Torment, not years, creased the faces of Americans coming of age as they watched the terrorists' horrific handwork unfold along with the rest of the nation and the world.
Now that young people have had a few days to absorb Tuesday's events, some say they sense the terrorist attacks may have changed them forever.
Changed them how? By turning them outward, many say, to try to understand the rest of the world better, to fathom why the attackers could hate this country so much. By making them more serious, more patriotic, some say, and making them less tolerant of relativist thinking, less patient with trivia.
``For a generation of young people, this is their Pearl Harbor; their Kennedy assassination,'' turning points in their parents' and grandparents' young lives, a Los Angeles Times editorial said.
``We all remember where we were the day JFK was shot. This will have the same importance,'' a professor at the University of Nevada-Reno, Sue Johnson, told her students. ``You will know where you were and what you did this day.''
Landmark buildings have disintegrated countless times in movies and video games for this generation. But the planes that struck Tuesday were not special effects, and some young people say something shifted psychically for them.
``People our age,'' said Stacey Flynn, an 18-year-old student at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona, ``they don't know what it's like to actually have to deal with something more than what they're driving and what they're wearing...
``I don't feel safe anymore, because it was such a huge thing,'' she said - and seemingly so easily pulled off.
``They came into our country, used our education to get their pilots' licenses, used our own equipment and our own people to kill us. It's like the scariest thing that could possibly happen.''
William Sexton Jr. was in second-period computer class at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, N.C., going over a test, when a counselor burst in and told students to turn on the television.
The World Trade Center and the Pentagon were burning.
``I just can't believe that they had the nerve to do it,'' Sexton said.
Last month, he signed up for delayed entry into the Army, hoping for the Airborne. On Thursday, he returned to the recruiting office to see if they needed him now. He turns 18 this week.
``I joined up because I needed it for college, and just because experience in the Army would make me a better person,'' he said. ``But now, when it comes down to this, I'm ready to go. I'm ready.''
In stories like Sexton's, many older Americans can find a reflection of their own experiences.
Gene Epperson, now 79, was a 17-year-old store clerk in Hamilton, Ohio, until the events of Dec. 7, 1941, turned him into an Army paratrooper. At a memorial service for the terrorists' victims, held at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu last week, he looked back and ahead.
``Your future was uncertain,'' said Epperson, who wore a baseball cap from the Battleship Missouri Memorial.
``Life is going to be different from now on,'' he said, reflecting on today's young people. ``Even here we can be reached.''
History's turning points have been David McCullough's career. The author and historian was 8 years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He was working for the Kennedy administration when JFK was assassinated.
``I remember the shock and numbness of my parents and older people after Pearl Harbor, and until now the Kennedy assassination was the most horrible national trauma of my experience,'' said McCullough, who was in Washington Tuesday and watched the smoke billow from the Pentagon. ``This surpasses that in both its magnitude and the psychological blow it has been to the country and each of us as individuals.''
In this changed America, he said, our heroes are no longer movie stars and ballplayers. They are firefighters.
``The attitude that everything is relative, that nothing is black or white but all shades of gray - that mushy thinking has to go out the window,'' McCullough said. ``This is a deadly contest with pure evil.''
Another observer of history, author Todd Gitlin, considered parallels with JFK's assassination. Some important things, such as government policy, changed little in that decisive moment, he said.
``But something did change. There was a rupture in the psyche, and the rupture took the form of, `My God, anything is possible,''' said Gitlin. ``So in some ways, the horrors of the late '60s - the growth of the Vietnam War and the assassinations - somehow these things, while not attributable to the Kennedy assassination, seemed somehow less surprising.''
In the wake of the terrorist attacks, some young people don't want to believe in a permanent psychic shift.
The redrawn skyline of Manhattan, their destination, was just coming into view for the crew of the U.S. Navy ship Comfort as Lt. Beth Montanus tried to assess her generation's state of mind. Yes, the attacks have reshaped their psyche - but only temporarily, she thought.
``At this moment in time, we are different because everybody is in shock,'' she said aboard the ship, which will house and care for recovery workers. ``But we will not be, once the reaction part is over and we regroup. I will not pull up next to anybody in a car, look over and think anything differently than I did on Monday.''
She is 27. Many others, that age or younger, see more lasting change.
At candlelight vigils and dorm discussions, they speak of other news events that became crucibles - the Columbine school shootings, the Oklahoma City bombing, even the Challenger explosion when they were very young. But nothing is like this.
``Don't you think we're going to wonder if it can happen again?'' said 19-year-old Darcy Hambrick of George Washington University in the nation's capital, where a red brick walkway was splotched with melted wax from a vigil held the night before.
Maybe the violence can lead Americans to better understand the underlying causes of the hatred some harbor against the United States, said the student from Englewood, N.J. But, she said, worries about safety will be paramount.
This generation already knew the world was a small place, but Tuesday's terror drove that point home in a harsh new way.
``We're global,'' said Sarah Hassing, a 20-year-old at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. She is disturbed by the militant talk that has followed the attacks.
``Obviously, we've made someone mad. I want to know: What did we do, to make someone so mad?'' said Hassing, who marched in the WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 - back when World Trade signified an organization to be protested, not a skyscraper crumbling pitifully.
``You're always going to remember where you were and the first things you thought,'' said Katherine Mann, a 19-year-old sophomore at Arizona State University. She awoke to the news Tuesday when her roommate's alarm went off.
``I imagined that it was like what JFK's assassination was like,'' she said. ``I saw people gathering around TVs. I saw people standing outside of cars listening to radios.''
She wants to believe the United States will respond the right way, though she doesn't know exactly what that means. Meanwhile, images of the attacks replay.
``I've wondered what morning I'll wake up and I won't think about it,'' Mann said.
There's an edge in the voice of another Arizona student, Sara Kurtz, who's 23.
``As long as nothing else happens, nothing major happens, life is pretty much going to go on the way it was before,'' she said. But ``what if this is the start of something big?''
She hoped the attacks will be ``the worst thing that happens in our generation.''
``This is something we're going to be talking to our kids about,'' she said. ``Everything's going to be compared to this. It'll be, `Remember the World Trade Center?'''
EDITOR'S NOTE - Contributing to this story were AP writers Pauline Arrillaga in Phoenix; Allen G. Breed in Raleigh; David Foster in Olympia, Wash.; Brett Martel in New Orleans; Paul Shepard in Washington, D.C.; Janis Magin in Honolulu; Hillel Italie in New York; and Douglas Kiker aboard the USNS Comfort.
AP-NY-09-16-01 1541EDT
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press.