Twenty years later, “we continue to weep for those families whose lives were changed forever in an instant,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, during a Mass of Remembrance held Saturday, Sept. 11, in the University Church. “We protest not only the loss of what was but also the loss of what might have been in the lives of the victims.”

He also cited the valor and heroism shown by police, firefighters, and others who risked—and lost—their lives in saving others during the attacks, as well as those who, facing the prospect of imminent horrific death, used their final moments to open their phones and send messages of encouragement and love to those they would be leaving behind.

“I believe it is not too much to say that in the way that they faced death, they taught us how to live,” Father McShane said.

Interfaith Reflection

The Mass followed an interfaith prayer service held the evening before, in which about 20 people gathered at Cunniffe Fountain on the Rose Hill campus and then walked to Finlay Gardens, the site of Fordham’s memorial to the three students and 36 alumni who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We bring our hearts together as a community so that our remembrance, our commitment, our hope, and our light may burn more brightly in the world,” said Joan Cavanagh, Ph.D., GSE ’05, ’17, the University’s director of spiritual and pastoral ministry, during the service.

The service included prayers from different faiths, with readings from the Bible and the Koran, as well as a singing of “Amazing Grace.”

Students read aloud the names of the members of the Fordham community who died on 9/11. After a closing prayer, students placed a few yellow roses in a vase at the base of the memorial.

“Let us remember that we are called to take our individual life and let it shine brightly each day, wherever we are,” said Kathryn Anderson Kuo, associate director of campus ministry for liturgy, in closing. “Perhaps whenever you pass by this memorial, you might ask yourself, how am I bearing witness to the lives of those that have gone before me? How am I letting my light shine, and how am I bringing peace to those who cross my path each day?”

One attendee, John DiDonato, was a 35-year-old MTA subway conductor who had planned to do some sightseeing at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. But instead he stayed in his apartment, watching the nightmare unfold on TV. “It still resonates in my head, just watching the first tower go down. I still see it,” said DiDonato, a communication and media studies student at Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies.

Personal Recollections

On Saturday, at the University Church, Kevin Horbatiuk, FCLC ’78, LAW ’81, took to the podium to read out the names of all 39 Fordham students and alumni who died that day. At the close of the service, Father McShane asked all the people in attendance—numbering about 80—to turn around so they were facing south, toward the former site of the World Trade Center, and raise their right hands in blessing.

Following the service, people were still stopping by the memorial at Finlay Gardens to reflect. Sarah Bel, FCRH ’08, was visiting with her father, Roger Bel, who was working on the 56th floor of the South Tower. “Twenty years ago, in the morning, I thought I was going to die,” he said.

Headed down the stairwell after the first plane hit, he kept going when he was told it was OK to go back up to his office. He recalled helping a woman who was frozen with fright, curled up in a corner, to get out of the building. Asked what the 20th anniversary means to him, he cited the need for greater national unity.

“We really were American that day,” he said. “Everybody helped everybody.”

Caley Knox, a Fordham sophomore, lost her uncle, Thomas Patrick Knox, who was working in the World Trade Center at the time. “We’ve always talked about there being a missing piece” in the family, she said. “I just would have liked to know him.”

“He’s very alive through us, still,” said Knox, who was visiting the memorial with Marlaina Cirone, also a Fordham sophomore.

Cirone said her father watched both planes strike the twin towers from the roof of his business’s building on the Bowery. “It’s something my parents can never forget,” she said. “They know that their lives have been changed ever since that day, and I think for every New Yorker, it’s the same way.”

—Taylor Ha contributed reporting to this story. 

“General, you will be remembered as one of the finest and most dedicated soldiers in a long and storied history of the United States military, no question about it,” the president said after describing Keane’s distinguished 38-year Army career stretching from his time as a cadet in the Fordham ROTC program to the Vietnam War to the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Among other achievements, Trump said, Keane “designed new training methods to ensure that military leaders would always be extremely well prepared for the intensity of combat command,” and also designed “state-of-the-art” counterinsurgency combat training for both urban and rugged environments.

In his own remarks, Keane said he was “deeply honored by this extraordinary award.”

“To receive it here in the White House, surrounded by family, by friends, and by senior government officials, is really quite overwhelming, and you can hear it in my voice,” he said. “I thank God for guiding me in the journey of life,” he said, also mentioning his “two great loves”—his wife Theresa, or Terry, who died in 2016, and the political commentator and author Angela McGlowan, “who I will love for the remainder of my life.”

“With all honesty, I wouldn’t be standing here without their love and their devotion,” he said.

Fordham Ties

Keane is the sixth Fordham graduate to receive the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The most recent alumni recipient was sportscaster Vin Sully, FCRH ’49, awarded the medal by President Barack Obama in 2016.

