A traveling display of flags fly June 14, 2003, at the temporary memorial for Flight 93 near Shanksville. The flags were once flown at Ground Zero in New York City. (Sean Stipp | Tribune-Review)
Story by BRIAN C. RITTMEYER
Photographs by SHANE DUNLAP
Tribune-Review
Sept. 7, 2021
When terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, shockwaves rippled through the nation and changed the course of history.
For those who watched the World Trade Center towers fall 20 years ago and took it as a call to serve in the armed forces, it changed the course of their lives — not only what they did, but who they would become.
Aryanna Hunter, Dan Peters and Barbara Fischer were all 18 years old in 2001.
The day before the attacks, Hunter was attending a community college with plans to become an elementary school teacher.
Peters was a high school dropout, going nowhere fast.
Fischer was already planning to enlist, but just as a way to pay for college.
They were three different people, on three different paths, in three different places, who all saw what happened that day and decided to enlist.
According to a report by the Military Times, 181,510 people enlisted in the active-duty military during fiscal year 2002, which started three weeks after the attacks. Another 72,908 joined the enlisted reserves.
It was an event that impacted an entire generation, said Lara Elizabeth Putnam, a research professor in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Putnam researches local, national and transnational social movements and political participation.
“Many young people experienced a moment in their life when they hadn’t felt a national crisis before. A good number stepped into public service and joined the military in the wake of that,” Putnam said.
“We make our history, and history remakes us,” she said. “It doesn’t happen uniformly.”
As they now approach 40, Hunter, Peters and Fischer reflect on their decisions to serve.
On Sept. 10, 2001, Hunter was living what she thought was a normal life in Phoenix. She had started studies at a community college and was working in a Walmart portrait studio.
She grew up in Sherwood, Ore., the youngest of 10 from a poor family with no history of military service.
“I was content with what I was doing,” she said.
She was getting ready for a morning class when the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. She stopped and watched the news. Then she saw a second plane hit the South Tower.
“I was 18, so I didn’t understand the full impact of what I was witnessing on television,” she said.
Not wanting to miss class, she went to her college, which was next to Luke Air Force Base. She remembers seeing a flood of cars heading into the base.
Her class was canceled.
“I just felt this call to serve,” she said. Childhood memories surfaced of how people helped her family in times of need, providing a Thanksgiving turkey or presents at Christmas. “I can remember we relied so heavily on our community to support us. I felt it was something I should be doing.”
Three weeks later, she was visiting recruiters for the Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force at a mall.
“9/11 for me, it was a clear attack against America. These were people attacking our way of life, our values. I felt confident we should be defending our nation,” she said. “I was young, I was fit, I could do the job.”
Without a family history of military service to guide her, Hunter didn’t know which branch to join.
“The Army recruiter was the best sales guy,” she said. He told her the Army had the most women and the most jobs.
“He didn’t lie,” she said. “Although, when I got to my first unit, I was the only woman there.”
She started basic training two months after Sept. 11. In February 2003, she was on a plane to the border of Jordan and Iraq, where she worked in communications with the Air Defense Artillery Unit, 18th Airborne Corps. Her job was to make sure equipment was working so units could talk to each other.
It was the first time she’d ever left the country. The Iraq War started the next month.
Hunter was in a combat support role, and her deployment ran six months. She never had to fire her weapon, but said she did have to “lock and load.”
She was honorably discharged as a specialist after four years, the length of her contract. She had considered serving longer, a full 20 years.
“War is a really difficult thing to go through,” she said.
A factor in deciding to leave the Army was the sexual trauma that Hunter says she endured. She said a man who outranked her took advantage of her and raped her. She’s been through therapy and counseling, and now does advocacy work.
“I never told anyone until 2019,” when she went to therapy, she said.
Since leaving the Army, Hunter used the GI Bill to go back to school, earning a bachelor’s degree in business and two master’s degrees, in business and public administration. She’s now a year into her doctoral studies at Point Park University.
She is the director of the Office of Veterans Services at the University of Pittsburgh, which helps veterans and their dependents.
Hunter came to Pennsylvania in 2005 because her first husband, whom she met in the Army, was from Mercer County. They were married until 2013.
She met Lee Wagner, a Marine, in Pittsburgh in November 2019. They plan to marry in October.
She has three children — a son, 15, and two daughters, 13 and 5. She and Wagner are expecting a son, whose due date is Sept. 11.
Looking back on her service, she has mixed feelings.
“I feel very honored to have been a part of something bigger than myself and make that commitment to my country,” she said.
Hunter feels she made a difference. She’s honored and proud to be part of the military community, and enjoys the instant camaraderie she has with other veterans.
She doesn’t often think about how 9/11 changed the course of her life.
“For me, that day marked the start of my adulthood. I was 18 years old when I signed on the dotted line. I’m 38 years old today. My entire adult life, my country has been at war,” she said. “Those of us who have been to war are the first to say we don’t want to go back, so let’s find another way.”
When Dan Peters saw the attacks happen on Sept. 11, he wanted to fight. But since he dropped out of high school at the start of his senior year, he had to do something else first — get his GED.
“I was a deadbeat kid. I was going nowhere,” said Peters, who grew up in Lower Burrell. “I had no respect for authority. I never had that patriotic bone in me. I was a high school dropout going nowhere fast.”
Then a laborer working in landscaping, Peters was at his boss’s house that day when the man screamed for him to come in.
“He was just pointing at the TV. We just watched. And then the second plane hit,” Peters said. He remembered hearing President George W. Bush’s address, saying that the nation would fight.
“I had to go,” he said. “It hit me like a ton of bricks what I had to do, what I wanted to do.”
When he first went to recruiting offices to enlist, he found them empty. But he persisted.
