How a New Generation of Troops Will Remember 9/11

When Ryan Manion stands before thousands of midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy this September, she will see something that would have been almost unimaginable when her brother Travis attended the academy.

Most of them weren’t alive on Sept. 11, 2001.

Manion saw that reality clearly at the academy’s 9/11 Heroes Run last year. Looking across a crowd filled with midshipmen, she estimated that 95% of the people standing in front of her had not yet been born when terrorists attacked the United States.

And that means something to those of us who did experience it, who were there, Manion told Military.com. It’s important that you keep showing up.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the phrase “Never Forget” is confronting an inevitable generational transition.

An increasing number of Americans being asked to remember the attacks, including the young men and women now preparing to lead the nation’s military, have no personal memory of them.

For Manion, CEO of the Travis Manion Foundation and sister of a Marine officer killed in Iraq, that doesn’t make remembering Sept. 11 less important. It makes the responsibility greater.

“We’re 25 years out,” she said. “It becomes even more important for us to kind of double down on that commitment to make sure that every single American understands what took place that day.”

The Day Everything Changed

Manion was a college student on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Her brother, Travis Manion, was a midshipman at the Naval Academy.

She remembers going to English class that morning, unsure what else to do. After the second plane struck the World Trade Center, her professor told the class to take out a piece of paper and write down what they were feeling.

“The world has changed,” she remembers him telling them. Years later, Manion found what she had written.

Her thoughts had immediately gone to her family. Her father was a career Marine. Her brother was preparing for military service.

“What if this leads to war,” she recalled writing, “and my brother and my dad have to go to war?” Her fear proved prescient.

Travis Manion had entered the Naval Academy before 9/11, at a time when his sister assumed he would graduate, serve his military commitment and eventually move on to something else. After the attacks, that changed.

“You saw a very dramatic shift,” Ryan Manion said. “It went from they were there during a time of peace, and the next thing you know, we were at war.” She saw the change in her brother, too.

“My brother’s focus and resolve definitely switched,” she said.

The cost of the coming wars was already becoming apparent before Travis even graduated. Ryan recalled that he had friends killed in Afghanistan while he was still at the academy.

By the time the Naval Academy Class of 2004 graduated, she said, everyone understood many of those newly commissioned officers would soon deploy. Travis would be among them.

A Hat That Connected 9/11 to the Wars That Followed

Before Travis Manion left for his second deployment to Iraq, he and another Marine traveled to New York City. They went to FDNY Rescue Company 1 in Manhattan, which had suffered devastating losses on Sept. 11.

They didn’t know anyone there. Travis simply knocked on the firehouse door.

I’m Travis. I’m a Marine. I’m leaving for Iraq in a few weeks, Ryan recalled her brother telling the firefighters. He wanted to come inside, thank them and say hello.

The firefighters welcomed the Marines. They spent the day together, eating and trading stories. Travis had already completed one deployment and talked about what he had experienced in Iraq.

Before he left, the firefighters gave him shirts, hats and other items from Rescue 1. Travis gave one of the hats to his father.

On the front was “Rescue One, New York City.” On the back were the words: 9/11. Never Forget.

“Dad, remember, like this is what we’re doing,” Ryan recalled Travis telling him. “This is what it’s all about.”

Ryan still has the hat. It sits in her home, and she typically wears it every Sept. 11.

For her, it represents the line connecting the attacks in 2001 to the generation that went to war afterward.

“What happened in 2001 stretched, let’s face it, all the way into…the withdrawal in Afghanistan,” she said. “It was an entire generation that was affected.”

Travis Manion never returned from his second deployment. He was killed in Iraq in 2007 while protecting fellow Marines.

From 500 People to More Than 60,000

After Travis was killed, family and friends established a memorial fund. His mother, Janet Manion, soon pushed to turn it into something larger: the Travis Manion Foundation.

Ryan and her father initially envisioned something relatively modest, a local organization in the Philadelphia area that would allow Janet to honor her son’s legacy of service. Janet had bigger ambitions.

In 2008, the organization held its first 9/11 Heroes Run in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. About 500 people participated.

Ryan remembers being amazed. Her mother immediately wanted more.

“We need to have one of these in every city and town across the country,” Ryan recalled her saying.

Ryan and her father suggested perhaps they should first try to get 1,000 people to show up in Doylestown the following year.

Today, the race series has grown to roughly 100 events around the world, with more than 60,000 participants expected this year.

And on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, participation appears to be accelerating.

Manion said registrations are up more than 30% from last year, even though the foundation hasn’t fundamentally changed how it is promoting the events. “I think it is about people recognizing it’s 25 years,” she said.

The run, however, is only the mechanism. “It’s not just a 5K,” Manion said.

The race, she explained, is a way to bring communities together each September to remember what happened and honor those who served. That mission becomes more complicated with every passing year.

When Memory Becomes History

For Manion, the transition feels personal. Her own daughter is now a 20-year-old midshipman at the Naval Academy. She was born just 10 months before Travis was killed in Iraq.

Ryan can now look at her daughter and her daughter’s classmates, young Americans preparing for the same profession Travis entered, and recognize the distance between their experiences.

Ryan remembers exactly where she was when America was attacked.

Travis experienced the transformation of the Naval Academy from a school preparing officers largely during peacetime into one sending graduates to war. Today’s midshipmen inherited the consequences and lessons of that era without having experienced its beginning.

Manion compares the transition to something she experienced growing up. She learned about Pearl Harbor from her grandfather’s generation. Now, she believes Sept. 11 is undergoing a similar transformation. It is moving from lived experience to history.

That puts the responsibility on those who remember to explain not only what happened on Sept. 11, she said, but what happened afterward. Especially Sept. 12.

Manion remembers the sense of unity that followed the attacks, the feeling that Americans were confronting something together.

There was something about that shared experience, she said. We were all in together. Like, we were one America.

As horrific as the attacks were, she said, the country’s response also demonstrated something worth passing to another generation. “It was a beautiful expression of how we came together as a country.”

‘We Still Need You’

That idea has expanded beyond the Heroes Run. The Travis Manion Foundation now operates more than 60 chapters across the country and works to put veterans and families of fallen service members back into positions of service in their communities.

Manion describes the philosophy simply: invest in veterans so they can empower others. Taking off a military uniform doesn’t erase the desire to serve, she said. “We still need you.”

One of the foundation’s flagship efforts, Character Does Matter, trains veterans to work with young people and teach lessons centered on service, courage, integrity and character.

Manion said 1 million children have gone through the program and interacted with veterans who help them understand what it means to live a life of character.

The concept reflects the larger challenge Manion sees surrounding the anniversary of Sept. 11. Remembrance cannot depend indefinitely on people who witnessed the attacks. Eventually, someone else has to carry the story. And, she argues, remembering cannot simply mean looking backward once a year.

‘If Not Me, Then Who?’

Before Travis left for Iraq, someone asked him why he had to go back. His response became five words that his family would eventually turn into the rallying cry of the foundation bearing his name:

Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, Ryan Manion believes those words offer an answer to what “Never Forget” should mean for a generation that cannot personally remember.

It’s not just about saying we will never forget, she said. It’s about what we do after that.

She sees the same question in the firefighters who entered the World Trade Center towers and in the men and women who subsequently served in America’s wars.

But she doesn’t believe the question belongs only to people who wear uniforms.

“We can wake up every day and ask ourselves that same question,” Manion said, “and live lives worthy of their service and their sacrifice.”