Before the rains came, the afternoon of Monday, Sept. 12, 2022, had been a mix of sun and clouds, with the latter prevalent.
In advance of the raindrops, however, a glint of sunlight had peeked around to catch the writing on the side of a police cruiser parked in the lot at Westwood Middle School.
“PROTECT AND SERVE,” read the mantra on the door of Westover Police unit that glowed for an instant in the rays.
Landon Hartman, a student at the school on River Road, popped out of that door.
He wasn’t in trouble. He was smiling.
“Thank you, sir,” he said.
Landon, 12, wants to be a police officer when he grows up. Monday only magnified his career aspirations.
That’s because he had just spent the past couple of weeks learning about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the day terror came calling on America.
And on Monday, the day after that anniversary, Jim Smith, who directs emergency services for Monongalia County, arranged to have an ambulance, police car and fire truck driven to the school.
That was so Landon and his classmates could see them up close – from the driver’s seat to the transport bays for patients.
Landon, bolstered by his new knowledge about Sept. 11, was impressed, he said.
He was impressed by the accounts of the people whose calling is to protect and serve, as they went off in a dead run in the direction of the smoke and flames that day.
“They weren’t thinking about their own safety,” the student said. “They wanted to help people and save lives.”
Teaching, in the moment
Honoring that debt, while making students aware, in a compelling way, of an unprecedented moment in American history, was motivation behind the lesson plan.
Westwood social studies teachers Barb Smith, Ashley Grandick-Peck and Phil Caskey created it during their planning periods in 2019.
Adults in the building remember Sept. 11 – “Like it was yesterday,” Principal John Conrad said.
The challenge, though, was constructing a collective memory, from Ground Zero up, for students who weren’t even born that day, he said.
Students, the principal added, whose parents were most likely sitting in high school classroom seats themselves at that same time 21 years ago.
That was when things went horribly wrong for the passengers sitting in their seats in four commercial jetliners that had taken off earlier on an achingly clear morning across the nation.
‘ … And we are at war’
Sarah Cooke, a Westwood Middle secretary, remembers cloudless, lithograph-blue skies with a tang of autumn in the air.
She also remembers people staring intently at a television set endlessly replaying a loop of something that simply couldn’t be real, jarring and wrenching as it was.
It was the video of two planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.
Cook is a first responder by training who flew on medical helicopters for a firm in Pittsburgh that provides that service for hospitals across the region.
She was training in Morgantown that morning when she and her colleagues got their orders.
They were being dispatched to Shanksville. She was allowed to make one hurried phone call as she stowed her gear.
The conversation was a tense haiku of an American homeland forever changed, as her mother answered the phone without saying hello.
“Hi, baby. I love you. And we are at war.”
Once there, in that field in Somerset County, Pa., Cooke was struck by the contrast: a beautiful forest, at the edge of an angry, smoking crater nearly 20 feet deep.
Flight 93 simply edged into the earth, upside down, at more than 500 miles an hour.
It was her job to sift through what was left – which wasn’t much.
Bone fragments.
Teeth.
Sheared seatbelts, unbuckled, speaking to the heroism of the passengers.
And something else.
It was round, and blackened by fire – save for one sliver of untouched metal that gave off just enough of a glint to make her look twice.
Anniversary gift
It was the back of a man’s wristwatch and it carried some engraving: “SD to JD 9-14-86.”
“SD,” was Sandy Dahl, the wife of Jason Dahl, Flight 93’s captain. The watch was a gift to her husband on their wedding day of Sept. 14, 1986.
Jason Dahl had switched flights with another pilot, as the couple had planned to celebrate their 15th anniversary with a trip to London.
On Sept. 14, 2001, Cooke was able to personally hand the item back to the widow.
It was a memory made all the more poignant since Sandy Dahl herself would become a victim of Sept. 11.
The woman died 10 years ago from what the medical examiner termed an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription medication.
Her friends said she couldn’t move past the trauma and grief of Flight 93 and the loss of her husband.
Tales of that day – for a new generation
Cooke still gets a catch in her voice when she remembers that wedding day gift, and those unbuckled seats, and a physical presence that can be reduced to bone fragments and stray teeth – just like that.
Still, she’s heartened by the heroism of those passengers who rose from their seats.
She’s heartened that the wildflowers have long taken over, to heal that scar in that field, from the flight with the passengers who became citizen-soldiers that day.
Monday, meanwhile, was the last day Cooke said she would tell the story publicly because of those emotions.
“I’m turning it over to you guys now,” she said, to a rapt audience in the school gym. “Now, it’s your turn to help others remember.”
And their turn, she said, to help one another, period – no matter the discourse of the moment.
“We can all have our differences,” she said, “but on Sept. 11, we were all Americans. Together.”
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