This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

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Rachel Sellers remembers staring at a fuzzy image of the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. There seemed to be some technical difficulties with the daily Channel One News broadcast in her seventh-grade homeroom.

She knew the story was about terrorists crashing planes into skyscrapers. But because she had never heard of the twin towers, she thought it must have happened in another country. Not here.

But, with the television switched off, her homeroom teacher at Brockbank Junior High in Magna explained that the United States had been attacked.

"It started to sink in that this was really big," Sellers recalled. "She compared it to our generation's version of Pearl Harbor, just being attacked on our soil. She said to us [that] it would be something we would remember for the rest of our lives."

And it has been something the 22-year-old University of Utah student has thought about frequently over the past decade. She remembers her mother placing an American flag sticker on her white Honda sedan the next day in a show of solidarity.

After the attacks, when Sellers would attend concerts at EnergySolutions Arena or basketball games at the Huntsman Center, she would feel nervous, wondering if the crowded gathering could be a target of another "evil" plot.

Three years after the towers fell, Seller traveled to New York with her high school dance company. The group visited ground zero and viewed a memorial that listed the names of all who died.

"It made me realize how devastating it was, how many lives were lost, how many people were affected," Sellers said. She thought about how the loss of three of her cousins in a car accident had hurt her own family, then multiplied that loss by thousands.

Now, when she looks at the patch of stars and stripes on her mother's car, she thinks about how people came together to mourn the loss.

"Every time I see that, I remember just what happened and how people felt about it," she said. "If this had not happened … I think that the pride that I have in America probably wouldn't be so strong."