JBVAMC remembers, pays homage to those lost on 9/11
On Sept. 11, the Jesse Brown Veteran Affairs Medical Center held a 9/11 memorial event in the medical center’s Prescription Room. The event was held to pay homage and remember the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil and the lives lost that day.
The event began with Chaplain Hippolytus Njoku’s invocation. He said God changes all things, and he is the hope and the healing, and the courage of those who people depend on for loss and tragedies.
“We will reflect today on American experience of that Sept. 11 … the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans,” he said during the invocation. “Today we will remember and pray fellow Americans who were on those planes, those who were inside those towers, and those who were on land experienced the fear … and cried for their safety.”
Dr. Sarah Unterman, the JBVAMC Chief of Staff, said when she thinks of Sept. 11, it brings her back to medical school. Unterman was in her second year of medical school, and this was before smartphones, so she wasn’t aware of the events that were unfolding that day. It wasn’t until she arrived at school that she received the news of an airplane hitting the World Trade Center.
Like most parents who have children who were born after 2001, Unterman said when trying to describe how the country was feeling that day has been interesting because her children don’t have a concept of what happened that day.
“When I was trying to explain to them how we felt and some of the stories that came out of Sept. 11, I came upon one of the most uplifting stories,” explained Unterman. “We have all heard stories of bravery and stories of people working together who would have never known each other before [and] lifelong friendships that were built off this tragedy that came from it.
“One of the stories that has gotten short shrift that I find uplifting is the story of the boat lift that day. If you remember, anybody in southern Manhattan was cut off, they couldn’t go anywhere all the tunnels and bridges were closed. They had hundreds of thousands of people who couldn’t get home or just out of Manhattan.”
Unterman added that the Coast Guard saw what was happening, and that people were starting to mass at the southern tip of Manhattan, and they called for all available boats to help move people from southern Manhattan to wherever they needed to go. That day every boat that was within reasonable distance came. None of this was official it was just everybody working together for the good of hundreds of thousands of strangers.
“People would get on and they would fill [the boats] as much as they could and the Coast Guard decided they weren’t going to be too stressed out about limits on how many people could go on the boat,” she said. “That day through the goodness of random strangers, this boat lift moved 500,000 people from southern Manhattan to places up and down the coast. That’s the largest boat lift in history.”
She pointed out that the Coast Guard saw that there was a problem and people said, “We are going to help.”
Unterman stressed the importance of helping others when they are in need. She also encouraged individuals to listen to other stories from that day.
“Some of us probably knew people who were lost in the attacks or who survived but lost a piece of themselves in the attacks,” Unterman said. “This is a very somber and life changing event for many of us. The kind of thing where everybody knows exactly where they were when they first found out and sitting in front of the television as things changed in real time.
“So, today we can remember the unity that resulted from that time and how we all, for at least a little while, realized that America needs to stand together — all Americans, we’re all our neighbors. If we don’t work together, we are not going to be able to do great things as we saw that we can do when we did work together.”