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When 2022-23 Lockerbie Scholars Zach Blackstock and Natasha Gilfillan arrived at Syracuse University from Scotland, they encountered a whole new side of the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 terrorist attack they had heard about all their lives.

Each year since 1990, the scholarship chooses two students from Lockerbie Academy — in the town where Pan Am Flight 103 crashed after its terrorist bombing in the air — to represent the “Lockerbie 11” who died on the ground and Andrew McClune, a Lockerbie Scholar in the 2002-03 cohort who died during his year at SU.

Blackstock, who is representing the Lockerbie 11, said he’s still navigating his role in bridging the different perspectives and understandings of the attack between Lockerbie and Syracuse as a scholar. He found neither community focuses much on the other in their commemoration of Pan Am Flight 103.

“It’s a big thing in Lockerbie, … but we don’t hear much about the Syracuse side of things. And it’s similar here where it’s a big thing here, but we don’t hear much about the Lockerbie side of things,” Blackstock said.

The two scholars work with SU’s cohort of 35 Remembrance Scholars — who represent the 35 SU students killed in the bombing while returning home from an abroad semester in London — to plan Remembrance Week events each year.

Throughout the planning process, Gilfillan, who is representing McClune, said that while SU focuses heavily on the students’ families and the attack’s impact on Syracuse, not many events focus on Lockerbie.

In Lockerbie, Gilfillan said even though the attack is well known and commemorated with memorial sites, there aren’t many events at all. Following her time at SU, she wants to bring events and traditions from the university back to Lockerbie, like the Sitting in Solidarity event Monday.

Blackstock said the attack is mostly in the past for people in Lockerbie who weren’t there at the time. Still, he said it’s the “little things” around the town that help keep the attack in the community’s collective memory.

“There’ll be a route that you walk along every day, right in the High Street. And there’ll be a part where the road’s been resurfaced,” Blackstock said. “You think a pothole or something’s been resurfaced, and then you see an image from the disaster, and it’s just a massive plane propeller in the ground, and you have no idea.”

Gilfillan said one of the first responders to the scene of the flight’s crash took her and Blackstock on a tour of memorials around Lockerbie. She said the experience provided a new and more immediate connection to the memorials they’d seen around Lockerbie their whole lives.

“Obviously when you grew up in the area, you see these places in passing. But you look at them and once you have someone there who’s experienced it and can give you their story to go along with the sight of it, it’s much more impactful,” Gilfillan said.

Though the younger generations may not have as much background for Lockerbie’s memorials, both Blackstock and Gilfillan said nearly everyone who was in Lockerbie when the plane crashed has a story to tell about the day. The two said community members discuss connections to the attack often.

Blackstock’s mom was a nurse at the time. He said his dad’s friend was the first police officer to arrive at the site of the crash. Gilfillan said her close friend’s grandfather was also a first responder and that her teachers who are local to the area would share their first-hand experiences in school.

“(Pan Am Flight 103) is a big thing (in Lockerbie), but mainly just with how it affected the town specifically. And everyone’s got their own little stories,” Blackstock said. “That’s really all that remains now.”

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Gilfillan appreciates the opportunity to represent McClune as an individual because of the different circumstances to his death. She said she feels especially honored to represent McClune because his mom was a teacher at her school, Lockerbie Academy.

Because he’s representing 11 people, Blackstock said his process of forging connection to the victims is different from Gilfillan and the 35 Remembrance Scholars. He said he’s working to deepen his understanding of the situation as a whole, which has included research in the Pan Am Flight 103 Archives about the families and community members impacted in Lockerbie.

“It’s not like one person I’m trying to find a link with. This is a lot of different people. There’s children and elderly and it’s just (all different). But there is that link because (they’re) from Lockerbie. These are my people, if that makes sense. So yes, there is that kind of pressure,” Blackstock said.

Following the discovery of antisemitic letters in SU’s Pan Am Flight 103 Archives written by SU abroad students Jason and Eric Coker, who died in the attack, Blackstock said his view on Remembrance has been altered. He said over the years, what was supposed to be remembrance has slowly become idolization of the people who died.

“A lot of (the Remembrance Scholars) feel like they need to find a connection with these people. And it’s easy to forget that we don’t know these people. We never will, and we have such little information on them in the grand scheme of things,” Blackstock said. “We’re representing them but that doesn’t mean that we knew them, or we are them, or (that) us representing them is saying that we’d love everything that they did and that we agree with everything that they did.”

Published on October 19, 2022 at 1:27 am

Contact Jana: jlseal@syr.edu | @JanaLoSeal