“I didn’t care what branch. I was joining,” he said. “I knew we were going to war. My family had fought in Vietnam and other wars. I couldn’t have an opinion of a war if I didn’t do something about it.”
The Marines turned him away, he said, because he was too small. The Army accepted him but said he needed to get a GED. He took the test, and passed on the first try.
But because of a backup with training dates, it took two years for him to get in. “There was so many people like me who enlisted,” he said.
Peters became an Army paratrooper. He served 12 years, retiring six years ago as a staff sergeant.
He did four tours, three in Afghanistan and one in Iraq.
He got to fight.
“Looking back on it, you kind of wish you didn’t. Because you remember it. And it never goes away,” he said.
“I was scared,” he said. “There is no way to describe what it feels like when you’re being shot at. I want to forget it and I want it to go away.”
He’ll also never forget the sound of a rocket coming in. Or the first dead person he helped carry, who had been killed by an improvised explosive device.
“I can still feel him. He was just so heavy, dead weight,” he said. “I could feel his head in the bag.”
Despite everything, after his first four years were up, he re-enlisted while in Iraq. He’d re-enlist twice more, the last being indefinite.
“I fell in love with it,” he said. “I fell in love with the structure, the discipline, everything I didn’t have as a teenager.
“To this day, I still live by my Army core values. I guess that will never die.”
He remembers celebrating when Osama bin Laden was killed in May 2011.
“Now the war was going to be over — we got the son of a bitch,” he said. “It wasn’t over. We just kept going.”
He may have served a full 20 years, but injuries to his hips exacerbated by the physical intensity of his service — including being hit by an explosion.
“Being a paratrooper was amazing, but it hurt a lot,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world. And I’d do it all again.”
Now 38, Peters has worked the last five years as a diesel mechanic. He met his wife, Luz, an Arizona native who did one tour with the Army in Afghanistan, at Fort Richardson in Alaska. They’ve been married 16 years and have three sons, ages 15, 12 and 10.
He commands the honor guard at the American Legion post in Lower Burrell, where he is the post’s first vice commander.
The 20th anniversary “means I’m getting old,” he said. “I don’t feel that it’s been 20 years. It feels so fresh, it feels so recent.”
Rather than Sept. 11, 2001, Peters tries to celebrate Sept. 12, 2001, and what the nation was like on that day.
“As terrible as 9/11 was, 9/12 — that was something else,” he said. “Nobody cared about your political agenda. We were one country, one nation, united.
“The day after is when every American saw what we were capable of doing. We were capable of coming together. We were capable of peace in our own country,” he said. “I find it very sad I don’t think we could have that anymore.”
Barbara Fischer graduated high school in Southern California in 2001 and started the process of enlisting in the Air Force Reserves before Sept. 11 to help with paying for school.
“I didn’t have many people in my family who were military,” she said.
When the attacks happened, she still had a way out if she didn’t want to go through with it.
“I had every chance to back out,” she said. But, “I had this overwhelming urge. This is my purpose. I felt like I needed to continue the process.”
She remembers being at a friend’s house the night before the attacks. They had just gotten up that morning when her friend got a phone call and they turned the television on.
“I remember my heart dropping into my stomach. Stuff got real,” she said. “Americans attacked on American soil, that hadn’t happened since Pearl Harbor.”
First, she was worried about her father, who traveled for work and had been at the Twin Towers two weeks before — he had sent her a picture from there. He was home safe.
Her next thought was her plan to enlist, and that she had a way out.
“I knew what that kind of attack meant. We were at war,” she said. But instead of changing course, “I got this feeling of greater purpose once it happened.”
Before Sept. 11, Fischer had initially approached an Army recruiter. She wanted to be an attorney, following in the footsteps of her grandfather, Eugene Fischer, her hero. But she said the recruiter made it sound too easy, so she talked with an Air Force Reserves recruiter.
She ended up in the Air Force Security Forces, the branch’s version of military police.
Following training, and after six or seven months at her home base in California, she found herself deployed to war, which was a shock.
“I assumed I needed certain experience. That was not the case,” she said. “I had no rank on my sleeve.”
As much of a shock it was to her, it was apparently unthinkable for others. She said she knew of people breaking their fingers or arms, or women saying they were pregnant, to avoid being deployed.
“You learn a lot about human nature,” she said.
She was in Qatar for Operation Enduring Freedom and extended into Iraqi Freedom. Her base served as an information hub for the war; planes loaded with bombs were constantly taking off.
“We were one of the first groups to land there,” she said. “We lived in a tent city on base. I never felt clean.”
While there were incidents of shots fired at the gates of her base, and they lived under the threat of attack, Fischer said she never had to fire her weapon.
“We had a morgue on base,” she said. “It was a tent and it had a bunch of caskets there, ready to go.”
As a woman, she felt the need to prove herself. She refused to let men help her with anything.
“I refused to let anybody help me,” she said. “I felt like I had to prove myself, that I could keep up. It’s not easy for a woman being in that situation.”
In a profession that’s 90% male, sexual harassment was “a given,” she said. It contributed to her leaving the service.
She was honorably discharged after six years in the reserves. She ended up working in law enforcement, as a custody specialist for a sheriff’s department in California.
Using her veteran benefits, Fischer has earned three associates degrees, in liberal arts, sociology and behavioral sciences. She now is studying business through Penn State from her Wilmerding home, where she’s a full-time student and mom to her 2-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter. Her husband, John, also from California, works in a warehouse.
Looking back on her service, Fischer has mixed emotions. She has a great sense of pride in her country but is angered that she wasn’t able to accomplish her goal of serving 20 years.
“If I had to go back, I’d do it again,” she said. “I’d still enlist. I’d still do everything.”
Brian C. Rittmeyer is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Brian at 724-226-4701, brittmeyer@triblive.com or via Twitter @BCRittmeyer.