EUREKA -- A U.S. general, a German embassy official, and Eureka College students who were babies when the Berlin Wall crumbled stood side by side as fireworks burst in the sky Monday celebrating 20 years since the wall fell.

They were among 200 people at the Fall of the Wall ceremony near a 5-foot slab of the former Berlin Wall in the Ronald Reagan Peace Garden at Eureka College.

"There are times we mourn and celebrate at the same time," said the Rev. Bruce Fowlkes, Eureka College chaplain. The mourning was for 13 people killed at Fort Hood in Texas last week in what he called "another brick in the wall of terror."

The celebration was for Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who set aside "what divided them to break down a wall that divided a nation" and eventually ended the Cold War, Fowlkes said.

Eureka students carried flags representing 24 countries, from the Republic of Albania to Ukraine, which became democracies at the end of the Cold War.

Liz Hoff, Eureka College student body president who was born in 1988, said her generation has no first-hand knowledge of the Cold War.

"It is a gift to my generation we are grateful for," she said of efforts that brought down the Berlin Wall and what it symbolized.

Paul X. Kelley, the commandant of the U.S. Marines during the Reagan administration, traveled from Washington, D.C., for the ceremony. He said Reagan's development of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative "may have saved mankind from nuclear holocaust - either intended or accidental."

"People made the wall fall," said Hans-Ulrich von Schroeter, deputy director of the German Information Center USA. "It fell day by day," he said.

Von Schroeter recently spoke to Lt. Gail Halvorsen, now 89, the American pilot who first dropped chocolate to children in West Berlin in 1948 during the blockade of Berlin. Only three years earlier, the Americans were enemies of Berlin, but Halvorsen and the other "candy bombers" helped create allies that allowed West Berlin to become an island of democracy, Von Schroeter said.

"I am glad I had the opportunity to serve on that border," said Col. Harold Fritz of Peoria, one of 94 living recipients of the Medal of Honor, who served at the Berlin Wall in 1976. He told the story of two white crosses there that represented a father and son who tried to cross from East Germany and died doing so.

Others had memories closer to home.

"Our daughter was a tiny baby then," Amy Sajko said of Nov. 9, 1989. Amy and husband, Brian Sajko, the curator of the Ronald Regan Museum and a Eureka College administrator, remembered being genuinely frightened of the nuclear threat when they were teenagers. Now their daughter is a student at Eureka College, which features the historic peace garden.