As the sun beat down on Gesling Stadium on Wednesday, Sept. 11, and “Jump” by Van Halen played over the loudspeakers, a varied group of veterans, Navy midshipmen, and community members jogged around and around the track carrying American flags over their shoulder — 911 rounds, to be precise.
In observance of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the victims and responders who lost their lives on that day, Pittsburgh’s Steel City Naval ROTC unit organized a commemorative event on Carnegie Mellon’s campus, a 911-lap trek bearing the flag.
The event recognized “the sacrifice of the people on the planes, the firefighters that went and responded,” and all the people who subsequently signed up to serve the country who “also ended up sacrificing,” said Midshipman Ben Condemi, Company Commander of Steel City NROTC and a senior at Carnegie Mellon.
This is the first year Steel City NROTC has hosted this event, run by the midshipmen with the support of unit staff, but they’re planning to make it an annual tradition, Condemi said.
In past years, the Corps has hosted a Sept. 11 bleacher climb for midshipmen at Gesling Stadium with the support of Carnegie Mellon police. This year, however, they “decided to do something bigger [to] get more of the community involved,” said Midshipman Griffin Mekler-Culbertson, Steel City NROTC’s Company Executive Officer and a senior at the University of Pittsburgh.
“We underestimated how much the community would respond, and how well they would respond,” Condemi said.
The unit team was expecting around 10 people who had preregistered, but throughout the day, word of the walk spread, and more people arrived to bear the flag. Condemi estimated that more than 50 people participated throughout the day, jogging or walking around the track with a flag from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.
Alongside over a dozen Navy and Marine Corps midshipmen, veterans at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon came to carry the flag, as well as people simply walking by. Even people who didn’t know about the event prior decided to join in the tribute, Mekler-Culbertson said.
The team accomplished their goal of completing 911 laps around the track by running the last two laps with the Carnegie Mellon football team at the start of their practice that evening, since Condemi is a Carnegie Mellon football player in addition to his role with Steel City NROTC.
Midshipman Aaron Elm was the officer in charge of the event, the “boots on the ground” leader, Condemi said, “getting everything tasked out, organized, all the logistics” taken care of. Although Elm wasn’t alive on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, through research leading up to the day he came to appreciate the gravity of what happened much more.
“When I first started working on the event, I wasn’t really emotionally connected to the events,” Elm said. But after reading through stories of heroism and “normal people doing extraordinary things” in the face of terror, he “really built an emotional connection” to the attacks.
“I was literally in the Pitt computer lab, and I started crying… reading about these people and their experience.” Elm said. Of those he studied, Elm most remembered the stories of Todd Beamer, a passenger on Flight 93 who attempted to take control of plane after it was hijacked, and Steven Siller, a firefighter who had just finished his shift and “had every reason to not go to the towers,” but still grabbed his gear and ran in to help people.
The Sept. 11 attacks carry particular weight for midshipmen, especially as their commission dates near, because of how much the Navy and Marine Corps are “shaped by the events of that day,” Mekler-Culbertson said. He and Condemi are commissioning as Marine Corps and Naval officers, respectively, at the end of the academic year, and Elm will commission as a Marine officer at the end of next year.
“All of our active-duty staff who’ve been in the Navy and Marine Corps for 10-plus years, they’ve all been affected by it. Pretty much their whole career is based around that event and the war on terror,” Mekler-Culbertson said.
As newly minted officers, they will be entering “into a different Navy and Marine Corps, and it’s important for us to understand how it got to the point where it is now, because that day set all of our seniors’ careers” on their current path. “Now it’s for us to take over and understand and pay homage to what occurred.”
In a back room of the Steel City NROTC building on Forbes Avenue, the unit has a wall of old composite photos showing incoming NROTC students in the late 1990s.
“The class of 2002, class of 2003, these are people who came to college in 1999 in a similar spot to where we are now,” in a time of relative peace for the Navy and Marine Corps, Mekler-Culbertson said.
“There’s no imminent threat that we would know of, the same as those people joining in college in 1999, and then 2001 hits, they graduate a year later, and now they’re at war,” he said, remarking on the “surreal” nature of “seeing those composites and understanding them in the context of what we’re doing here,” about to commission and facing an uncertain future.
An Army officer that Elm ran with told him “about how he joined … in August of 2001, just looking for adventure, something to leave his hometown, and then 9/11 happened, and he was going to war,” Elm said.
For the unit, Condemi said, their event on Sept. 11 honors the people involved not just on that day in 2001, but in the more than 20 years since.
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