Blake Baur, an Air Force veteran and Yale College student from Wisconsin, was just a toddler on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He first recalls learning about the terror attacks, a few years later, from older family members who shared their memories, or when teachers would wheel TV sets into his elementary school classroom to screen documentaries on 9/11 anniversaries.
Karolina Burtell, a Michigan native who also served in the Air Force before enrolling at Yale, also remembers her parents trying to explain to her the events of that awful day, years after the fact, and watching online footage as a young girl.
Like most other current Yale College students, Gabe Sachs, a junior from Maryland and Naval ROTC student, wasn’t even born yet.
Indeed, while so many people old enough to remember Sept. 11 count it among the indelible experiences of their lives, for a generation of young adults it’s a chapter of history absorbed through classroom lessons, films, and YouTube clips.
Some want to feel closer to it, or at least better grasp the meaning of the tragedy. Among them Thursday were scores of ROTC students and military veterans who gathered at Yale’s Reese Stadium for a memorial stair climb in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the 2001 attacks.
For these students — more than 80 of them, including members of Yale’s Air Force, Naval, and Army ROTC, as well as peers from across the region — the early morning challenge offered an opportunity to better appreciate 9/11 and the sacrifices made by so many people that day and in the years since.
“We do this to honor the men and women who lost their lives in service of others or in defending our freedoms,” said Michalah Dillard, a senior cadet in the Air Force ROTC from Southern Connecticut State who organized the event. “The events of 9/11 inspired a generation of people, including those of us who are here today.”
Over the course of two hours, the students completed circuits that included hundreds upon hundreds of stair climbs on the Reese Stadium bleachers, a tribute to the first responders killed while scaling stairways of the World Trade Center towers on the morning of 9/11. While the conditions obviously didn’t compare with the brutal realities rescuers encountered that day, or involve the grave consequences, organizers said they saw the experience as a small way to connect with the ethic of sacrifice.
The physical challenge, students said, also prompted a reflection on the nature of sacrifice in the name of a cause greater than oneself: it is difficult and it requires stamina.
“In the military, people often say you have to ‘embrace the suck,’” said Baur, the Eli Whitney student from Wisconsin. “Look, sometimes the work is hard, and it does suck. But, you know, when you’re getting through it with a group, you look to your left, you look to your right, and everyone is getting through it together. And it starts to feel like, ‘You know what, this isn’t too bad. They’re doing it, I can do it. We can all get through this.’”
Participants included ROTC students from Yale, the University of New Haven, Southern Connecticut State University, Fairfield University, Quinnipiac University, Sacred Heart University, Wesleyan University, and Western Connecticut University. Also participating were several military veterans who are now enrolled as students at Yale, including members of Eli Whitney Students Program, which brings adult learners with an extraordinary range of life experiences into Yale College. (Of the 35 Eli Whitney Students admitted to the newest class of Yale students, 19 are U.S. military veterans.)
The current college generation didn’t live through 9/11, but in engaging with the memory of it, they too can apprehend a glimmer of the price paid by so many people during the attacks and in the decades since, said U.S. Air Force Col. Thomas “TK” Wilson, commander of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) Detachment at Yale.
And, he said, young people want to understand those lessons.
“When I was growing up, I found it fascinating to hear from those who served in Vietnam or who’d served in World War II, and to understand how their character was built from those experiences, and to understand the sacrifices, the trials and tribulations, and how that made them who they were as a generation,” he said. “In a lot of ways, that’s what the young people here are doing, through honoring the service that came about after the events of 9/11, honoring those who we lost, and feeling a connection.”
Like many others, Wilson says his career was defined by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Just months before the attack, he was commissioned through the Air Force ROTC at the University of Michigan. At the time, he remembered, there was an assumption that the military was entering a post-Cold War era and that wars between sovereign states might be a remnant of history. The events of that day, and the years that followed, dispelled that notion.
“That really cemented in my mind how uncertain the world can be, and how important it is to have folks in [the military] from around the country, and from all walks of life, who are willing to come together and do something on behalf of the country.”
Kate Ahrens, a Coast Guard veteran now in her third year at Yale Law School, vividly recalls the traumatic events of Sept. 11. On the day of the attacks, she was just a few days shy of her 13th birthday. A native of upstate New York, she’d made a visit along with her mother to Manhattan just days earlier.
“I very much knew what was going on,” she said, “and I was very shaken by all of it.”
The experience would help shape her future career path. After attending the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, she was commissioned into the U.S. Coast Guard, where she rose to the rank of lieutenant commander over 14 years of service. During those years, she came to appreciate just how much the service was transformed in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, when it became part of the newly created Department of Homeland Security.
“It’s really interesting to learn about this and to study it from more of a legal perspective,” she said. “I don’t think I fully understood how much things changed post-9/11. But 9/11 shaped everything.”
