The 25th anniversary of 9/11 will bring back memories of where people were when they first heard the news, but Jacksonville City Council member Chris Miller will think again about where he wasn't — a Pentagon office on the side of the building that a hijacked plane slammed into and killed people he had served with daily.
The only reason MIller, an Army veteran, wasn't in his office that morning on Sept. 11, 2001, was he had just been sent to Europe for a NATO class.
"So I wasn't there when the nose of the plane went into my senior boss's office at the Pentagon," Miller said at the end of the Sept. 8 City Council meeting. "And so 30 of my colleagues that I just left when I went to that course were killed that day."
He said the death toll included
his office mate who worked at a nearby desk.
Miller did not have a prepared speech and spoke haltingly from the council dais during the portion of the meeting when council members can speak about any topic they want to bring up. He said for many years, he avoided talking about what happened on 9/11 but decided to speak after hearing comments from other council members about this week's approaching milestone.
"It's tough when this time rolls around — when this comes up — and especially when someone brings it up," Miller said. "I used to just try to ignore it and wait until it passed."
He said that has changed recently for him.
"I've been able to speak to some groups and I think it's better that way for everybody, including myself," Miller said. "So my hope is we don't forget and that we remember not only 9/11 but also other things are are important to pass on that we learn from for the future."
The attack on the Pentagon was one of four planes commandeered by terrorists linked to Al-Qaida that day. American Airlines Flight 77, scheduled to fly from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles, flew into the west side of the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. The collision killed all 59 passengers and crew members taken hostage by the hijackers and 125 people in the Pentagon.
Two other planes flew into the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in New York City and a fourth crashed on a field in Pennsylvania.
Miller said the history of 9/11 must be passed on to future generations who "many of them have no idea what happened that day."
"I hope our schools and others are teaching them what happened that day and we do everything we can to keep that from happening again," he said. "There were signs there and we should have picked up on them as a country and we didn't."
City Council member Jimmy Peluso thanked Miller, who retired from the Army in 2014 as a colonel, for speaking out publicly.
"I know a lot of senior officers and a lot of senior enlisted that have a really tough time talking about their time in service (and) their time in situations like that," Peluso said. "I'm grateful to you and I hope that that's a lesson to others that they're able to speak up as well as you do."
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: An Army assignment took Chris Miller away from Pentagon on 9/11
