Patrick Durham was 15 and starting the second month of his freshman year at Red Bank High School when hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.
Three years away from adulthood, Durham couldn't know he'd eventually father three children or walk the streets of the Middle East as a U.S. Army soldier.
And while Durham showed an early interest in joining the military, his family never predicted a nine-year war would bring him home inside a flag-draped casket, one of 56 Americans to be killed in Afghanistan in August.
"You question and you do get upset," his wife, Kristy Durham, said before her husband's burial service. "You couldn't find a better hero. He was full of life and a damn good soldier."
On Thursday, about 200 packed into the chapel at Chattanooga's Lane Funeral Home to honor Durham, a sergeant who also served a 2007 tour in Iraq. Before the service, family members greeted guests as a slide show played near the casket.
Half the pictures showed a confident, smiling Durham with a grape-sized plug of smokeless tobacco inside his lower lip. Sometimes he's standing near blue lakes, sometimes he's sitting with friends in Iraq, and sometimes he's holding a miniature version of himself - his 3-year-old son, Elijah.
After the service, the boy stood dressed in a pink clip-on tie and white shoes as he held his mother's left hand. His confused face fell a little as eight military men lifted his father's body into a hearse.
"I don't think he completely understands yet," said Nikki Sizemore, one of Durham's three sisters. "He keeps looking for his daddy."
Former Red Bank High School classmates, family members and Vietnam veterans gunning their motorcycles followed the hearse to a small family cemetery in Suck Creek.
The popping, motor-oil atmosphere seemed an appropriate exit for an "always smiling" soldier, his wife said.
"Patrick wanted to be the center of attention, but wasn't the center of attention as a bad thing," Kristy Durham said. "He made people laugh and everyone around him full of joy."