No matter where you lived in America on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the story often begins with a sapphire sky filled with airy white clouds perfectly contrasted against the expansive blue, a picture-perfect backdrop shattered by the deadliest attack on American soil in the country’s history.
Nineteen men, trained by al Qaeda, boarded four passenger aircraft that morning, seeking to carry out a devastating coordinated attack aimed at symbols of American freedom: the World Trade Center, the Capitol, and the Pentagon. Three hit their target. Flight 93, the plane targeting the Capitol, crashed in an isolated field in Somerset, Pa., thanks to brave passengers who wrested control of the plane from the hijackers. More than 3,000 people lost their lives that day, 400 of whom were New York City’s first responders.
Sean Parnell, Joni Ernst, Taylor Cleveland, Lloyd Austin, and Victor Lewis are five people whose lives were changed by the terror attacks. They were separated by geography, age, and life experience, but for them, 9/11 proved to be a common call of duty to serve their country. The Washington Examiner spoke with them about their service.
*****
Victor Lewis didn’t come from a military family. Taylor Cleveland, his friend and fellow Ohioan, grew up surrounded by soldiers.
“Even my priest growing up was a chaplain in World War II. I mean, everybody around here served. It’s just expected that’s what you’re going to do,” Cleveland says.
[Related: Arlington: The noblest acre in America]
Unfortunately, he couldn’t follow in the footsteps of others. He had been a local high school football star and had wrecked his knee during a game, so the Marine Corps turned him down. Instead, Cleveland turned to community service, earned a degree in criminal justice, then worked as an emergency medical technician, then a firefighter, and then a beat cop before joining the department’s SWAT team.
But he knew he had to do something more after the 9/11 attacks.
“My grandfather joined the Navy the day after Pearl Harbor in 1941. And I just knew after that there was no way they would keep me out of this war that was coming. There was no way that people were going to go fight a war for me and that they were going to put their lives on the line for me. I could never live with myself as a man if I didn’t go and let somebody else go fight my battles for me,” he says.
He signed up to join the Marine Reserves but had concerns about his knee injury.
“I figured that because I had the knee problem still they’d still turn me down,” he recalls. “Well, they enlisted me before the medical portion, and they called the house and left a message on the machine that said, ‘Good news, you’re approved.’”
[Also read: Rolling Thunder rides off into the sunset]
Lewis and Cleveland met in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2003. Cleveland is 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines. Lewis, a Navy hospital corpsman, attached to the Marine unit. The two became like brothers immediately.
They deployed to Iraq in 2005. Cleveland admits he had a hard time adjusting at first. “I was friends with a fellow reservist by the name of Jeff Wiener who had joined the Marines right out of high school. Wiener’s got this book, and it’s got a picture and a story of every person that was killed in 9/11, and I’m like, ‘What are you doing, bro?’ He smiles at me, and he’s like, ‘Man, I just read this whole book. I can tell you what, I read every single person that was in here that died on 9/11. I know why I’m here.’”
Twenty minutes after that conversation, Wiener was fatally shot in the head. Cleveland recalls, “That’s the last conversation I had with him. Having him say, ‘Man, I know why I’m here,’ is the best gift I’ve been given.”
Lewis says he never got shot in Iraq. No mortar. No shrapnel.
Cleveland practically spits out his beer. “Dude, you were hit by a rocket!”
Lewis is sheepish and uncomfortable telling the story. Deployed south of Haditha just outside Haqlaniyah, the engagement turned deadly as a guy coming straight at Lewis fired off a rocket-propelled grenade.
“The blast throws me toward the river. Trying to shake it off, I grab my weapon. I’m trying to fire back. I’m crawling toward the river. I go to stand up and fall back down. Like, ‘What the f—?’ My leg’s all mangled,” he explains.
He was medevaced to Al Asad Air Base, then took a Black Hawk to Basra. From there he was transported to Ramstein, Germany, and finally, Bethesda, Md. He wanted a little Motrin and to go back to “his men,” but they told him he was going home.
“I felt like I failed them, you know? Because nobody could take care of my men like me,“ Lewis says. “They’re my boys. We hung out, we partied, we kicked it. We shared everything. I wanted to go back.”
That’s the hardest part of returning to civilian life. “I think about it all the time. But you know … you can replay it as many times as you like in your mind. The result’s the same.”
