Recently, I helped a Florida high school student review her application essay for the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, my alma mater. I regularly speak with students who are applying to the Service Academies because I sit on Congressional Service Academy nomination boards in my home state of New Jersey.
This young Floridian spoke with me about her first memory of feeling a sense of patriotism, walking through her elementary school on Veterans Day, hand in hand with her beloved grandfather, a Vietnam War veteran. She had not known war, but walking next to him that day she knew her “Papa” had been part of something important.
When she visited Annapolis this past summer, she recognized that same sense of belonging, “The moment I stepped
on the Yard, I felt that I belonged there,” she wrote of Bancroft Hall. She had found a family.
She was born years after 9/11, unlike my generation, which came of age in its shadow. Yet she yearned to belong to the same fellowship her “Papa” had known, and to live a life with purpose.
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This conversation led me to ask myself: What do we owe young Americans who know that morning as history rather than memory?
When the Twin Towers fell, I had just joined the ranks of adulthood, living across the river in Bayonne, NJ, a small city nestled between Jersey City and Staten Island. Walking down my childhood block, I watched the soot from the collapsed towers drift down and settle on my neighbors’ cars and houses. Amidst the grey fog was an eerie silence - reducing Bayonne’s daily clamor to only the sounds of sirens from across the river, as first responders rushed to Ground Zero.
In our gravest hour the heroes who charged through plumes of smoke, past bent steel, and into darkness, gave my generation an example of what love of country could require.
In July 2002, I was part of the first class to enter Annapolis after Sept. 11. I stood in the same Bancroft Hall, a massive 1,700 room dormitory housing over four thousand midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. It was the beginning of Plebe summer – a seven-week military indoctrination designed to turn civilians into midshipmen, and eventually into officers in the United States military.
Braced at attention around me stood a mix of young men and women from all over the country, no older than eighteen or nineteen - a sea of patriotism and youth. A Marine Corps gunnery sergeant towered over us, barking orders to look at the ground below. “This is where your mistakes go,” he said, pointing to a body bag laid at our feet.
The visual represented the sacred responsibility of leadership, as well as the weight and severity of loss. We midshipmen all carried the same weight – the weight of a nation at war and the loss of 2,977 innocent American lives.
On the 25th anniversary we remember the everyday citizens who, at our country’s darkest hour, demonstrated extraordinary courage – from the individuals who ran directly into danger as the towers fell, to those who were lost on the battlefields defending the values that make America so exceptional.
We remember the more than 7,000 troops killed in action during the Global War on Terror – six of whom were classmates of mine.
We remember Chief Special Warfare Operator Aaron Vaughn, a Navy SEAL from Stuart, Florida, who was killed in combat on August 6, 2011, when the helicopter carrying Aaron and 29 other service members – call sign Extortion 17 – was shot down over Wardak Province, Afghanistan. He was just 30.
There’s an old saying: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.”
We have lived our whole lives in that shade. Now it is our turn to plant - by keeping faith with the families who still bear the cost of service, standing beside the veterans who came home, and standing beside the young people preparing to follow them.
To the post-September 11th generations, those who know the day through news footage, social media coverage, stories of their elders, I say: Listen. Pay attention. May you grow strong enough to carry this country forward.
And so, I return to the little girl walking through her elementary school, her hand in her grandfather's. He could not have known how far his example would reach. Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, the American spirit has not passed into history. It lives in a young woman who hopes to raise her right hand, and in the grandfather who first took her by the hand.
Will Sheehan is a Palm Beach resident, U.S. Naval Academy graduate and Navy combat veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: We owe our children the 9/11 memories | Opinion
