Andrew Dykes, Captain at City of Monroe Fire Department

“Ironically, I was working on an ambulance, in Chick-fil-A, when the news broke with the first plane. So I was actually working in public safety at the time. And that was, yeah, I guess it’s like every generation has their moments, (my) parent’s generation was the Kennedy assassination, I guess this is, this is ours.”

“From the public safety aspect, we ended up having a couple of calls directly responsible from that. Panic attacks, people that had friends and family in New York that couldn’t get in touch with them and didn’t know what’s going on. I think as a, just as an individual, we had just finished up relatively peaceful 1990s. In retrospect, I mean, give the bombing of the USS Cole, we had domestic terrorism with the [Alfred P.] Murrah Federal Building being bombed. Waco was a big deal, but from a military or terrorism aspect, just the idea that somebody would do that on our soil, to our people, never crossed my mind until that day.”

“We’ve got some of our newer employees that were either very young children or were not even born in that era. They don’t even know a time of peace, or where terrorism was not an everyday term, and everything else and it just, to me, it was the it was turning the page of almost an age of innocence.”

Photo and interview by Lilli Dickens as part of the Advanced Photojournalism course at the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.