Lewis is blunt about his routine after leaving the military: “Hanging out, drinking, and chasing women.”
He finally went back to work at the fire department, but even working triple shifts couldn’t fill the void left by having to do something other than what he saw as his purpose in life.
He sought help from the Department of Veterans Affairs and got lost in the system. Lewis says, “I started snapping at people and flipping out over nothing, but that’s not me. I was looking for help.”
It all came to a head one evening outside a bar when he was approached by two men and a woman looking for trouble. They pummeled Lewis pretty badly; he fought back with a knife.
[Also read: Memorial Day has strayed from its sober roots]
“People got hurt,” is all he says. The price? Thirty months in prison.
But he turned his life around. He gets treatment for his post-traumatic stress disorder, has a job he loves at a contracting company, and takes care of his twin boys. He talks to Cleveland at least twice a week and is working toward his degree in electrical engineering.
Lewis earned a Bronze Star, and Cleveland a Purple Heart. The lesson they want people to remember is simple: American freedom is paid for a thousand different ways.
*****
Lloyd J. Austin III always knew he’d eventually join the military, but he wanted to attend the University of Notre Dame first. Smiling, he says, “But I went to West Point because my father sat down and we talked about how it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and so eventually I agreed with him.”
The Thomasville, Ga., native not only came from a family tradition of military service, the entire community where he grew up was filled with servicemen, and they loved to gather with townspeople on porches and stoops, in churches and barbershops, and regale them with stories about their lives in the military.
“I wanted to be like them. Walk in their shoes, serve my country, and so that’s the reason that I really wanted to join. I wanted to make a difference,” he says.
And he did.
Throughout his career, Austin, now a retired general, was a soldier’s soldier. The four-star general served as the 3rd Infantry Division’s assistant division commander for maneuver during the invasion of Iraq, the vice chief of staff of the Army, the commander of Combined Joint Task Force 180 in Afghanistan, and the first African American commander of the United States Central Command. He retired in 2016, and he is now the class leadership chairman at West Point.
“Our character is really a reflection of our values, and in the military, no matter which branch of service you’re in, those values are driven home day in and day out, whether you serve for three years or 30 years,” he says.
[Editorial: No greater love]
Austin worries the military is becoming isolated from the general population. Only 0.5% of all Americans serve in uniform. “It is not a bad thing, it’s a horrible thing. We can’t allow the American people to get too far away from its military. Those of us who have worn the uniform and are wearing the uniform worry about that part,” he stresses.
One consequence is that people don’t understand the military. “There is this notion that if you’re in the military, you’re there because you can’t do anything else, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. Kids are out there interacting with foreign governments, training people, building teams, and even serving and teaching folks in countries how to set up and run governments. So these are very resourceful and talented people, and I think we have to do a bit more to promote them for what they are,” he says.
Every Fourth of July, Austin reflects on a battle just outside the Karbala Gap in Iraq.
“We exchanged gunfire most of the night, and then when day broke and we were about to move out on the attack, there was this one lone vehicle that rode by our position and had the American flag on its antenna. It was tattered, torn, and dusty. It just drove home this sense of patriotism and what we were fighting for,” he says.
What does he want people to think about? That’s easy. “That we still continue to produce those kinds of people who are willing to sacrifice all to protect our treasure.”
*****
Joni Ernst spent nearly half of her life in the Army Reserve and Army National Guard, a career that began with her commission as a second lieutenant in 1992 and ended in 2015 with her retirement as a lieutenant colonel at 44, just over a year after she won election to the U.S. Senate from Iowa.
Ernst is the first female combat veteran in the Senate. Eighteen months after 9/11, she was in Kuwait as the commander of the Iowa National Guard’s 1168th Transportation Company.
[Related: Dan Crenshaw knows exactly where he is]
It tore at her heart to leave behind her family. “It was very hard,” she says. “I think as a mom you want to be there and be there for your child, but knowing the reason you are serving is to protect your children and future generations.”
The unit Ernst commanded drove supply convoys from Kuwait to Iraq. She says, “When our soldiers first got their missions, we were driving constantly. We were short drivers. There were more missions than we had drivers and trucks and trailers, and many of them were running 20 hours a day with mandatory four-hour sleep time. They were running ragged, but it does create that special bond when you’re serving in hardship and you’re out on the road.
