It’s been 25 years and many in San Antonio still remember exactly where they were, and what they were doing on Sept. 11, 2001. The events of that day killed 2,977 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, but the ripple effects were felt nearly 2,000 miles away in Texas.
The deadliest attack on American soil altered the course of so many lives. Over 2 million Americans would go on to serve in the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with more than 7,000 never to return home.
As the country marks the quarter-century anniversary of 9/11, the San Antonio Report shares the stories of those who survived, those who lost loved ones and others who recall how the terrorist attack shook the nation.
‘We’re going to war for this’
A hijacked airplane. A government building. A violent crash.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Monica Morris felt the impact.
Seated in a third floor conference room at the Pentagon, Morris heard what sounded like an explosion at 9:37 a.m. A blast wave knocked Morris and multiple U.S. Army colleagues from their chairs onto the floor.
“I just fell on my knees,” recalled Morris, senior vice commander at VFW Post 76 in San Antonio.
Minutes before American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, Morris was discussing an upcoming trip for soldiers to Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland.
An administrative, non-commissioned officer for the Office of the Chief, Army Reserve, she watched two sergeant majors, Lacey Ivory and Larry Strickland, leave the meeting early. That was the last time they were seen alive.
They perished along with 184 others —125 individuals inside the Pentagon and 59 passengers and crew from the plane — hijacked by terrorists.
Twenty five years later, Morris remembers the chaotic aftermath. She led a new sergeant, who was in charge of medics, through the Pentagon to the clinic. On the way, Morris passed a large window.
“I saw smoke and people running out into the courtyard from the area where the plane hit,” she said. “When I was outside looking for my co-workers, I found them and some of them had blood on themselves from helping the injured.”
The images remain vivid.
“I saw a lot of people upset, crying.” Morris said. “Some were just standing, looking at the building in shock. Once I got outside I was told what had happened in New York City and immediately thought, ‘We’re going to war for this.’”
Seven years later, Morris was selected as First Sergeant and transferred to San Antonio. She retired from the Army in 2013. In 2025, she became the first female commander of VFW Post 76.
The anniversary of 9/11 stirs deep emotions.
“I’m grateful I survived,” Morris said. “But I’m very sad that I lost some of my friends.”
The names of the officers who left the Pentagon meeting early, Lacey and Strickland, along with the name of another friend are tattooed on her right arm.
Remembering a classmate
Tina Mora Valadez still remembers the first time about six decades ago she saw Dora Menchaca, who was the new girl at St. John Berchmans Catholic School.
“I remember that she raised her hand to answer a question, and she had a very booming voice,” Valadez said. When she turned to look, “I was mesmerized by her looks.”
She befriended the green-eyed, fair-skinned girl with jet-black hair, and the two were inseparable through their years at Providence High School.
In 2001, Menchaca was returning home to Santa Monica from a work trip on Sept. 11, when the plane she was on, American Airlines Flight 77, was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon.
It was a Tuesday when Valadez got the call in her classroom in Austin, a call from Menchaca’s husband that devastated her and the world.
The lifelong friends had stayed close as they went on to separate colleges, careers and marriage, visiting whenever Menchaca made her way home to visit family in Texas.
In August 2001, Menchaca booked a flight for Valadez to visit her for the first time in California. “I won’t take no for an answer,” she recalled of their conversation. “We spent a week together, and it was just so lovely.”
They went sightseeing, walked and gardened. Valadez cooked Mexican food for her friend and got to know Menchaca’s 4-year-old son. They talked.
“I asked her if she was afraid of flying, and she said not at all,” Valadez remembers.
Twenty-five years later, Valadez and the Providence Class of ‘73 gather regularly to remember their classmate, the top student who was friends with everyone, even girls in other cliques, as her best friend recalls.
“We will always remember Dora,” said another classmate, Gisela Girard.
Valadez visited the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City for the first time in January. She found the engraving of her friend’s name at the reflecting pool.
“You just don’t expect the monument to be that big, and when you see it, the whole perimeter is surrounded by names,” she said. “It’s overwhelming.”
Honoring the fallen
“9/11 changed the trajectory of my life,” U.S. Army veteran Geoff Grant said. “After that, I was really paying attention to what was happening around me with people coming together and serving others, and just the unity that happened after 9/11, and that inspired me to go join the military.”
Grant would go on to deploy to the Middle East twice, and he said he’ll take any chance he can get to keep the legacy alive of two of the most impactful people on his life, one who was killed in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan.
Army 1st Lt. Kevin J. Gaspers, who was described by friends as one of America’s “finest citizens,” and Army Sgt. 1st Class Alvin A. Boatwright, remembered by friends as “the guy people want to be like.”
This coming week, Grant will run in memory of them in the One Flag Forward relay, put on by USAA and several other veterans groups. Grant currently serves as the cooperate impact director at the organization.
Members of the military community will carry the American flag 250 miles from Ground Zero in New York to Washington D.C. over the course of five days. San Antonio will host its own local version of the race this Sunday.
“The whole point is, it starts on September 12th to highlight the unity of us coming together after September 11,” Grant said. “It was a tragic event, but also highlighting the sacrifice and service and unity that happened after.”
The city will host other events to commemorate the anniversary, including a remembrance climb hosted by the San Antonio Fire Department to honor the 343 firefighters who died responding to 9/11.
Educating the next generation
Office 4B747.
That’s where Lieutenant Colonel Santiago G. Bueno III was when a plane hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Bueno, a San Antonio native, was a U.S. Army captain at the time, serving as an intern at the Pentagon. He remembers that day starting as a regular work day. He’d just come back from a work trip in Africa and prepped for a 9:30 a.m. briefing.
He watched as a second plane hit the World Trade Center. Minutes later, he felt the building shake and saw a ball of fire through a window.
