To mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City’s Twin Towers the UNL ROTC units and local firefighters paid tribute by traversing 2,200 steps at Memorial Stadium on Thursday, roughly the same number first responders faced on 9/11.
September 11, 2001 marked the final chapter for the hundreds of first responders who scaled stairwells in the hope of rescuing thousands trapped amid steel and concrete and fire. Killed that day were 343 FDNY personnel, 23 NYPD officers and 37 officers of the Port Authority.
“You want to do them justice,” said Capt. Troy Scharfen, a Marine officer instructor with Navy ROTC. “Even though I wasn’t a firefighter, reading those stories, there are lessons that I can apply to my midshipmen. We want to honor those people, first and foremost, and also carry it forward with the 18- and 19-year-old kids, teaching them what these men and women did.”
Roman Montes, a junior in management from Lincoln, was just 6 months old when the towers fell. But his perspectives on the first responders, and the event, suggest that Scharfen’s aims are being realized.
“The firefighters went up way higher than this, so to stop while climbing is dishonorable to them,” Montes said before pointing toward a section of East Stadium. “That’s why we all go so hard. These guys up here are going hard with the freshmen who haven’t done this before, pushing them to their limit, because those firefighters did the same with a lot more at stake.
Like Montes, Midshipmen 2nd Class Ian Weninger was less than a year old on 9/11. “I’m a little exhausted, but I know it could be a whole lot worse,” Weninger said after finishing the last of his 22 trips up and down the stadium steps. “I could be wearing the flame pants, the steel-toed boots, the gas mask and all that jazz, which is significantly heavier and harder to wear than simple cammies.”
He wasn’t the only Weninger in attendance. Ian invited his father and U.S. Air Force veteran, Eric, to take part in the memorial stair climb for the first time. The Weningers lived in New York during 9/11, with Eric recalling the emptiness of the normally busy airspace in the hours following the attacks and the fire engine-led funeral processions that flowed through the city for months after.
“It’s just a real honor to do this with the midshipmen here at Nebraska,” Eric said.