Remembering 9/11: Reflections after 20 Years
This piece was written as a collaboration between all Thought to Action contributors as we reflect on one of the most consequential events in our lifetimes that defined our decade of military service. We dedicate this piece to Dr. KelliAnn Leli, USAFA Class of 2011 who gave her life in 2020; and 2LT David Rylander and CPT Drew Ross, members of USMA’s Class of 2011 who gave their lives in Afghanistan in 2012 and 2018, respectively.
Alexander Boroff
Ms. Rosa’s 7th Grade Homeroom
Saint Patrick School, Chatham, New Jersey
Several students were simultaneously pulled out of class, a trend that continued throughout the day. Everyone was amazed at how their friends were allowed to go home so early in the morning. It was just a regular day of the week, and the school year had just begun a week prior. Aside from that wonderment, my classmates and I really didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until I got picked up from school by my father, an unusual occurrence because he typically worked until early evening, that my sister and I learned both of the Twin Towers had been hit by planes and collapsed.
Being a New Jersey native, not only had I visited the towers on several occasions with my aunt who was a bond broker, they themselves were also a fixture in the skyline of what I considered to be the only city on the planet at the time. The first thing my dad assured us about was that my aunt was safe. She had moved offices and no longer worked in the World Trade Center itself, and all my close relatives who lived and worked in NYC were unharmed. This was not the case for everyone in my small New Jersey commuter town. The next days were a whirlwind, profoundly sad as we thought about those who did not survive the attack, but at the same time the spirit was undeniably patriotic. We are the United States of America — it seemed like that feeling said — we would prevail over those who committed this attack.
Going to West Point had been a dream of mine since I had visited the academy on a field trip in the same grammar school that I had been attending on that fateful September morning, but it still seemed far away from me on 9/11. I had yet to go to 8th grade, much less high school, and those future choices were distant. When it came time to choose a college though, I knew that I wanted to serve. This desire to serve came as a direct consequence of pride in my country and how the nation was able to bounce back after that terrible September day. The pride evident in the reconstruction of both 1 World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the memorials constructed at both sites speaks to that emotion that feels further away than twenty years.
That feeling of national patriotism was still outwardly evident when I departed for Afghanistan in 2012. The same people who had lost friends and family in the September 11th attacks gathered at Walker’s Bar, a mere 15 minute walk from the site of the former World Trade Center, to send me off to fight in the war that those attacks had started. Every cop who my aunt knew, and every friend who had lost someone on that day — even tangentially — came to wish me luck. Friends and family gathered again to welcome me home in 2013, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how blessed I was to have met such people who supported me and my family, despite only knowing me as a soldier preparing to go to Afghanistan. The attacks on September 11th echo through my life, and will continue to do so as I pursue my Army career.
Brigid Calhoun
Mrs. Marla Sculley’s 7th Grade U.S. History Class
Saint Isaac Jogues School, Hinsdale, Illinois
“A plane flew into the trade center,” said Senora Johnson, our Spanish teacher, as she entered our home room for first period Spanish class. We didn’t think much of it and thought we’d perhaps misunderstood her. Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I assumed she meant the Chicago Board of Trade where many of my classmates’ dads worked. I hadn’t heard of the World Trade Center in New York. During class I noticed the principal and other teachers conferring in the hallway. When the bell rang to rotate to Mrs. Sculley’s classroom for second period, I still thought it was just another Tuesday.
Mrs. Sculley ran her classroom like Captain von Trapp. Exactly eight minutes before class started, we lined up along the lockers outside of her room and, after she opened the door, filed silently into the classroom. She characteristically held a firm stare, but today her eyes looked particularly determined. Class always started with a three-part routine: (1) a student reading a prayer for America; (2) the playing of a scratchy recording of Kate Smith’s “God Bless America” on an old record player; and (3) the class reciting the Preamble to the Constitution.
“…and secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Shortly after the Preamble concluded, Mrs. Sculley positioned herself in front of us. “Young men and young ladies,” began she, “today our country is under attack. Earlier this morning, two airplanes were hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center Towers in New York City. One of those towers has collapsed, killing almost all of the people inside. Another hijacked airplane just crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. I believe that we are experiencing the Pearl Harbor of your generation.” Mrs. Sculley’s eyes filled with tears. I remember feeling profoundly sad and confused. I knew what Pearl Harbor was and spent the rest of the school day wondering if we would go to war.
