The permanent memory of the victims of September 11, 23 years later

Salvadoran immigrant Ricardo Barahona polishes the 184 granite benches every day, cleans the fountains and, along with his other colleagues, is in charge of keeping the solemn site that remembers the victims of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, on September 11, 2001.

The sound of water running under the benches mixes with the constant noise of planes taking off from Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, on the banks of the Potomac River, very close to the heart of American military power in Virginia, where the terrorists planned and executed the kidnapping of American Flight 77 Airlines to crash it into the West Wing of the Pentagon.

This was the third plane hijacked by Al Qaeda, minutes after the impacts on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, which left 2,753 people dead, according to official recordsand a fourth plane with 40 passengers and crew crashed outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The total death toll was 2,977, not including the 19 terrorists.

The memories

Remembering that date, Ricardo Barahona says to the Voice of America He said he was working in the kitchen of a restaurant a short distance from the Pentagon and that that day “changed everything,” but he never imagined that two years later he would start working inside the Pentagon and since 2017 he has become part of the maintenance team at the memorial, inaugurated on September 11, 2008.

He remembers arriving at the Pentagon when the West Wing was in the middle of being rebuilt, “and they wouldn’t let you get inside that area,” he says. He then points to the exterior of the rebuilt space, and right where the plane hit, in that part of the building you can see a slight change in the patina of the walls and the material used.

Former Arlington City Councilman Walter Tejada, the first Hispanic to be elected to an elected office in Virginia, says when commenting on the fateful events of September 11, 2001, that “everyone has their own story” about where they were and what they were doing that day.

In his case, he was in a meeting to negotiate insurance for a Salvadoran festival that would take place three days later in Arlington, while working in the office of Congressman Jim Moran, who represented Northern Virginia in Congress.

After the first few hours, Tejada said that he and his wife decided to go to the Pentagon to observe the magnitude of the tragedy. To his surprise, the entrances were still open and he was able to get to the outskirts of the emblematic building, which at that time was not fenced around its perimeter.

“We parked on Columbia Pike, walked down the hill and got to the other side of the street, crossed it (…) we could see this wing that was destroyed, the big hole, the smoke and flames that they had not finished putting out yet, there were firefighters, police and the destruction,” he says in an interview with the VOA from the 9/11 Memorial at the Pentagon.

He still remembers the pungent smell that emanated from the scene. Those memories and being an eyewitness, he says, left their mark on him, especially because of what it meant for the United States and the drastic changes in American policy on all issues, including one that was very sensitive for him: immigration.

In proximity to the military wing

Michael Hamilton, a tour operator for The Good Comma who travels from Ohio with tour groups to Washington, recalls being caught off guard by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in 10th grade.

He will never forget the loudspeaker message from the school principal warning the students that they had to return home because a third plane had crashed into the Pentagon and that “the United States was under attack,” but also because the Department of Defense was no stranger to his family; his father, a career military officer, traveled every two weeks to the Pentagon in the U.S. capital, but that day he was not in Washington.

For Hamilton, educational trips with his company to the nation’s capital and other monuments around the country take on a lot of value, saying that in Washington, the monuments to heroes “are very visible” because of the stories of the characters, but that visits to the Pentagon’s 9/11 Memorial become more personal and unique for visitors.

“A memorial like this, the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial, is about the silent heroes, the ordinary people who showed up to work,” never imagining it would be their last day, he told the Associated Press. VOA

He adds that it is now a privilege for him to work in these open-air history classes with people so that they learn to better understand events such as those of September 11, 2001, which changed the lives of Americans forever.

Regular tours carry between 35 and more than 100 people on buses, “we try to make each experience feel as if it were unique and personal,” he adds. Empathy is an important factor in enriching visits – he says – so going with friends or family helps to better assimilate visits to these memorial sites.

In the collective consciousness

As two decades passed since the September 11 attacks, the Pew Research Center analyzedhow the events of September 11, 2001 have marked the collective consciousness of American society.

And how those events with more than 3,000 fatalities between those of the 11th and those who died later from injuries or the after-effects of the attacks help to understand some of the dynamics of subsequent global conflicts.

The Pew Research Center found that 69% of American adults have come to believe that the United States has failed in its objectives after the attacks, when looking back on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistanin light of the costs to those countries and to the United States itself.

The research also found that, depending on age range, the events of September 11 were closer or further away for Americans; “An overwhelming majority of Americans who are old enough to remember the day remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. However, an increasing number of Americans have no personal recollection of that day, either because they were too young or because they had not yet been born,” the report said.

On this day of commemoration of the attacks on the World Trade Center memorials in New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania, with official events to remember the date and honor the victims, from Organizations created by relatives of victims and workers who cleaned up the rubble keep their organizations active for legal claims and to recognize the sacrifices and not to forget this date.

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