The Berkshire Eagle invited subscribers, HERE, to submit their recollections of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and how the attacks shaped their lives. The newspaper used 20 of them, in addition to publishing longer articles about others’ experiences. Below is what I sent in, just under the maximum word count specified in the invitation. The headline is theirs. — MCM

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Where were you on Sept. 11? Eagle readers recall that dreadful day.

I was at UMass/Amherst that Tuesday morning. My wife, pregnant with our first child, had planned to read in the Labor Center’s library while I was in two classes.

There were no classes. We joined about 20 other students at the Center clustered around a TV screen on the wall watching — over and over — as what was described as a commercial jetliner slammed into one of the Twin Towers. Then another into the other Tower. From high up in one or the other, tiny figures leaped from fire inside to their deaths below.

Everyone was stunned. Shocked and awestruck. Terrorized. In memory, the repeated reports are a blur of dusty terror and heroism and confusion. Did we see the two buildings collapse then, or later? On the car radio driving home we must have heard news reports of the attack at the Pentagon.

We absorbed the horror, believing officials’ narratives and following their decisions. Years later after reading David Ray Griffin’s first book on the attacks, “The New Pearl Harbor,” I began questioning it all.

A growing number of scientists, engineers, architects, demolition experts, and military and “intelligence community” analysts have challenged the Executive Branch line but have been mostly ignored by the news media.

In 2018 a friend and I walked across Massachusetts from Provincetown to the New York border wearing “9/11 TRUTH” signs, to largely positive response from people along the way. Now I do a blog on the subject.

— Mark Channing Miller