned the painting in the weeks just after Sept. 11, 2001,
as a tribute to nine Amex colleagues and the son of another who
died inside the trade center.


      "I wanted something that would reach out to people, that people
would not forget," Lasher says of the memorial, which has since
become a local landmark. "When people drive by here, I want them
to envision what this country has been, for all its greatness, and
that we should not forget the people who were lost that day and in
all the wars, because they died defending what it represents."


      And in Brown City, Mich. - with a population of about 1,300 and
no direct connection to the attacks - firefighters will lay 343
roses on a 15,000-pound steel beam salvaged from the World Trade
Center, in honor of the New York City brethren who perished in the
disaster.


      Since venturing to New York in June to claim the beam and bring
it home, the Michigan firefighters have finished building a brick
plaza, lighted around the clock and crowned by three flagpoles.
Already, this has become a local shrine, Chief Jim Groat says.


      A few days ago, a couple from St. Joseph, Mich. who happened to
be driving through, pulled into the fire station lot when they
spotted a sign for the memorial. Groat came out to speak with them
and the woman explained that she was a flight attendant for
American Airlines who'd been aboard a plane the morning of the
attacks.


      Then she turned to face the steel beam from the trade center.


      "She just stood there and cried. She said she was just honored
that somebody still cares," Groat recalled. The chief observed
silently, before offering an invitation.


      "Will I see you here on Sept. 11?" he asked.

Gallery

Courage of Flight 93 victims lauded at dedication

Cartoonists remember 9/11

Special programming on September 11

Sept. 11 anniversary programming

Sept. 11 attacks spurred more to enlist in military

Social Issues

Ten years on, Americans will come together
Sunday where the World Trade Center soared, where the Pentagon
stands as a fortress once breached, where United Airlines Flight 93
knifed into the earth.

A changed America: Marking 10 years since 9/11

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