Josh Imhof | features editor

Jibri Wilson was running late.

It was the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and his stick shift car clunked down the road to Fort Bragg, N.C., where he was stationed as a United States Army Human Resources representative.

This was a regular occurrence for him, but the day would turn out to be anything but.

Wilson pulled up to the white barracks, built during World War II, which housed his office. He expected to get chewed out when he walked through the door.

Instead, his friend, wide-eyed, told him to look at the TV.

As soon as Wilson’s eyes met the screen, a fireball engulfed the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

“It happened,” his staff sergeant said. “Game on.”

Wilson, who utilizes the Shepherd’s Heart Veterans’ Home in Uptown, was one of almost 1.4 million active duty and 867,000 reserve United States military service members in 2001, according to the Center for Naval Analyses. Since then, more than 3 million men and women have enlisted.

The Duke asked some of these veterans to recount where they were on Sept. 11 and describe the impact the attacks had on the military.

Empty classrooms and grounded planes

Jack Stonesifer, a West Virginia Army National Guard veteran and Duquesne law student, sat in a circle with the rest of his fourth-grade class. Rather than telling them what had actually happened that day, his teacher explained to them that a bomb had gone off somewhere in Washington D.C.

Some of his fellow classmates began to worry.

“Is my grandfather ok?” he recalled one saying.

“What about my cousin?” said another.

With no other explanation, students were soon ushered into the school auditorium where teachers handed them out miniature American flags and led in the singing of traditional patriotic songs.

One by one, the crowd quieted as frightened parents took their children home.

At the beginning of the day, the school was filled.

By the end of the day, it was almost empty.

“I was one of 12 students who were still there,” he said.

For Stonesifer, this was the first time he felt called to join the military, a call that he would answer later in life by joining the National Guard and being deployed to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as a paralegal supervisor.

Others were already in the process of answering it.

Chris Boissonnault, Marine Corps veteran and director of the Office for Military and Veteran Students at Duquesne, was tasked with driving 11 new marine recruits to Logan International Airport on the day of the attacks.

The recruits were set to fly to Parris Island, S.C. to begin boot camp, but the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all U.S. flights before their plane could take off.

Around this time, Boissonnault’s pager started to go off. He made his way to a phone and heard the news.

He was ordered to take the group back to their homes, and each had a different reaction to the news.

One by one, Boissonnault explained to the new recruits’ families what had happened that day and the next steps their loved ones would go through since they were technically already sworn in as marines.

“There were a couple that were upset, sad… visibly shaken like most of us. There were a couple that were eager to go… They were upset, and they wanted to go get their training done,” Boissonnault said.

“Confusion is probably the best word I would use.”

“‘Laxi-daisy’ to boom”

Lewis Irwin, a political science professor at Duquesne and Army veteran, was grading student essays when a neighbor called and told him to turn on his TV.

By 2001, Irwin had already served in Operation Desert Storm in Iraq from 1990-1991. He had since transitioned to the reserves to become an educator, first at the United States Military College at West Point and then at Duquesne.

Minutes after he turned on the news, Irwin watched the second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.

Soon, he was called to headquarters, where an air of uncertainty hung overhead. Service members were left wondering who had attacked them, why they were attacked and if there would be another one.

“We didn’t know if this was an isolated incident. We didn’t know if there was going to be a follow-up with chemical weapons,” he said.

Approximately 500 miles south at Fort Bragg, Wilson and his fellow service members were also scrambling.

He said there was an instantaneous change.

“We went from ‘laxi-daisy’ to boom. In a split-second we’re on the go … Now we have to prepare like we are going to some kind of action … We are about to go,” he said.

This was new territory for Wilson and his fellow troops.

“Before that happened, the possibility wasn’t there,” he said. “It was peace.”

Wilson, who had not yet been deployed, was sent to Afghanistan in 2008 and again in 2011.

Irwin was reactivated by the military. He had already been to the Middle East once, and in 2004, he went back.

An ongoing battle

In 2011, almost 11 years since Operation Enduring Freedom began in Afghanistan, U.S. Navy Seals shot and killed Osama Bin Laden. While many rejoiced, Stonesifer said it did not provide everyone with the same feelings of closure.

“Where’s that closure when the wound is still festering?” he said.

It is estimated that at least 7,053 U.S. military members and 408,749 civilians died as a result of post-Sept. 11 wars in the Middle East, according to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

In addition to this, American nation building and counter-terrorism efforts have been largely reversed in countries like Afghanistan. After the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan’s capital city, Kabul, in 2021, it took the Taliban 10 days to regain majority control of the country.

Even though the troops came home, some never left the desert.

“They say that the war is over, but for those veterans who are still dealing with those issues… it’s not how it works,” Stonesifer said.

Josh Imhof can be reached at imhofj@duq.edu