By Tony Hathcock

There are dates we remember because a calendar tells us they are important. Then there are dates that become part of us.

September 11 is one of those dates.

For those of us who look back on that morning, the memories do not return like facts from a history book. They return in pieces. A television screen. A telephone call. The look on someone’s face. The sight of smoke pouring from a building that none of us could imagine falling.

We remember where we were when the world we understood suddenly changed.

Twenty-five years have now passed since the September 11 attacks. That is difficult for me to comprehend. An entire generation has grown into adulthood knowing that day only through photographs, recordings, and the stories we choose to tell.

That last part matters. If we stop telling the stories, September 11 eventually becomes a date followed by a death toll. The people become numbers, the sacrifice becomes a paragraph, and the lessons become easier to ignore.

I have written before that we cannot afford to forget. On this 25th anniversary, I feel that responsibility more strongly than ever.

The Morning We Remember

I had gone on an early hike with a friend who was passing through from out of town. When I returned home, I turned on the television without paying much attention at first.

The second tower had already been struck, but both towers were still standing. Footage showed the second plane disappearing into the side of the building.

The scene was so far beyond anything I expected to see that morning that my mind tried to make it something fictional. For a moment, I thought it might be part of a religious program or some kind of “Left Behind” production.

Then I reached for the remote, and the truth began to settle in.

Like many Americans, I felt shock and disbelief. I also remember a strange numbness. Before long, however, that numbness became anger.

At the time, I was serving as a paratrooper with an Army Special Forces unit and working in military intelligence. It did not take long for the telephone to ring. The instructions were simple: Be ready, get your affairs in order, and remain reachable.

Those of us in uniform had trained in a peacetime military. We knew within minutes that peace was over and that the direction of our lives had changed.

That night, several of us gathered around the altar at my church to pray. Prayer had always come easily for me there. Yet that night, all I could bring before God was anger.

I prayed for an opportunity to do something. Soon enough, the answer would come.

Everyone at WEIS carries a different memory of that day. Those memories belong in this story because history does not live only in museums, official reports, or news archives.

It also lives in living rooms, workplaces, classrooms, patrol cars, fire stations, and radio studios. It lives in the ordinary places where Americans first heard the impossible and realized their country was under attack.

Crystal Wells: Where Were You on September 11, 2001? — Crystal Wells Remembers

There are certain moments in history when we can remember exactly where we were and what we were doing. For me, September 11, 2001, is one of those days.

It began as an ordinary Tuesday morning. I was a young mother, and my son, Nathaniel Wells, was only four months old. My mother, Gaile Williams, was with us as we walked into Big B Drug Store—the location that is now CVS—to pick up some medication.

Nothing about the morning seemed unusual until my uncle, Jimmy Williams, who worked there, told us something I will never forget:

“We’re under attack.”

At first, I could not comprehend what those words meant. I only knew that something terrible was happening.

Afterward, I remember going home afraid and staying glued to the radio and television. I did not know what would happen next or what our future would look like. At the time, it was difficult even to understand everything that was unfolding. I just knew something terrible had happened and that our country would never be the same.

Twenty-five years later, Nathaniel is grown. Still, when I remember September 11, I see him as that four-month-old baby I was carrying as the news began spreading through our community. I remember my mother beside me, my uncle’s warning, and the fear of not knowing what the future held.

September 11, 2001, became a day that changed America forever.

As our nation marks 25 years since the attacks, we remember the lives lost, the first responders who ran toward danger, the families who never saw their loved ones come home, and the countless acts of courage and compassion that followed.

We also remember our own stories—where we were, who we were with, and the moment we realized the world had changed.

September 11, 2001.

We remember, we honor, and we will never forget.

Shannon Fagan, Sports Director

I remember on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was driving to the ALFA Insurance office in Piedmont to file a claim on my truck bumper being rear ended from the night before. As I drove, I listened to the radio and heard the news of a plane crash in the first tower of the World Trade Center. I remember thinking that was unusual.

After I left the insurance office, I was headed to my Constitutional Law class at Jacksonville State University in the Lurleen B. Wallace building. There was a TV on in the lobby with several students huddled around it. By that point, the second tower had just been struck, and we were all in disbelief. Our professor ended class early that morning, and I returned home to Piedmont.

