Unforgettable: Community members share personal 9/11 stories

WASILLA — In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared Dec. 7 “a date that will live in infamy,” after the attack on Pearl Harbor claimed 2,403 U.S. American lives. Sixty years later, Sept. 11 joined the ranks of infamous dates as another act of war killed 2,977 people on U.S. soil.

“I’ll never forget 9/11,” said Mat-Su Regional CEO John Lee, fighting back tears at a remembrance ceremony on Friday. “I’ll never forget the significance of that day.”

For the last five years, the hospital has recognized 9/11 with a short ceremony and tree-planting — “a living reminder,” Lee said, of the people who died in the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and White House in 2001.

One of those victims, he said, was his good friend, Lt. Col. Karen Wagner.

Lee, who served in the U.S. Army for 22 years, called Wagner “an exceptional soldier” whom he had known most of his life, since his ROTC days in the early 1980s. They were both members of the Army Medical Corps, though he was stationed at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina and Wagner at the Pentagon at the time of the attacks.

The day before American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked and plowed into the Pentagon, Lee said he had spoken with Wagner on the phone to coordinate upcoming medical corps events at Fort Bragg. That was the last time he heard from her.

Not far from where Wagner was killed, one of Alaska’s own perished. U.S. Navy ET1 Ronald Hemenway, a 1982 Wasilla High School graduate, was also at the Pentagon that day.

His parents, Bob and Shirley Hemenway, along with his sister, Kathy Novich, came up from Kansas this weekend to participate in the Mat-Su Regional ceremony, as well as a MY House event at Gathering Grounds Café on Friday afternoon.

At the café, Bob Hemenway told a small gathering of people about his son — how he was born in Cordova, graduated with Sarah Palin, married an Italian girl and had two children; how he joined the Navy at age 30 because the Air Force said he was too old; how he was one of five people killed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11 whose remains were never found.

His sister said she didn’t fully comprehend what was happening that day as she saw it unfold on television.

She remembered seeing the twin towers fall while she was at work, feeling sorry for the people in New York City. Then she heard the Pentagon had been struck, and expressed some mild concern for her brother to her boss, who temporarily assuaged her worry.

“He was like, ‘what are the chances, though, Kathy?,’ and I was like, ‘you’re right, what are the chances?’”

Carol Thurneau, the Hemenway’s longtime family friend, said she also didn’t believe Ronald Hemenway was dead when his name and rank were read on TV a few days later, in the list of the deceased.

“I thought, ‘oh, that couldn’t be him, he’s not in the Navy,’” she said, misremembering what branch of the military he was in.

It was weeks later that Thurneau received a call from Shirley Hemenway, confirming Ronald’s death.

Consequences

Novich said she hasn’t been the same since she lost her brother 15 years ago.

“It still doesn’t feel real, a lot of the time,” she said, but the effects are always with her.

Talking or hearing about the incident, for example, is difficult at best and sets her whole body shaking at worst.

And whether it’s the safest place or not, she has to sit at the front of the plane when she flies.

“If something’s going down, I need to see it,” she said.

She constantly worries about where her family is, she said, asking her husband and children to text or call her whenever they leave a place and as soon as they reach their destination.

“All I wanna know is (they’re) OK,” she said.

She worries, too, that her anxiety will manifest in her children’s lives, she said, but all they can do is move forward.

That’s what retired Army mechanic Dan Grota tries to do, too.

As a result of 9/11, Grota was deployed to Iraq in February 2004 as part of a combat engineer unit in Washington state’s Army National Guard’s 81st Brigade. In the next year, his unit would lose 10 men, several of whom he called friends.

One friend he saw “cut in half,” he said, by an improvised explosive device (IED) that detonated in the unarmored belly of the Humvee they were riding in. He said he still remembers the smell of “blood and burning flesh.”

Grota would later be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sometimes triggered by the combined smell of diesel, oil and radiator fluid, or loud noises.

“Sometimes I really don’t like fireworks,” he said.

Grota came to Alaska in 2005, and met former Frontiersman editor Heather Resz not long later. He showed her detailed pen and pencil drawings he’d once made, but could no longer create.

“When he first came back, his hands shook so bad he couldn’t do art,” Resz said. “But he could still write.”

At Resz’s encouragement, Grota began to write about his experiences in a column for the Frontiersman. He got involved in radio and community events, and has become a well-known voice in the Mat-Su Valley.

The next generation

Resz’s effort to give people a voice has recently culminated in a personal project called MY Voice, a volunteer storytelling initiative that offers MY House clients an opportunity to tell others about their lives.

Resz had written about the Hemenways in 2011, when a battlefield cross — a statue of a rifle, helmet and combat boots — was placed outside Wasilla High to honor Ron Hemenway’s memory. So when she invited them to the MY Voice gathering this Friday, they were able to not only share their story, but hear the stories of young people who were too young to remember much from 9/11.

Burchell High School student Abby Lampley was one such person, though she did have a significant memory associated with the day.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Lampley was four years old. She had just undergone major brain surgery the week before, and was recovering at the UCLA hospital in Los Angeles. Her mother had her released early after hearing about the twin towers, Lampley said, because she was afraid big cities like L.A. “would be next."

Lampley maintains that she wasn’t in any danger, but one fact remains: United Airlines Flight 93 was bound for San Francisco, California before it was hijacked and sent spiraling into a Pennsylvania field.

However, the events of 9/11 were only revealed to Lampley by her parents years later, as was likely the case with this year’s high school seniors around the world. Students who began their freshman year of high school this year were born after the attacks. But not much, if anything, about 9/11 is taught in Alaska’s schools.

The Hemenways, the hospital, the veterans, and the youth of MY Voice want to make sure people remember.

“People need to know what happened,” Bob Hemenway said.