'Life as we knew it was going to change' - Crawford County residents remember 9/11

Sep. 11—Twenty years later the events of Sept. 11, 2001, seem no less surreal than they did originally.

For most Crawford County residents, and for millions of Americans across the country, those events played out largely on TV, which only added to the paradox. On the one hand, the attacks were like something out of a disaster movie, the only comparable context was what had previously been seen in the movies and on TV. But this was real — so real, in fact, that the tiny screens showing the nation the tragedy could hardly convey the scope of what had happened.

Even the raw numbers struggle to convey that scope as well: 2,977 people died as a result of the attacks in New York, Washington and rural Pennsylvania when 19 al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, according to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. The extremists flew the planes into both of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, where 2,753 people were killed, and into the Pentagon, where 184 people were killed.

Another 40 people on Flight 93 died when passengers, who had learned of the other crashes via cell phone calls, fought back. The terrorists intentionally crashed the plane into an abandoned strip mine just north of Shanksville, approximately 20 minutes by air from Washington.

Among the dead were more than 400 emergency response personnel, including 343 firefighters and nearly 60 police officers who were at the World Trade Center when the towers collapsed.

Images of the towers being struck, burning and finally collapsing were aired over and over again as news of the attacks spread. Against a backdrop of blue skies that seemed to stretch forever, the seemingly impossible happened again and again on the TV screen.

"Life as we knew it was going to change"

Tony DiGiacomo saw the images from a barber's chair at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Now the Crawford County Veterans Services Officer, DiGiacomo was a Marine sergeant teaching refresher infantry skills to other Marines at the time. He was a decade into a career that, until that time, he said, had been about as uneventful as a Marine infantry career could be. It wasn't long before he and his colleagues who were also getting haircuts realized that part of their career was over.

"When the second one hit and we realized what was going on," he recalled earlier this week, "the consensus of all of us was that life as we knew it was going to change as we had not seen since Vietnam.

"We're going to send people into harm's way," DiGiacomo continued, "and some of them aren't going to come home."

Shanksville connections

At about the same time Julie Frantz, in her third year of teaching eighth grade English at Cambridge Springs Junior-Senior High, was navigating the most nerve-wracking day of her young career. Shortly after a colleague had pulled her into another classroom to see what was happening on TV, the principal's voice on the intercom announced that a fourth plane had crashed in Somerset County.

Frantz, who grew up in Shanksville and graduated from the tiny high school there in 1993, still recalls how she felt as she began trying to reach family members on the blue Nokia flip phone she had at the time.

"My heart just stopped," Frantz said.

Amazingly, she got through to her family's business on the second try. With her family members safe and accounted for, she could marvel at the other news: Flight 93 had crashed about 2 miles from the house she grew up in, coming down in a place she knew well.

"We used to ride our four-wheelers there," Frantz recalled of the old strip mine at the crash site. "We would go spotting deer there."

The nearby town was a lot like where Frantz teaches now. The similar rural character is what attracted her to PENNCREST School District decades ago. Since the crash put the town that virtually no one had heard of on the map, however, things have "definitely changed," Frantz said.

Though perhaps less visible, the changes wrought by Sept. 11 are still being felt on a personal level as well. For some, like Saegertown Junior-Senior High Principal Tom Baker, the changes have shaped their lives "immeasurably."

Baker grew up about 10 minutes from the Shanksville crash site — his parents felt the impact shake their house — but he was a student teacher at Parker Middle School in Erie County on Sept. 11, 2001.

He was also a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard and eventually deployed on active duty three times — once to Germany, where his unit replaced soldiers who had been sent to Iraq, and twice to Iraq.

"Looking at me now, you don't see any scars or anything because it's hidden underneath my shirt," Baker said while reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the attacks that eventually led the U.S. to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Am I the same person I was before I went to Iraq in '05 and '08? No."

One thing that's different is the metal rod that extends from the base of one elbow to well up his arm, the result of a roadside bomb injury that left him hospitalized for nearly five months. Still, compared to fellow soldiers who didn't make it back or who returned home with a variety of long-lasting issues, Baker counts himself lucky. He doesn't dwell on past events that can't be changed, he said, but he does talk to his young children about Sept. 11 and planned a moment of silence at SJSH to commemorate the anniversary.

From Titusville to Afghanistan

For many, the clear blue skies of that day 20 years ago anticipated the clarity with which the attacks quickly came to be seen and the sense of national unity that emerged along with it. For some, making sense of the seemingly unreal attacks that killed thousands proved difficult.

Graham Barnhart found himself "distrustful of the clarity" that emerged almost immediately. At the time, Barnhart was a junior at Titusville High School when the attacks occurred; today, he is an award-winning poet teaching creative writing at Allegheny College. In between, he graduated from Allegheny, then spent more than a decade in the Army Special Forces, deploying once to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan.

The memory of the 9/11 attacks did not play a central role in his eventual decision to enlist, according to Barnhart, perhaps because of his age at the time but also because he wasn't entirely sure what to make of the attacks, their aftermath and his own reaction.

"It seemed very abstract — I don't think I wrapped my brain around the actual human cost of what had happened," Barnhart said this week. "It felt like a lot of folks' patriotic reactions didn't feel genuine to me, so I think I was kind of skeptical of that. ... To suddenly feel it after this event didn't quite add up."

Looking inward resulted in confusion as well. When Barnhart's response didn't match up with the ones he saw around him, he found himself asking if his was "the right one."

"Am I patriotic enough?" he wondered. "Do I not love our country?"

Serving in Iraq and Afghanistan more than a decade later, it was clear in an abstract sense that his presence was a direct result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but it was hard to feel that connection during the day-to-day demands of deployment. Now, with the nation's withdrawal from Afghanistan and questions about whether years of sacrifice there meant anything in the end, Barnhart's initial skepticism may not provide comfort exactly, but it has provided perspective.

"I never had those expectations that it meant something," Barnhart said.

Looking back

Frantz talks to her Cambridge Springs students about her hometown and the events of Sept. 11 each year. None were alive at the time, of course, though some have visited the Flight 93 memorial. But where Barnhart was uncertain about the period that followed the attacks, Frantz turns back to that moment with her students.

"To see what our nation is now and to see how divided we are over simple little things — vaccines and masks," she told them recently, "but to see how united our nation was the day after this happened, and months and years after this happened — that's what I like to focus on.

"I was never more proud to be an American. You couldn't find a flag — you couldn't buy a flag," she continued. "That's the America that we need to see. We talk a lot about that because a lot of these kids have never seen it."

Though the post-9/11 unity on the homefront can be cause for optimism, reminders of the same period were troubling for DiGiacomo, who deployed twice to Iraq in the years following 9/11.

The terrorist attack on American soil was hard not to take personally, he said. Similarly, it has been hard not to be frustrated with the nation's recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the same frustration has been evident among many he served with.

"Ultimately it changed everything for us. It affects me to this day," DiGiacomo said. "I'm doing pretty good, but a lot of the guys we went to Iraq with were injured and they'll never be the same."

The withdrawal from Afghanistan, he continued, has brought with it reminders of a common 9/11-era mindset, one that for some has faded even as those images of towers, smoke and blue skies have remained seared in our memories.

"With Afghanistan the way it is now," DiGiacomo said, "most of us that were in that situation are thinking, 'When's it going to happen again now?'"

Mike Crowley can be reached at (814) 724-6370 or by email at mcrowley@meadvilletribune.com.