Later that afternoon, I was driving around town and saw where all the gas stations in Piedmont were backed up with cars trying to fill up their tanks. People were in a panic like I had never seen before.

Andrew Hughes, Assistant Manager

I was in the 9th grade at Gaylesville School. During our morning snack break, we began to hear rumors and rumblings among the students. After returning to class, our teacher, Mrs. Leah Odam, turned on the radio and allowed us to listen to the live news coverage after the second plane hit.

The People Who Went In

As I think about September 11 now, my thoughts keep returning to the people who went in.

While thousands desperately tried to escape the towers, members of the New York City Fire Department climbed toward the flames. They carried heavy gear up crowded stairs as office workers moved past them in the opposite direction.

Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer and members of Battalion 1 were among the first to reach the World Trade Center. Across Liberty Street, firefighters from Engine 10 and Ladder 10—the Ten House needed only to look outside to know where they were going.

Then came engine companies, ladder companies, rescue companies, and squad companies from across the city. They arrived carrying tools, air bottles, medical equipment, and all the training they could bring against an event for which no city could ever fully prepare.

To mention particular units is not to place one sacrifice above another. It is to remember that these were not faceless uniforms moving through the smoke. They belonged to firehouses, precincts, commands, families, churches, neighborhoods, and one another.

The firefighters could see the fear on those faces. They could feel the heat and the building beneath their boots. They knew conditions above them were growing worse with every step.

Still, they climbed.

Officers with the New York City Police Department and the Port Authority Police Department directed people away from danger. Members of the NYPD Emergency Service Unit took on rescue work inside and around the towers. Paramedics treated the injured beneath burning buildings while emergency medical crews established places to receive casualties in streets that were still dangerous.

Dispatchers and 911 operators stayed on telephone and radio lines with people who were frightened, trapped, and running out of time. Somewhere, a voice had to remain calm while the person on the other end faced the unimaginable.

Inside the towers, building engineers, security officers, elevator personnel, office fire wardens, and ordinary workers helped guide others toward safety. Some people made it out and then turned around because a coworker, a stranger, or someone who could not move as quickly still needed help.

Chaplains prayed over the dying. Among them was FDNY Chaplain Father Mychal Judge, who ministered to firefighters until the attack took his life too. Strangers carried strangers, held doors, offered comfort, and refused to leave others behind.

Along the water, ferry captains, tugboat crews, Coast Guard personnel, and private boat owners helped move people away from Lower Manhattan. They saw a city under attack and used whatever they had to carry people toward safety.

New York gave us the images most deeply burned into our memories. However, New York was not the whole attack, and it was not the only place where courage answered evil that morning.

The Attack on the Pentagon

The terrorists also struck the Pentagon, the nerve center of the American military and one of the most recognizable symbols of our national strength.

Yet the people inside were not symbols.

They were soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and civilian employees. They were husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Some had begun what they expected to be an ordinary day at work.

The passengers and crew aboard American Airlines Flight 77 had started an ordinary morning too. They boarded a flight expecting to cross the country. Instead, terrorists turned their aircraft into a weapon and murdered everyone aboard before tearing into the western side of the Pentagon.

In an instant, offices became a battlefield. Fire and smoke filled corridors. Part of the building stood badly damaged and unstable. Rescuers needed to find injured people and carry them out while no one could be certain that another attack was not coming.

People inside helped coworkers through the smoke and guided the wounded toward safety. Pentagon police officers, military personnel, and civilian employees moved toward the destruction because others remained inside.

Firefighters from the Arlington County Fire Department, Fort Myer, and Reagan National Airport confronted burning jet fuel and the threat of collapse. Emergency medical workers established treatment areas and began the difficult work of sorting injuries, stopping bleeding, and moving people to hospitals.

When part of the damaged section collapsed, responders had to pull back. Then they regrouped and returned to the work.

No one there knew whether the Pentagon remained a target. Nor could they know whether another hijacked aircraft might appear over Washington. They knew only that people were hurt, people were missing, and their duty had brought them to that place.

For the military men and women who survived, the attack carried a particular wound. They had sworn to defend the United States. On that morning, war came without warning to the halls where they served.

