Sep. 10—Stationed in Bosnia. Attending boot camp. Hoping to enlist.
Sept. 11, 2001, altered many people’s lives as they watched iconic symbols in New York City crumble. Friends and family members died.
Though many groups have been impacted, those serving the United States had a unique perspective when watching an attack on America unfold.
Three local servicemen who were either serving at the time of 9/11 or would enlist shortly after shared their experiences watching the country they defended now under threat.
“It changed everything,” Army veteran Brandon Cortez, director of the nonprofit United Veterans of Kern County, said of 9/11.
Brandon Cortez
Cortez, 40, always knew he wanted to go serve his country even as a teenager, but he had to first meet the physical requirements needed to serve.
When his boss turned on the radio on Sept. 11, 2001, shock set in. Listening to those initial reports motivated him to work even harder to enlist, and he eventually served in the military for just shy of nine years.
“‘Is it really going on?'” Cortez remembers thinking. “‘Is this really happening?'”
Cortez listened to the reports of 9/11, and he wanted to do his part to prevent another such attack from occurring. His fellow servicemen volunteered to deploy, infuriated by the thousands of lives lost amid the rubble and debris.
“What if my children are affected by a terrorist attack?” Cortez said of his service, which included a 15-month tour in Afghanistan.
Josh Dhanens
Josh Dhanens, 44, recalled hearing a commotion while off-duty while serving in the Army in Bosnia and deciding to go investigate.
He and his fellow soldiers hurried over in time to see a second plane crash into the twin towers and explode as an inferno that enveloped the building’s top quarter.
“It was definitely a surreal moment for everybody,” said Dhanens, who’s now executive director of the Kern County Veterans Service Department.
In Sarajevo, where Dhanens was stationed, he was surrounded by military members from other countries and saw the shock flash across their faces. This was the first time in recent years a Western country had been attacked, and many realized the nation was not as safe as they thought it was, he said. Other countries were often rocked by frequent instability, but not America, he said.
“There was definitely a shift” in people’s perspective, Dhanens said.
Their years of combat training — Dhanens had enlisted in 1996 — became acutely relevant. There’s a difference between training for war in the foreseeable future and training for war to be deployed in a definitive location, he added.
The world as Dhanens knew it had changed. Walking loved ones to gates at the airport to board a plane stopped. Security tightened. A defensive approach when interacting with the world rooted itself within servicemen, he said.
But Americans changed, too, said Dhanens, who served until 2005. He also enlisted in the California National Guard after the Army, and was deployed to Iraq for about nine months.
“People realized that there was more going on in the world,” Dhanens said. “And our reaction to it, for good or bad, certainly changed.”
Future generations should remember 9/11 because those events revealed the importance of empathy when encountering values and cultures unfamiliar to Americans, he added. Being amenable to open discussions is key to understanding other places, he added.
“Everything we do in the world matters,” Dhanens said. “Keep that in mind as we make decisions here, even if we … don’t want to care what other people think of what we do. It’s important because it’s going to affect them and potentially us again.”
Francisco Garcia
Delano native Francisco Garcia, 39, always dreamed of traveling the world.
So he enlisted in the Army while still in high school, and he was shipped out to boot camp not long after he turned 18. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was getting ready to go to the shooting range when his drill sergeant announced they were under attack.
“We haven’t (had) … an attack (like that) since Pearl Harbor,” Garcia said.
Two of his friends were from New York and one of their fathers worked at the Pentagon. The father’s office was where a hijacked plane struck a section of the building, though the father survived.
“Thank God … (that) my dad … smoked, because that saved his life,” Garcia recalled his comrade sharing about his dad’s smoking habit.
The dad had stepped outside the Pentagon office to smoke a cigarette.
Garcia said his training became more real as the threat took a clear shape and the potential for an imminent attack materialized. He went to Iraq for one year to protect America’s freedom and its citizens, he said.
Those sights were terrible to see. He remembered not being able to watch the footage of people jumping out of the towers rather than face a fiery death, shortly after the attack.
“The whole world stopped at that time,” Garcia said.
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