My first dramatic news story was the 1986 Challenger explosion. I was 8 years old and I clearly remember it.
Even at 8, I knew it was a very sad day and that a lot of people(including a teacher) had died. Perhaps because one person was a teacher, I understood better. Teachers were something I, in 2nd grade, could understand.
Having said this then, how could a 10 year old not understand 9/11?
I should ask my youngest brother what he thinks. He was 9 years and about two months old. I’m sure he’ll remember being picked up from school early that day, and the whole dismissal thing must’ve been pretty confused, but I’m not sure what else he thinks of the whole day.
I’ll probably have to wait until he gets home from camp later this month. I could email him but I don’t think he’ll be that interested in sitting down to write about it.
I’ve got some clear historical remembrances from around that age, though. The Gulf War started when I was eight, and I remember watching a little of it on CNN at my uncle’s house (I presume it’s a real memory). I have a memory I’m more sure is real, from shortly before the invasion. Iraq had a deadline to get its troops out of Kuwait, and I remember laying awake at night and wondering what would happen if there would still be a war if the last soldiers were crossing the border at 12:01. Which proved that even at that age, I was prone to missing the point and bad with deadlines.
In 2001 I had an eight year old neighbor. A year later we were talking about school and he told me about the program his class did about 9/11. Then he asked me “What were the World Trade Towers?”
“What do mean ‘What were the World Trade Towers?’” I didn’t get the question.
“Were they apartment buildings?”
“No, they were office buildings. All the people that day were in their offices.”
He just said “Oh.” I later realized we lived in an apartment building right under the route to an from Teterboro Airport. For a whole year he had been thinking about planes going into apartment buildings ever time he saw or heard a plane overhead.
Image an 8 year old worrying about that for a year. Some things just break your heart.
Same experience for me, but I was nine.
I remember a couple of years later, when I was in fifth grade, our teacher bringing a radio into the classroom because President Reagan had been shot. That was a big deal - and bigger to her and to my parents because they had memories of John and Bobby Kennedy. I didn’t have these - I was born in 1970. It grew in importance to me later, as did the shooting of the Pope some weeks after that.