For the families of those aboard Flight 77 and those killed inside the Pentagon, the building was never merely damaged stone and concrete. It became the last place someone they loved drew breath.

The nation rebuilt the Pentagon. No one could restore the lives taken there.

Because the destruction in New York was so enormous and so visible, the Pentagon can sometimes become a smaller part of the story we tell. We cannot allow that to happen. The people murdered there, those who carried others to safety, and the first responders who fought the fire deserve a permanent place in our national memory.

“Let’s Roll”: The Courage of Flight 93

The fourth hijacked aircraft never reached Washington.

That did not happen because the terrorists changed their minds. It happened because the passengers and crew aboard United Airlines Flight 93 learned what was happening and chose to fight back.

Through telephone calls from the aircraft, they learned that planes had struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They understood that this was not a hijacking in which they could wait quietly and hope to be released. They knew their aircraft was part of the attack and that more innocent Americans would die if they did nothing.

Passengers Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham, Todd Beamer, and others began discussing a plan. Flight attendants Sandy Bradshaw and CeeCee Lyles were among the crew members who made calls, passed along information, and prepared to resist.

They talked. Together, they prayed. They voted. Then they acted.

Beamer had tried to reach his wife but connected with an Airfone operator, Lisa Jefferson, instead. During that long final call, he relayed a message of love for his pregnant wife and children. He asked Jefferson to pray the Lord’s Prayer with him.

Near the end, she heard him turn to the others and say, “Are you guys ready? Okay. Let’s roll.”

Those words became a national rallying cry. Before they became a slogan, though, they were a decision.

They were spoken by a husband, a father, and a man of faith who knew he might be only moments from death. Other passengers and crew members who had reached the same terrible understanding answered them.

Todd Beamer did not act alone, and remembering his words should lead us to remember everyone around him. The passengers and crew of Flight 93 were ordinary Americans placed in an extraordinary moment. They had no weapons, no rescue team coming down the aisle, and no reason to believe they would survive what they were about to do.

Still, they moved toward the cockpit.

Their resistance prevented Flight 93 from reaching its intended target in Washington, believed to have been the United States Capitol or the White House. The terrorists murdered every innocent person aboard that aircraft, but they failed to complete the final part of their attack.

Flight 93 came down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The Shanksville Volunteer Fire Company answered, followed by emergency medical crews, law enforcement officers, coroners, and people from across the surrounding community. They arrived at a peaceful field that had suddenly become sacred ground.

For the families of Flight 93, the lives spared in Washington could never erase the loss of the people they loved. Yet the courage of those passengers and crew members means that their final moments were not defined by helplessness.

The terrorists chose them as victims. They chose to become defenders.

Before most Americans understood the full shape of the war that had begun, the people aboard Flight 93 fought its first battle. Their target was not reached because unarmed Americans refused to surrender without a fight.

The attack was intended to be worse. Whatever building the terrorists hoped to strike, more families were supposed to receive terrible news that day. More names were supposed to be added to the dead.

Heroes aboard Flight 93 stopped that from happening.

America was attacked in New York, at the Pentagon, and over Pennsylvania. At every site, someone moved toward danger for the sake of another.

They did not have the luxury of knowing how the story would end. They only knew someone needed them.

That is what makes their sacrifice so powerful to me. They were not standing safely years later, talking about what courage should look like.

Their choices came in smoke, confusion, fire, and terror. They chose duty, the person beside them, and strangers whose names they would never know.

Scripture tells us, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” On September 11, men and women laid down their lives for people whose names they did not know.

There is something sacred in that kind of courage. We should speak of it with reverence, and we should never allow familiarity with the story to make the sacrifice seem ordinary.

It was anything but ordinary.

Listening for Life

When the towers came down, the mission changed, but the courage did not.

After the roar of the collapses came moments when rescuers needed everything around them to become quiet. Saws and heavy equipment stopped. Men and women called into openings in the pile and then listened.

They listened for a voice, a cry, a tap, or any sound that might mean somebody was still alive beneath the steel and concrete.

I have tried to imagine what that required of them. They climbed over wreckage that shifted beneath their weight and crawled into dark spaces where another collapse could trap them. Many were searching for strangers. Others knew they might be searching for friends, partners, or members of their own firehouse.