Through the confusion that followed, he called his wife, Honey, and later his mom. As phone lines went down, he was able to stay connected with his mom, who carried out three-way calls with family members of Bueno’s colleagues who couldn’t get in touch with their loved ones.
“We were not prepared,” Buneo recalled.
Then he, and the rest of those who made it out of the building, walked a long distance from the Pentagon to King Station in full uniform.
Having served in the military for nine years, Bueno was at a point in his career where most leave. But after 9/11, he knew he couldn’t leave.
“I would have felt that I was betraying my oath, my soldiers, my troopers that were stationed in Kuwait, that I had prepared for that deployment they were on,” he said.
Now in his 50s, Bueno is currently the Senior Army Instructor at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio Independent School District. He’s been a JROTC instructor for SAISD since 2019.
A history major in college, Bueno would’ve gone straight into teaching if he hadn’t joined the Army, he said. Now, his mission is molding students into “better citizens.”
He doesn’t like talking about that day, he said, but he and Honey made a video to talk about their experience for his future grandchildren and remaining relatives. His office walls are mosaics of framed memories from his service time. One frame has a pencil sketch of “September 11, 2001,” inscribed on the chapel built in the spot where the plane hit the Pentagon that day.
Today, Bueno will be delivering a speech to students at Thomas Edison High School in honor of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
He plans to talk about preparedness and the power of choice in responding to a crisis:“Sometimes you can’t control the situation you’re in, but you can control the way you respond to it.”
Calls to serve
U.S. Army veteran Amber Davila recalls being in class at Marshall High School and watching news coverage of the Twin Towers. That day, and the American unity she observed in the days that followed would inspire her to enlist in the military.
“It wasn’t just 9/11. It was 9/12. It was 9/13. It was 9/14… I think it was one of the few times that I can remember in our in our country and in our society where patriotism was at a max,” Davila said.
The Afghanistan War would go on to be the longest American conflict, spanning 20 years. Davila said that even though time went on and U.S. military efforts faded from the forefront of the public’s mind, she and other veterans went though new battles; like combatting PTSD they developed from service and advocating for veteran benefits.
“I think that’s the problem with long wars, right? It’s that people get tired, and they want to move on, and they forget that we don’t get to move on,” she said. “We’re fighting for our benefits. We’re fighting for what we were promised in service of our country.”
For one of San Antonio’s leading military medicine experts, Dr. Alan Peterson, 9/11 kicked off over two decades of combat-related PTSD research.
Peterson was serving in the U.S. Air Force at the time, and he immediately deployed from his base in Texas to New Jersey to create a military field hospital to treat survivors in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. He was then tasked with leading a team of military mental health professionals at the Armed Forces Mortuary at Dover Air Force Base.
Deceased victims of the attacks were brought to Dover for identification, an immensely difficult task, both emotionally and mentally, that at the time was often being preformed by military personal without prior experience under these circumstances. Dentists, for example, that were being tasked with finding teeth in body bags to use for human remains identification.
“Then the main job was to do interventions with individuals to prepare them to go into the mortuary, do the human remains identification, and to do our best to prevent them from becoming psychological casualties,” Peterson said.
He then deployed several times to the Middle East, at one point treating casualties from the Second Battle of Fallujah, which would result in the deadliest month of either war, with 137 U.S. casualties in November 2004.
“I started to see a lot of the psychological wounds of war, TBI, and post traumatic stress disorder, and realized that I was ill prepared to know exactly what to do with these individuals,” Peterson said. “…That was the challenge, there were no treatments that ever had been done, no study had been done to look at how to treat PTSD in the war zone at that point.”
PTSD and TBIs would become the signature injuries of post-9/11 combat, with Peterson spearheading treatment research at UT Health San Antonio through his STRONG Star consortium for combat-related PTSD.
Wide-reaching impacts
Though the two wars that commenced following 9/11 officially came to a close with the deadly pullout from Afghanistan in 2021, for many, the hardships have continued.
Texas Army veteran Nichole Guttery deployed to both Afghanistan and Iraq after being inspired to join the military following 9/11, but for her one of the hardest parts about the 25 years since the attacks was seeing the way the wars that followed came to a close. She said it was especially difficult to watch the fates of American allies play out on television.
“Seeing them on the news, trying to get on the planes that were taking off, ‘like please save us.’ That was so hard to watch because why didn’t we, right?” Guttery said.
She said interpreters were critical to the success of American efforts abroad, and she was personally friends with several, making the Afghanistan pullout in 2021 more difficult to watch.
“It’s just really hard finding out that these people aren’t given some sort of reward or deal after saving our servicemen, saving our lives, helping us interpret what is going on over there,” she said.
Thousands of locals who supported U.S. forces as translators or in other capacities, at great risk to themselves and their families, struggled to get visas to safety in the aftermath of the wars.
Going up in Iraq, Azad Sleigher, who now lives in the San Antonio area and volunteers with the refugee resettlement group No One Left Behind, always dreamed of being a translator for U.S. armed forces.
He practiced his English on American soldiers, and he gave up a scholarship at university to finally become a translator for the U.S. military.
It was then that the death threats started. He was soon kidnapped by local militia, angry at his collaboration with Americans.
He was able to get a Special Immigrant Visa for translators, an immensely difficult process that required a letter of support from an American general, and forced him to leave his family behind in Iraq. Inspired by the troops he served with as a translator, when he got to America, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.
“I always wanted a better life, and just to be free. To be an American,” Sleigher said.
It was 25 years ago, the evening of 9/11, President George Bush addressed the nation and spoke of that same sentiment of freedom.
“America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.”
The San Antonio Report’s military and veterans coverage is supported by Report for America.