Our recess was cancelled. The teachers were told not to allow the students to watch the events on TV. At the end of the school day our principal came on the intercom to lead us in prayer for the people who died in New York, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon. I immediately burst into tears. This was the first I learned of the Pentagon being hit. My aunt and uncle lived in northern Virginia and I assumed they worked at the Pentagon. I concluded they must be dead. When we were released from school I ran to find my little brother and gave him a hug. Together we then ran to the parking lot to find our mom. She told us she hadn’t been able to get a hold of our aunt and uncle yet because the phone lines were busy, but she told us that they did not work in the Pentagon.
Later that night we went to Mass as a family, and the church was packed. Everyone held candles, wept, and sang patriotic hymns. Over the next several days my parents explained how they had been my age when President Kennedy was assassinated, and how that event propelled them out of childhood and into adulthood. I started to feel the same about 9/11. The next year, the Iraq War kicked off, and like many in my generation I spent high school observing two wars, a troop surge, and political vitriol. I became fascinated with trying to understand our enemies: what would make someone my age join a terrorist group and volunteer to become a suicide bomber? Those questions and a growing sense of patriotism led me to West Point. No one in my family had served in the military since World War II, but I couldn’t see myself doing anything else after high school.
Looking back now, I’m struck by how time is a funny thing. My West Point class graduated ten years after 2001, and we are about to celebrate our 10 year reunion on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I first set foot in Afghanistan on September 11th, 2012. During my second deployment in 2014, my unit was responsible for providing security for the election in which Ashraf Ghani was voted into the presidency. Just two months ago, from my office window I watched him climb the steps of the Pentagon’s River Entrance to meet with the Secretary of Defense. And now, my generation in uniform just completed the final American mission in Afghanistan.
On Friday, August 27th, the day after 13 US service members were killed by an ISIS-K suicide bomber in Kabul, I walked down to the Pentagon chapel to attend the daily Catholic Mass. To walk to the chapel, you pass through a long basement corridor. Hung on both walls are homemade quilts and artwork by elementary school children, donated in the aftermath of 9/11. There is a model of the Pentagon’s 9/11 memorial–the memorial itself lies just outside the chapel’s walls. At the end of the hallway you arrive at the chapel’s anteroom, on whose walls are written the names of everyone who died at the Pentagon that day. This is where Flight 77 crashed.
As a 7th grade girl in Mrs. Sculley’s class, I never would have thought that 20 years later on the anniversary of 9/11 I’d be working at the Pentagon. But just as time is a funny thing, life has a full-circle rhythm to it. Plenty of other writers have and will continue to debate whether the war in Afghanistan was worth it, whether it was justified, and whether the ending was executed correctly or not. My only comment is that I would not have joined the military if 9/11 didn’t happen.
As I try to sort through all of the complicated emotions of the past several weeks, I keep returning to a profound sense of gratitude. I am grateful to live in a country that I love so much. I am grateful to have met and served alongside Soldiers who I’d die for like I would my own children, peers who I love like brothers and sisters, and leaders who I revere like my own parents. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.
Brian Fiallo
7th Grade Homeroom
Terence C. Reilly Middle School, Elizabeth, New Jersey
We began our day like every other day at school, congregating in the gymnasium before we headed to our respective homerooms to begin the day. As we gathered in our homeroom class, one of my fellow students talked about something he had seen on the TV some of the teachers were watching: what he believed to be a controlled demolition of what he thought was the Chrysler building. As we left the homeroom to begin our classes for the day, one by one several students were taken from the class by their parents. Our city was less than ten miles–as the crow flies– from ground zero, and it became abundantly clear what was happening as the day went on.
On the bus ride home, those of us who hadn’t been picked up by our parents talked about what was happening. Being so close to the World Trade Center, we could see the pillars of smoke rising when we looked in the direction of New York City. I later spoke with my father, who was working in Jersey City at the time and saw the events unfold in real time from his office across the river. I arrived home from school to find my mother crying in the basement watching the coverage on TV.
Growing up in Elizabeth, N.J., our community lost many people who worked in NYC. Their names decorated white signs that were placed over the signs on the streets where they lived. It was a visceral and ever present reminder of how close those events were to us. As a Scout Platoon Leader in Afghanistan 11 years later, despite the fact that Osama Bin Laden had been slain the year before, I could not help but feel proud that I was part of bringing justice to those who had aided and abetted the attack on our Nation.