Every sound could raise hope. Every silence carried its own kind of heartbreak.

Still, they went from one possible void to the next because there remained a chance that someone was waiting to be found. Later, when the chances of rescue grew painfully smaller, they continued the work of recovery.

That change—from searching for the living to recovering the dead—must have taken something from everyone who worked there. Yet they kept going because families deserved answers. They deserved to have someone they loved treated with care and brought home whenever that was possible.

Firefighters and police officers worked beside federal urban search-and-rescue teams, National Guard members, ironworkers, operating engineers, welders, electricians, sanitation workers, utility crews, communications workers, clergy, and volunteers. Some cut steel. Others moved debris by hand. Teams marked what was found. Still more carried water, meals, clean clothes, batteries, medical supplies, or a listening ear to people who had reached the edge of exhaustion.

People came from every part of the country. People from our own communities traveled north to help as well. They left families, jobs, churches, fire stations, and small towns because fellow Americans needed them.

That matters to me. In places like ours, the people answering a fire call or rescue call are often our neighbors. On September 11, that same spirit crossed county lines and state lines. Americans did not ask whether the suffering belonged to them. They saw the need and made it theirs.

Among those searching the pile were rescue dogs and their handlers. Dogs such as Apollo, an NYPD K-9, and Bretagne, who came with Texas Task Force 1, worked amid twisted steel, broken glass, smoke, dust, noise, and heat.

They moved into spaces a person could not easily reach and searched for human scent. Their handlers watched their breathing, checked their paws for cuts, gave them water and rest, and then returned with them to the work.

A search dog is trained to find life and receive the reward that follows. At Ground Zero, living finds became heartbreakingly rare. The handlers had to protect the dogs from exhaustion and keep them encouraged through play and praise, even while the people holding the leashes understood what the silence meant.

Before the search began, guide dogs had already served in another way. Roselle and Salty led their blind partners down crowded, smoke-filled stairwells and out of the towers.

One working dog did not survive the day. Sirius, a Port Authority Police K-9 assigned to the World Trade Center, died when the South Tower collapsed.

The dogs were not decorations or mascots in the story of September 11. They were working members of rescue teams, and they carried part of the burden too.

The Ones Who Waited

Not every act of service happened at the pile.

Across New York, hospital workers prepared for an overwhelming wave of casualties. Emergency rooms cleared space. Surgical teams stood ready. Blood banks prepared. Stretchers lined hallways and entrances while doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, technicians, orderlies, housekeepers, and support staff braced for the injured.

They treated the burned, the cut, the sickened, and the exhausted people who reached them. Firefighters and police officers who had breathed smoke and dust came through their doors. Hospital teams also tried to comfort survivors who had escaped without the people who had been beside them only minutes earlier.

Then, in many hospitals, came a different kind of horror: the waiting.

Medical teams had prepared for more patients than they could imagine handling. Too many of those patients never arrived because too many people never made it out.

No one should mistake an empty stretcher that day for an easy shift. Hospital workers stood ready to save lives while slowly realizing how many lives were already beyond their reach. Meanwhile, families moved from hospital to hospital carrying photographs and asking whether anyone had seen the person they loved.

The workers who met those families had no words large enough for what was happening. Still, they stayed, answered what they could, and helped carry grief that belonged to strangers.

Beyond the hospitals, another group accepted one of the most difficult responsibilities imaginable.

The staff of New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner, along with forensic pathologists, anthropologists, laboratory technicians, mortuary personnel, funeral directors, and others, began the long work of identifying the dead.

It was exhausting, exacting, and deeply human work. Some worked punishing shifts amid a kind of grief that offered almost no relief. They documented what was recovered, preserved it, tested it, and tried to return loved ones to their families. Workers had to handle every fragment with the understanding that it belonged to a person whose family was waiting.

That work did not end when the television cameras left. It has continued across the years as advances in DNA testing have allowed more identifications to be made.

Those workers have carried sights, responsibilities, and conversations that most of us will never know. Their service rarely appears in the familiar photographs of heroism from that day. It belongs in our memory all the same.

September 11 Is Still Taking Lives

The towers fell that morning, but the dying did not end when the dust settled.

