09/11/2026
Thank you Gordon M Crothers Auxiliary Unit 15 for this post and the moving video tribute shared yesterday. If you haven’t seen it, please go to their page and watch it.
Our Fun Fact Fridays are usually a little lighter, but history isn’t always fun. Sometimes, remembering it is the most important thing we can do.
Today marks 25 years since September 11, 2001.
Most of us know the three places forever connected with that morning: New York City, the Pentagon, and a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
But the memorials connected to each site contain details you may not know — details designed to preserve not only what happened, but the individual lives behind the history.
🌾 Shanksville, Pennsylvania — The Field of Honor
At the Flight 93 National Memorial, the landscape itself is part of the memorial.
The flight path passes through the Field of Honor toward the crash site. Forty Memorial Groves, each containing 40 trees, honor the 40 passengers and crew members aboard United Airlines Flight 93.
At the Memorial Plaza, the Wall of Names consists of 40 individual panels of polished white marble, one for each passenger and crew member. Spaces between the panels represent each person as an individual, while from a distance they appear to form one solid wall — representing their unified actions that morning.
A 17.5-ton sandstone boulder marks the edge of the general area where Flight 93 impacted the earth. The crash site and debris field are the final resting place of the passengers and crew and remain closed to the public, with access reserved for their families.
🏛️ The Pentagon — 184 Lives, 184 Memorials
Outside the Pentagon, near the location where American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building, you’ll find 184 individual Memorial Units — one for every person killed aboard the aircraft and inside the Pentagon.
Each includes a bench engraved with a victim’s name arching over a shallow, illuminated pool of flowing water.
But look closely and you’ll notice that the benches don’t all face the same direction.
For the 125 people killed inside the Pentagon, the memorials are positioned so that when you read the person’s name, you see the Pentagon in the same view.
For the 59 people aboard Flight 77, they face the opposite direction, toward the aircraft’s approach.
The entire memorial is also arranged according to the ages of the victims, and one of its most powerful features is the Age Wall.
It begins at just 3 inches high, representing the youngest victim, 3-year-old Dana Falkenberg.
As you move through the memorial, it gradually rises — one inch for every year — until it reaches 71 inches, representing the oldest victim, 71-year-old Navy veteran John D. Yamnicky.
One hundred eighty-four people. From 3 years old to 71. Each remembered individually.
🇺🇸 And did you know there is another memorial to the Pentagon victims at Arlington National Cemetery?
In Section 64, the Pentagon Group Burial Marker stands over the gravesite containing unidentified and commingled remains recovered following the attack.
The granite marker has five sides, reflecting the shape of the Pentagon, and bears the names of all 184 people killed inside the Pentagon and aboard Flight 77.
🏙️ New York City — The Wall That Held
Finally, beneath the World Trade Center is something that wasn’t originally intended to be a memorial at all.
When the original World Trade Center was constructed in the 1960s, engineers faced a major problem: the site sat beside the Hudson River.
They constructed a massive reinforced concrete slurry wall around the underground site to hold back the surrounding groundwater.
The enormous excavation surrounded by this wall became known as “the Bathtub” — somewhat ironically, because its entire purpose was to keep the water out.
Then came September 11.
When the Twin Towers collapsed, the structures that had helped support the slurry wall were destroyed.
But the wall held.
Today, a monumental section of that original slurry wall remains visible inside the National September 11 Memorial & Museum’s Foundation Hall.
A structure built decades earlier simply to hold back water survived the destruction around it and continued doing exactly what it was built to do.
Today, it has become a symbol of strength and resilience.
And perhaps there is something fitting about ending today’s Fun Fact Friday there.
September 11 is a story of tremendous loss. It is a story of 40 people aboard Flight 93, 184 lives at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 77, thousands of lives lost in New York, first responders who ran toward danger, families forever changed, and countless lives and years of service shaped by what happened that morning.
But it is also part of the story of what came afterward.
We remembered.
We rebuilt.
We supported one another.
And, like that wall beneath New York City, we held.
Twenty-five years later, there are adults who know September 11 only as history.
That makes remembering — and teaching the generations who came afterward — more important than ever.
🇺🇸 History isn’t always fun, but remembering is one of the most important things we can do.
Never Forget.
September 11, 2001 🇺🇸
