By LINDA CHION
linda@observernews.net
For the most part, the crowd at the Lennard High School track in Ruskin on September 11 had no real-time memory of what happened 25 years earlier at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia or in a burning field in southwestern Pennsylvania.
The JROTC cadets and their schoolmates were not alive when al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four American planes for the greatest attack on home soil in the nation’s history.
This is the reason Lennard students under JROTC instructors invited teachers, administrators, Veterans, parents and first responders to join in the Earl J. Lennard High School Memorial Walk, to share with students their remembrances of the day.
The walk kicked off at 8:46 a.m., the time the first terrorist plane hit its mark, the North Tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane hit the South Tower.
At 9:37 a.m., the third plane exploded into the western side of the Pentagon, followed by the fourth plane, which crashed into an empty field near Shanksville, Pa., after passengers overtook the hijackers to thwart an expected attack in Washington D.C.
The Lennard walk covered 2.977 miles, in honor of the 2,977 lives lost that day, excluding the 19 terrorist hijackers.
Before the walk started, LTC (Ret.) David Dietz asked cadets to remember the classroom lesson a day earlier in preparation for the walk. The point was made that while 9/11 was a tragedy, the aftermath showed the greatness of a people who came together, with courage and sacrifice, to stand as a united nation.
“We weren’t black, we weren’t white, we weren’t Republican, we weren’t Democrat,” Dietz said. “We were Americans. Flags were flying and blood banks were packed up. We need to get back to that.”
Dietz implored the cadets that if they’re walking next to a Veteran or a first responder, they should ask them where they were on 9/11. “They’ll love to tell their story,” Dietz said. “Remember it, absorb it and think about it.”
On hand was retired Army Col. Thomas Hanley, a former senior CENTCOM officer at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, who before his walk talked to the cadets as a group about his 9/11 memory.
He paid tribute to Peggie Hurt, a civilian with an accounting degree who worked for Hanley in a building near the Pentagon. He said he was talking to Hurt on 9/11, with her replacement, going over budget matters, before the telephone line went dead.
“Peggie recently had been promoted, we’d given her a cake, sent her away [to the Pentagon] and thanked her for her work,” Hanley said. “She was living the dream she wanted to live, working in the Pentagon, the building she grew up near, then killed by the cowards who would steal our planes.”
Hanley said in an interview that he often wonders if, had he not been on the phone with Hurt, she might have taken a coffee break, which could have spared her life. To the students, he said it was “an honor to speak to anybody about what happened,” and to remember, along with the first responders, the civilians who lost their lives simply going to work.
Hurt, like so many others, was “a life lost in an instant, taken by cowards, and that’s what terrorists do,” Hanley said.
Hanley, like Dietz, finds in 9/11 a teachable moment for today’s youth. Hanley stressed what he called the nation's four guiding tenets, which he described as freedom of commerce; protecting U.S. humans anywhere on the planet; protecting U.S. interests (not just military, but also cultural, economic and influential), and protection of human rights anywhere on the planet.
“These are the tenets that guided our country for decades prior to 9/11,” Hanley said. “As the youngest voters, you have to understand that just as Americans after 9/11 did their part, it’s the American spirit to do your part as well.”
Overall, “it was an inspiring day, realizing that 9/11 still impacts this generation to this day,” said Lennard senior Destiny Michelena, in an interview after the walk. The important thing, she added, is that “we can always come together as a nation, as a community, if we want to.”
Sophomore Tess Britton agreed, emphasizing the importance of honoring the military members and first responders who risked and lost their lives on 9/11, “as well as those who continue to risk their lives today.”