Firefighters, police officers, emergency medical personnel, search teams, dog handlers, construction workers, clergy, and volunteers spent weeks and months at Ground Zero. They searched for survivors and, later, for remains that could be returned to grieving families.

They lifted steel and passed debris from hand to hand. Many worked until exhaustion forced them to stop, slept wherever space allowed, and then returned to the pile.

The dust covered their uniforms, settled into their skin, and entered their lungs. What they carried away from Ground Zero could not always be seen.

Years passed before some received a diagnosis. For others, it took decades.

The World Trade Center Health Program still monitors and treats responders and survivors with 9/11-related conditions. Meanwhile, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund continues receiving claims from people whose health and families were forever changed.

Those figures keep moving because new names keep being added.

That is the only part of the numbers that truly matters here. Each new total represents another person, another family, another empty chair, and another final farewell.

Fire departments and police departments continue to lose people who answered the call that morning or worked in the recovery afterward. Some survived the collapse only to face a slower enemy years later.

Their sacrifice came due in hospital rooms, difficult treatments, and diseases linked to the place where they served. Their husbands, wives, children, and grandchildren have carried that burden beside them.

For those families, September 11 was never confined to one terrible day. It followed them home.

We cannot honor only the heroes who died before the sun went down that Tuesday. We must also remember those who lived long enough to watch the anniversaries pass, only to have the attack claim them years later.

America made promises to those men and women. Keeping those promises should never depend on which party controls Congress or how many years have passed.

Their service did not come with an expiration date. Neither does our debt to them.

What I Saw at Ground Zero

Before deploying to Afghanistan, I had the opportunity to visit Ground Zero with members of my unit.

We traveled from Fort Dix, New Jersey. New Jersey State Police escorted us to the tunnel, and New York State Troopers met us on the other side. From there, they took us into the center of the recovery operation.

Ground Zero was still an open wound.

Recovery workers shared cots, church pews, benches, and places on the floor between heartbreaking shifts. They had traveled from across the country to help search through the remains of fellow Americans.

The Ground Zero cross still stood among the wreckage. In that place of almost unimaginable destruction, it offered a quiet reminder that evil and death would not have the final word.

Firefighters opened their quarters to us. The company had lost an entire shift, and the room carried the weight of their absence.

Their dress uniforms had been folded neatly. At the foot of each bed sat a formal portrait of the firefighter who would not return.

Until then, that honor had belonged to their fellow firefighters. Yet they shared that sacred place with us because we were preparing to carry the fight overseas.

We also visited Saint Paul’s Chapel, where recovery workers slept in the pews. Before we left, someone offered to pray over us.

Outside, firefighters, police officers, Port Authority officers, and hard-looking construction workers stopped us on the street. They hugged us, slapped us on the back, and told us to go do what needed to be done.

Some had tears in their eyes.

That memory has never left me. These men had spent their days working inside the grave of their city. Even so, they paused to encourage a group of soldiers headed toward war.

They had already given more than anyone should have been asked to give. Somehow, they still found something more to offer.

When I remember September 11, I remember them.

Faith, Patriotism, and Moral Clarity

To remember September 11 honestly, we must remember what caused it.

America did not suffer a vague tragedy or an unfortunate misunderstanding. Radical Islamic terrorists deliberately hijacked civilian airplanes and used them as weapons against innocent people.

They attacked Americans because of who we were, what we believed, and what our nation represented. We should not soften that truth to make history more comfortable.

There is a tendency today to blur every moral line and treat every expression of patriotism with suspicion. Some seem more comfortable criticizing America than defending the principles that make this country worth defending.

September 11 left no room for that confusion.

The men who murdered innocent passengers, office workers, children, military personnel, and first responders served an evil cause. The people who resisted them, rescued the trapped, treated the wounded, searched the wreckage, and defended this nation were heroes.

We should be able to say both without apology.

Flight 93 also reminds us that ordinary people do not become powerless simply because evil catches them by surprise. No one could reach those passengers and crew members in time to save them. Instead, they acted to save people they would never meet.

In the days after the attacks, Americans picked up their Bibles and filled churches. Flags disappeared from store shelves because people wanted them flying from porches, businesses, bridges, and car windows.

