NO USE USA

Lower thirds:

00:05 Report by / Benjamin Alvarez Gruber
00:20 Gordon Huie
01:48 Gordon Huie

Script:

Nearly 25 years after the September 11 attacks, the images remain etched into America's collective memory. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and reshaped the United States. 

But as time passes, some survivors fear that the memory of what happened that day will eventually fade. 

+++ SOT Dr. Gordon Huie +++ 
"In time, everyone will forget. In time, the 350 survivors like myself – we're going to be gone. Our shelf lives are very short. When we're gone, these people that you see out here, they're not going to have a clue what happened." 

The orthopaedic surgeon was in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit. When he arrived at Tower 2 to help, it came down. He now suffers from cancer caused by the dust at Ground Zero.  

He then headed to a nearby hospital as doctors and nurses prepared for what they feared would be thousands of injured survivors. There, many medical teams faced another reality: the scale of the catastrophe. 

+++ SOT Dr. Gordon Huie +++ 
"Their operating room didn't need me, but they needed all the medical professionals to come off the street because the rest of the hospital was in dire need of medical support. They gave me the fourth-floor conference room. And it's very surreal because on that hard conference room with no sheet or mattress, I started to sew people back together again."

Among the nearly 3,000 people killed that day was Huie's older sister Susan. 

She had been attending a business meeting inside one of the Twin Towers. 

+++ SOT Dr. Gordon Huie (walking towards the North Tower reflecting pool) +++
"Let me introduce you to Susan. This is Susan. They try to put the people who work together, their names together." 

The family later learned from a colleague who survived, that Susan had been on one of the upper floors when the plane struck. 

+++ SOT Dr. Gordon Huie +++ 
"I went home and my daughter Kelly was only four years old. How do you process something like that? Who do you talk to? It was all inside me. It was bottled and I wanted to explode. But I needed Kelly to be calm. I'm missing my sister, I need to talk to someone, but who am I going to talk to?" 

He continues speaking publicly about 9/11 because he worries younger US citizens are growing up increasingly distant from the events that transformed the country. 

+++ SOT Dr. Gordon Huie +++ 
"When I ask any American child, any high school student, I say, open up your American history book and tell me what happened on September 11th. They'll open to that one section. It'll be one paragraph to describe all three areas of our country that was attacked on September 11th, 2001. And that's all they know." 

As the United States prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of those attacks, Gordon says there is one thing he wishes would stay out of the commemoration. 

+++ SOT Dr. Gordon Huie +++ 
"Well, I just wish the politics wasn't there. This whole entire thing is going to be overshadowed by politics, unfortunately. So, I can't do anything about that." 

25 years later, the scars of 9/11 are still visible for those who lived through it. And for survivors like Gordon, the responsibility to remember has become as important as the remembrance itself. 

END