For Kevin Collaco, the sights, sounds and smells of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are just as vivid today — yet just as hard to discuss — as they were 25 years ago, seared into his memory after spending four months assisting with the cleanup of the World Trade Center wreckage in New York City.

“It was truly organized chaos,” said Collaco, then a New York Army National Guard member and now an adjunct instructor in the University of Delaware’s Lerner College of Business and Economics. “It was surreal. The scale of the destruction exceeded what the mind could immediately comprehend. It was like a movie set; larger than life.”

A quarter century has passed since the most devastating terrorist attacks in United States history, which claimed the lives of 2,996 people, including five UD alumni in the World Trade Center and several family members of UD alumni.

However, more than a third of Americans today were not even born at that time, and millions more were too young to remember it. Collaco is aware that virtually all his students know 9/11 only through books, photos, movies and the stories of people who lived through it.

Collaco will share his experiences and perspectives as the featured speaker at the Patriot Day ceremony scheduled for 9 a.m. Friday, Sept. 11, at Olan Thomas Park, 89 Papermill Rd., Newark. UD and the City of Newark are co-hosting the annual event, which is open to all.

Meaghan Walsh, who earned her bachelor’s degree in vocal performance in May and is now pursuing a master’s in vocal performance, will sing the National Anthem at the ceremony. “It's such an honor to be singing at this event,” she said.

Also at UD, flags on campus will be flown at half-staff, and the UD Carillon will toll at four times — 8:46 a.m., 9:03 a.m., 9:37 a.m. and 10:03 a.m. — to mark each moment that one of the airplanes crashed in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Collaco was at his home in Queens, New York. He was an Army aviator and was packing to drive to Fort Indiantown Gap in central Pennsylvania for flight training. The morning news played on the TV in the background when the first plane hit the north World Trade Center. It was widely assumed to be just a tragic accident.

Then the second plane hit the south tower.

Collaco made his way to the National Guard facility in Long Island, then traveled with his unit to Marcy Avenue Armory in Brooklyn. “All you saw from the Brooklyn side was the towers collapsing in a huge plume of smoke,” he said. They crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan, which became their operations post. 

Two to four feet of dust and debris covered everything. “The scale and scope of the destruction was difficult to internally comprehend, even while standing in the middle of it,” he said. His unit gathered protective gear and other tools from wherever they could find them. They helped secure the site so forensic investigators and clean-up crews could do their work.

“We knew it wasn’t a safe environment because of what we were breathing in,” Collaco said. “But we all knew we were there for a reason. Everyone knew their role and focused on it.”

After his deployment ended, Collaco became a test pilot for the Department of Defense, then worked in the healthcare field and in other industries. He later moved to Delaware and earned his MBA and master’s in international business at UD.

Collaco said he understands that as time goes on, a growing number of Americans will know 9/11 only through history books and stories, much like the way he and many others know major events like the attack on Pearl Harbor. But he hopes that everyone remains curious about that history and can connect it to what’s happening in the world now.

“It wasn’t a once-and-done thing,” he said. “The world we live in today is a result of the dominoes that were knocked over and set things in motion that day.”