“That brotherhood of arms. You know, the bad times and the good times through deployment, and so many of us are still very, very close today,” she says, her voice cracking and tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Unfortunately, I saw some of my unit members last weekend. One of our soldiers committed suicide, and we got together. The struggles that came from trying to get back to normal life, and what it is just to be a citizen, and not having that same purpose, and I think that’s what a lot of our service members feel when they get back. Sometimes they lose that purpose, and they struggle … with substance abuse [or] trying to find their role in society. He just couldn’t make it,” she says. “It’s tough. That’s the second one we’ve lost to suicide. It hits home.”
Last month, Ernst introduced two bipartisan bills for veterans in crisis. The first helps states apply a “Green Alert” system to find missing veterans. The other fixes a flaw in bankruptcy law that jeopardizes veterans who rely on disability benefits. She criticized the Department of Veterans Affairs last year, urging it to fix problems in its suicide prevention outreach program and outlined its continued failures on the issue.
Her mission is to get veterans the help they need. “Often, the veterans that are committing suicide don’t ever seek assistance at our VA. The vast majority never seek VA benefits; they don’t ever go into a VA hospital. We need to make sure that they are reaching out and providing that support however we can.”
*****
On Sept. 10, 2001, Sean Parnell was an elementary education major at Clarion University in Western Pennsylvania. His run-down apartment smelled perpetually of stale beer, and he struggled to find his purpose.
“I wake up the next morning lying flat on my back on this beat-down couch in my living room, surrounded by crushed Iron City beer cans and cigarette butts all over the floor and with the hangover of a lifetime. I turn on the television, and in that moment, was shaken to my core,” he says, recounting what it was like to watch the horrific events unfold that day.
“What grabbed my attention more than anything else — in the wake of that terrorist attack — was how ordinary Americans responded. Police officers and firefighters ran into the flames to save people they didn’t even know. In many cases, people who ran into the flames that day never came out again. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, this is an act of selflessness I have never seen before in my entire life.’ I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve got to do something.’ I had to serve something greater than myself,” he says.
He transferred to a university that had an ROTC program. He became an officer and was on the ground in December 2006. “Getting ready to fly into the front lines — 9/11 just lit a fire under my ass in a way that nothing else in my life, up to that point, had ever done. For the first time ever, I knew exactly why God had put me on this earth. I spent 485 days in heavy combat. I got what I wanted,” he says.
During one battle, Parnell suffered a skull fracture in three places and received a medical discharge after being diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and PTSD. During his service, Parnell received two Bronze Stars, one for valor, and a Purple Heart.
“When I got out, my mission shifted from defense of the country to capturing and preserving the legacy of my soldiers. That was the rocket fuel that propelled me to write Outlaw Platoon in 2012,” the Pittsburgh native says of his best-seller. Besides being an author, Parnell also runs a foundation that pairs highly trained service dogs with veterans dealing with traumatic brain injuries and PTSD.
The platoon he served in reached a sad milestone recently: It has lost more soldiers to suicide than it did to combat.
“War changes everything it touches. Whether you’re a soldier fighting or a kid affected by it, it’s with you for life. Like spyware on a computer, it’s always running in the background. It becomes a question of how you frame that experience.” He uses it as motivation, whereas for many veterans, it’s an anchor that sinks them.
“In a warrior culture, if [samurai] lose a battle, they take their own life. If Vikings lose a battle, they take their own life. There’s a cultural difference in the way that elite warriors live, and it’s driven into your mind when you’re in the military.” He says, “When you’re in the Army, the warrior ethos is everything. It’s who you are.”
He continued: “That’s why you see all these veterans walking around with, ‘See you in Valhalla.’ Because they believe that their true paradise is with their brothers in arms after they pass. There’s a difference in perception of what suicide means among some in the veteran community.”
Parnell says the natural reaction to his framing of suicide and the warrior ethos is, “My gosh, it’s selfish. You leave your family behind. You leave your friends behind. Everyone is upset and sad. They miss you. That’s the perception among civilians. But in a veteran community it’s like, ‘My family and friends don’t even get me anymore. I want to go be with my brothers that do in Valhalla.’”
Salena Zito is a reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner and author of The Great Revolt.