Jennifer Walters
Boise, Idaho
Two decades after the day that cast the longest shadow in my life and that of countless others, I can write this reflection only because I’m still here — living, breathing, thinking, feeling. I learned that the World Trade Center existed as it was crumbling, effacing from the New York City skyline in the most violent of ways. I was twelve years old and lived in Boise, Idaho. For as long as I could remember I had been nestled in a tapestry of subdivisions, shopping centers, and manicured playgrounds and soccer fields. A cloudless Tuesday morning like any other, my mom drove me to school. She turned the car radio up, her right ear lurching towards the dash as if she was struggling to hear the news. The first tower had collapsed. The reporters announced the news with bewilderment and tragedy; this was not yet understood as an attack.
In art class, my teacher received a call from the principal. He glanced over at me and signaled with a small nod. “Jennifer, you need to call your mom.” Typical of any kid of the early 2000s, I instinctively dialed the one number I’d had memorized my entire childhood: home. Strangely, I was unworried, a byproduct of pure and unadulterated naïveté. My mom answered on the first ring. “Jennifer, I’m going to come pick you up from school now. Then we have to get John.” She had just spoken to my dad who was at that very moment sitting in an A-10, bombs loaded, engines running, ready to takeoff at a moment’s notice. He had very specific instructions for her: go to Costco, buy a month’s supply of water and non-perishable food, pick up the kids, and do not drink the water from the faucet.
Based on the chaos that had just unfolded in his squadron, he reasoned a biological attack might be on the horizon. The blissful unawareness of the morning had evaporated. This was an attack. Years later, before my first deployment, he confessed to me a somber thought he grappled with during those seven hours waiting on the runway for the launch decision: “It’s the only time I thought I might never see you guys again.” He came through the front door late that night, face ashen with fatigue but softened by relief. Cases of water stacked to my eight-year-old brother’s height had created an obstacle course leading to the living room where we watched the television beam out horrifying images on a relentless loop.
I’m 32 now. Twenty years of life has unfurled along roads of deliberate intention and unplanned detours. We left Idaho and moved to the East Coast. My parents divorced, and as our family disintegrated, the stress of my dad’s final and longest deployment to Iraq surprisingly drew my parents back to reconciliation and girded us all with a new strength. A few years later, they split up again. The demands of the military was not the causal factor in their demise, but I know it gnawed deeply at their relationship.
I graduated from the Air Force Academy and went on to graduate school where I studied the impact of PTSD in service members returning from our generation’s long, groaning, costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I went to pilot training and earned my wings from the same base in Columbus, Mississippi, where my dad had graduated thirty years prior. My younger brother became our family’s third Air Force pilot four years later. I flew exactly a 100 combat missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. I reflect on this path that led me to today because I can. Because service looks a little different for everyone, but the motivation is always personal and layered. Because I’m here and so many are not–rendered voiceless by their sacrifice.
Just weeks ago, the human cost of the war in Afghanistan stood at 2,448, each life lost an endless echo of pain, futures permanently extinguished. In the fast waning days of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, we witnessed yet again the brutal reminder of the vagaries of war: thirteen young men and women in uniform killed by a suicide attack outside the Kabul airport. As the last C-17 departed just before midnight, the war in Afghanistan had taken 2,461 of our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers. The count is similarly staggering for the unfinished war in Iraq. Over twenty years, a bevy of military installations grew like roots in the Middle East and southwest Asia, providing support to these two towering and insatiable efforts. At these places too, service members lost their lives. Remembering is all that remains.
As cadets at the Academy, Kelli and I had lived next door to one another. She was funny, quick-witted and never took herself too seriously although she had serious goals, and I knew two of them: to become a doctor and marry her boyfriend, Jimmy. She did both. Then, at just thirty-one years old and full of life and even more promise, Dr. KelliAnn Leli was killed last year in a non-combat accident while deployed. It was the day after Thanksgiving. Jimmy, my classmate, friend, and a fellow pilot in the tanker community, was deployed at another location in the region at the time of her death. Watching her memorial services held at both her deployed base and home station, the liminal space between disbelief and reality grew closer, but I still struggle to comprehend that she is gone.
So on this day, especially, remember where you were on that Tuesday in September of 2001. Examine your successes and triumphs, your mistakes and struggles, and the vast expanse of life that has transpired in-between. Embrace your family and friends and the time you spend in their presence. Appreciate these imperfect twenty years that have elapsed, whether you wear a uniform or not, and recognize what a privilege it is to carry and share your memories into tomorrow. Most of all, remember for those who no longer can.