Neighbors checked on neighbors. People donated blood, delivered food, supported first responders, and asked what they could do for their country.

Our political disagreements did not vanish. For a time, though, they became smaller than the nation we shared.

We remembered that we were Americans first. Freedom has enemies, peace carries a price, and strength is not something for which a good nation should apologize.

Once again, we remembered to pray.

The America of September 12 was grieving, angry, wounded, faithful, patriotic, and united. It was not a perfect America, but it understood what mattered.

I still believe this country needs that understanding. We should not need another attack, another pile of rubble, or another generation of folded uniforms to recover it.

What We Owe the Next Generation

Twenty-five years later, many young adults have no personal memory of September 11. Some now have children of their own.

If those children learn only the date and the basic timeline, we will have failed them.

They need to know the victims were not numbers. These were mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, coworkers, and friends. Each had birthdays, favorite songs, unfinished plans, and people expecting them home.

Our children should hear about the firefighters who climbed, the officers who stayed, and the rescuers who listened for life. They should know about Pentagon workers who carried wounded coworkers through smoke and the first responders who entered a burning, unstable building to search for others.

On Flight 93, passengers and crew understood what their aircraft was being used to do and fought back. They should know Todd Beamer’s name, but they should also know that his words called a group of Americans into action and that he did not act alone.

The story must include the hospital workers who stood beside empty stretchers, the medical examiner’s staff who carried out their painful duty, and the rescue dogs and handlers who kept searching the pile.

Our children should know about the boat crews who evacuated strangers, the tradesmen who cut through steel, the volunteers who fed exhausted workers, and the people from communities like ours who crossed the country to help.

They should know why Americans gathered around church altars. Our sons and daughters should understand why the flag suddenly meant something deeper and why so many volunteered to serve.

Just as importantly, they need to know about those who became sick years later. The sacrifice of September 11 did not end with the funerals shown on television.

We must tell the whole story, even when it is painful. Especially when it is painful.

Memory carries a responsibility. If we remember only the fear, the terrorists retain too much of the story. We must also remember the courage, faith, sacrifice, defiance, and love that answered them.

That is the America worth passing on.

We Remember

The older I get, the more I understand that remembering is an act of gratitude.

We remember because people lived and served. We remember because people died believing that another life, and this country, were worth their sacrifice.

Those killed in New York remain with us. So do the passengers and crew aboard Flight 77 and the service members and civilian employees murdered at the Pentagon.

We remember the passengers and crew of Flight 93, who knew enough of what awaited them to understand that they had to fight. Their aircraft never reached Washington because they refused to surrender its final moments to the terrorists.

Likewise, we remember the firefighters, police officers, paramedics, dispatchers, rescue workers, and building employees whose lives changed that day.

We remember the hospital teams who prepared to receive the wounded and then endured the terrible waiting. The same gratitude belongs to the medical examiners, forensic teams, mortuary workers, and funeral directors who treated the dead with dignity and helped families bring loved ones home.

It belongs to the ironworkers, equipment operators, utility crews, sanitation workers, boat crews, military members, clergy, relief workers, and volunteers who went wherever they were needed.

It also belongs to the handlers and rescue dogs who searched for life in places human beings could not easily reach.

We also remember those who came home from Ground Zero carrying illnesses that would not reveal themselves until years later.

Alongside them stand families who have endured empty chairs, long treatments, unanswered questions, folded flags, and final alarms.

Most of all, we remember so that our children will understand what happened, who stood against it, and what kind of nation emerged from the smoke.

This is not about living forever in anger or fear. It is about refusing to become careless with the price others paid for us.

So, on this 25th anniversary, pause for a moment.

Say a prayer for the families who still grieve. Thank a firefighter, police officer, paramedic, dispatcher, medical worker, rescue volunteer, or service member. Fly the flag and remember what it represents.

Tell your children the stories.

Let them hear about the people who went in and the people who fought back.

Remind them about the Americans who stood together afterward.

Then live in a way that honors what they gave.

May God comfort the families of the fallen. May He strengthen those who continue to suffer, protect those who still answer the call, and bless the United States of America.

 

NATIONAL NEWS

 

The appearance of U.S. Department of War visual information does not imply or constitute Department of War endorsement.