Four passenger jets screamed out of a crystalline blue sky 10 years ago today, and suddenly the world was different.
The impacts reverberated for a decade as the nation adjusted to a new reality.
But the stories of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 were personal.
You can read some of them attached to this story:
Two children lost their father in the World Trade Center in New York City.
A mother lost a son in Iraq five years after he watched the attacks on TV and decided to do something about them.
Perceptions shifted. Muslims became new targets, and firefighters became new heroes, even though neither group did anything differently the day of the attacks than did the day before.
New worries led to changes in the way we travel. New fields were created to respond to the threats of cyber terrorism and agro-terrorism.
The stories reveal through personal experiences how much we have changed since that morning 10 years ago when sunny skies filled with smoke and flames.