Michael Ollis was not even in high school when terrorists slammed jetliners into the World Trade Center towers.
This summer, 12 years later, he was serving his third combat tour with the United States Army when insurgents attacked his base in Afghanistan.
Staff Sergeant Ollis, 24, a Staten Island native, was killed. He was one of 92 New Yorkers who enlisted after 9/11 and died in battles that were spawned in the smoldering rubble of ground zero.
As the families of those killed on 9/11gathered on Wednesday morning in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia to mark the anniversary of the attacks, Sergeant Ollis’s death, one of thousands during a decade of war, offered a reminder that the costs of what happened 12 years ago are still being borne across the globe.
And with the nation once again in the midst of a debate about America’s role in the world and the wisdom of launching military strikes, the memorial ceremonies offered not just an occasion to pay tribute, but a moment to take stock.
Edwin Aviles, 41, who lives in Brooklyn and was working near ground zero just before the memorial Wednesday, said time had done little to ease his sense that there are enemies looking to harm New York.
“I don’t think anything has changed,” he said. “Just like then, just like now we got to stay on point. Got to stay on top of everyone else. Anything can happen at any given moment.”
Others noted that it was on the anniversary last year that the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked and Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others were killed. On Wednesday morning, a car bomb exploded outside the Libyan foreign ministry in Benghazi, causing no casualties, according to state media, but offering a reminder that the day holds significance for extremists as well.
In New York, the anniversary ceremony has taken on the familiarity of ritual.
Bruni Sandoval has come each year to remember her friend, Nereida De Jesus. “It helps a little,” she said.
Families began to gather quietly between the reflecting pools, the rush of water and the distant sounds of bagpipes the only sounds rising above the crowd.
The ceremony at ground zero began with bagpipers and drummers; the Brooklyn Youth Chorus performed the national anthem.
At 8:46 a.m., when the first plane struck the north tower, there was a moment of silence. In Washington, President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., their wives by their sides, stood on the White House lawn, heads bowed.
At 9:03, a second moment of silence marked the moment a second plane hit the south tower. There would be four more moments of silence interrupting the reading of the names -- twice to mark the time when each tower fell and to mark the moments of the attacks on the Pentagon and on Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
The ceremony will also be the last over which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg presides.
Elected to office just weeks after the attacks, Mr. Bloomberg has taken a forceful role in shaping New York’s efforts both to honor its dead and to rebuild ground zero.
He will continue to play a role, in his capacity as the chairman of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum foundation. But next year his place will be occupied by one of the winners of the mayoral primary held Tuesday.
Twelve years ago, when Mayor Bloomberg first ascended a podium overseeing a vast pit of rubble, there was a moment of seeming national unity and moral clarity.
But that clarity long since eroded in the sands outside Fallujah and the ancient alleyways of Baghdad.
As President Obama, who was elected on a promise to disentangle the country from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has tried to rally a war-weary nation to support a possible military intervention in Syria, he has been met with resistance.
Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader who the Obama administration contends used chemical weapons to kill his own people, invoked the memory of 9/11 in warning against an attack on his country. Such a strike, he told the broadcaster Charlie Rose, would help “the same people that killed Americans on the 11th of September.”
Closer to home, the politics of 9/11 re-emerged as a campaign issue hours before primary voters went to cast their ballots on Tuesday, when Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly blasted the field of candidates for not taking the threat seriously.
“The analysis of the Police Department, the intelligence community, our recent experience tells us that New York remains squarely in the cross hairs of global terrorism,” he said. “This is a time for vigilance, not complacency.”
In Lower Manhattan, healing the physical scars of the attack has been slow but progress is now evident. The wildly over-optimistic promises of a decade ago are starting to take shape, even if they are still under construction.
In the past year, the city celebrated thetopping off 1 World Trade Center, its spire rising 1776 feet.
Meredith Feiner, 28, who works in Lower Manhattan, said she was proud to see the new building rising, the construction cranes towering overhead.
“It never would have had to be rebuilt if something terrible had not happened,” she said.
Work on the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, designed by Santiago Calatrava of Spain, has finally moved above ground, offering the public a glimpse at the grand designsoon to be completed.
The National September 11 Memorial and Museum remains on track to open next spring.
Once the museum opens, the annual anniversary will no longer bear the main weight of remembrance, either for New Yorkers or for the millions who visit the city.
By next Sept. 11, the museum devoted to memorializing the attacks and their aftermath will open to the public. Still a vast subterranean construction site, a series of chambers as vast and as hermetic as a pharaoh’s tomb, the museum will eventually offer an array of historical exhibits, personal tributes and archaeological artifacts.
Last week the last of the large-scale artifacts – like a burned-out fire truck and a 36-foot-tall steel column from the south tower – were fitted into place
Among members of Congress and in world capitals, President Obama’s speech on Syria offered some relief about a possible diplomatic solution, but few reassurances.
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