On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 lifted off from Dulles at 8:20 a.m. with 64 people aboard. Fifty-seven minutes later it struck the west face of the Pentagon, six miles from the Fairfax County line. One hundred eighty-four people died there — 125 inside the building and 59 on the plane (9/11 Pentagon Memorial). By the end of the day, 2,977 people were gone in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Seventy-six of them lived in Northern Virginia (Patch). They were our neighbors. Khang Nguyen, 41, of Fairfax, a Navy computer specialist. Michael Selves, 53, of Fairfax, an Army civilian. Sandra Teague, 31, of Fairfax, a physical therapist on her way to Australia. Six more from Great Falls alone, whose names are carved on a memorial off Georgetown Pike. People who had kissed someone goodbye that morning in Burke, Reston, Springfield and Falls Church and expected to be home for dinner.
Arlington County firefighters were on scene within two minutes of the impact, and they commanded the response for the days that followed (Fire Engineering). Within hours, Arlington called for help, and the first FEMA urban search and rescue task force to answer was Virginia Task Force 1 — the team built and staffed by the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, drawn from the county’s heavy rescue companies, the same firehouses that answer calls in our neighborhoods. They worked twelve-hour shifts for six days, building 55 crib towers and dozens of shoring supports to hold up a burning, collapsing building so that the search could go on (Fire Engineering). They found no one alive. They kept working anyway, because the families deserved to have their people brought home.
That is worth sitting with for a moment. When the building was too dangerous to search, the people the country called to hold it up were not from a federal agency in Washington. They were from Fairfax County. When the country needed someone to walk into the fire, it turned out the people ready to do it lived down the street.
A quarter century is long enough that memory becomes history. Every student in Fairfax County Public Schools today was born after that morning. To them, September 11 is a chapter, a museum exhibit, a moment of silence on the morning announcements. That is not a failure. That is what a generation of Americans worked to make possible — a childhood in which the towers falling is something you learn about rather than something you remember.
But it puts an obligation on the rest of us. We are the ones who remember what the sky looked like that afternoon with no planes in it. We remember the flags on every overpass on Route 66, the lines to give blood, the strangers who spoke to each other at gas stations. We remember that for a few weeks the country did not ask what party you belonged to before deciding whether you were an American.
The anger of that season has faded, as anger should. What ought not fade is the other thing — the plain, unshowy decency that showed up everywhere at once. The firefighter who climbed. The passengers on Flight 93 who voted, and then acted. The Pentagon employees who went back into the building for coworkers they barely knew. Nobody organized that. It was simply what people did, because it was who they were.
Commemoration is easy. Anyone can lower a flag. The harder work is being the kind of country those people believed they were dying for — one where neighbors look out for each other, where service is honored more than celebrity, where disagreements are argued and then set aside when something larger is at stake.
Fairfax County has more than its share of people who took that seriously. The firefighters of VA-TF1, many now retired, some of whom went on to Haiti and Turkey and Surfside because the work did not end at the Pentagon. The military families at Fort Belvoir. The federal employees who went back to work in that building the next Monday. The teachers who found a way, every September since, to explain the unexplainable to a room of ten-year-olds.
Twenty-five years on, the best way to honor the dead is to be worthy of the living who answered the call.
The City of Fairfax holds its 25th-anniversary remembrance Thursday, September 10, at 5:00 p.m. at the Veterans Amphitheater, 10455 Armstrong Street, with a bell ringing, wreath laying, and a piece of World Trade Center steel. Great Falls gathers Friday, September 11, at 7:00 p.m. at the Freedom Memorial, 9830 Georgetown Pike, to honor its six residents. The Pentagon and Arlington County hold their observances Friday morning. And the county’s own 9/11 Memorial Grove at the Government Center, 12000 Government Center Parkway, is open every day for anyone who would rather remember quietly (The Fairfax Girl).
Go to one. Take a young person who was not alive that morning, and tell them what it was like. The crispness in the air — it was a perfect September day, the kind that makes the memory harder. The courage of the people who ran toward the building. The tragedy of the ones who never came out. And the fear, in the days after, of not knowing what would come next. Then tell them what happened after the fear — how a whole country stood up at once. The flags on every porch and overpass. The lines around the block to give blood. Strangers who stopped to talk to each other. Members of Congress from both parties singing on the Capitol steps. A president standing on the rubble with a bullhorn, and a nation that, for a season, remembered it was one thing. They will not find that in a textbook. They will only get it from someone who was there.
We remember. We always will.