Keane has advised President Trump and has often provided expert testimony to Congress since retiring as vice chief of staff of the Army in 2003. He is a Fordham trustee fellow and a 2004 recipient of the Fordham Founder’s Award.

Keane grew up in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and was the first member of his family to attend college. He had 16 years of Catholic education, including his time at Fordham, where there was a prevailing idea that “you should have a sense of giving things back, and finding ways to do that,” he said in an interview last week on Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson Show.

Six other Fordham alumni, including some who were his contemporaries at Fordham, attended the ceremony. One of them, Joe Jordan, GABELLI ’74, said he’s impressed with how Keane, on television, “can say so much in such a short time that makes sense.”

“He attributes a lot of it to the philosophy courses he took at Fordham,” said Jordan, an author and speaker specializing in financial services who met Keane about 15 years ago, when he was a senior executive at MetLife and Keane was on the board. “He’s a guy who’s extremely successful, extremely humble, has a common touch, and always remembers his friends and attributes a lot of his success not to himself but to the people around him, and the people who helped form him.”

Also in attendance was retired General Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, who has appeared at Fordham events, including the International Conference on Cyber Security.

Turning Points

Keane earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1966. He became a career paratrooper, going to Vietnam to serve with the 101st Airborne Division, which he later commanded.

He was decorated for valor in Vietnam, which was a turning point for him, with its close combat in which “death was always a silent companion,” he said.

“It was there I truly learned the value of life, the value of human life—to treasure it, to protect it,” he said in his White House remarks. “The experience crystallized for me the critical importance of our soldiers to be properly prepared with necessary skill and the appropriate amount of will to succeed in combat.”

He said he spent his Army career “among heroes who inspired me, and I’m still in awe of them today.”

“My sergeants, my fellow officers, and my mentors shaped me significantly, and several times they saved me from myself,” he said. “That’s the truth of it.”

The 9/11 attacks were a second major turning point for him, he said. He was in the Pentagon when it was attacked, and helped evacuate the injured. He lost 85 Army teammates, he said, and two days later was dispatched to New York City to take part in the response to the World Trade Center attacks.

“It was personal, and I was angry,” he said. “I could not have imagined that I would stay so involved in national security and foreign policy” after leaving the Army, he said. “My motivation is pretty simple: Do whatever I can, even in a small way, to keep America and the American people safe.”

Watch the ceremony honoring General Keane

Several Fordham alumni attended a reception honoring General Keane on March 10. From left: Scott Hartshorn, GABELLI ’98; Phil Crotty, FCRH ’64; the Rev. Charles Gallagher, FCRH ’06; Paul Decker, GABELLI ’65; Laurie Crotty, GSE ’77; General Jack Keane, GABELLI ’66; and Joe Jordan, GABELLI ’74. On the right is Roger A. Milici, Jr., vice president for development and university relations at Fordham.

I was in the Pentagon on 9/11 and lost 85 teammates from the Army Headquarters (among the 125 people killed in the Pentagon and the 59 passengers who died on Flight 77), including a dear friend, Lt. Gen. Timothy J. Maude, a three-star general. My secretary lost five friends she had known for more than 20 years. We sent a general officer to every funeral. Terry, my wife, and I attended scores of funerals. Most were buried in Arlington, all together at a site selected in view of the Pentagon.

On that fateful day, I was in my office when one of my staff rushed in to turn on the TV and advise me something terrible had happened in New York City. I saw that a plane had hit the World Trade Center (WTC). I am a born and raised New Yorker. I noticed it was a blue-sky day and you could not hit the WTC by accident. I knew in 1993 terrorists had tried to bomb the WTC and bring it down from an underground parking garage. I knew instinctively it had to be a terrorist attack and said as much. I ordered the Army Operations Center (AOC) to be brought up to full manning (which was fortuitous because many who occupied it came from the blast area where the plane would eventually hit the Pentagon). The Pentagon is five stories high and five stories below ground level. It houses on a normal day about 25,000 people, most of them civilians. Up until the time the Sears Tower was built in Chicago, it was the largest office building in the U.S. The AOC was on the lowest floor.

We watched the second plane hit the WTC. My operations officer, a two-star general, called me to confirm that the AOC was fully manned. He also advised me that he was monitoring FAA communications. All planes were being grounded, he said, but a plane that took off from Washington, D.C., had turned around in the vicinity of Ohio and approached D.C. from the south along I-95 before turning east, short of the city, and then south again. We know now that the terrorist flying that plane likely believed he was too high. The general and I were discussing procedures for evacuating buildings in D.C. when the plane hit us. My office shook violently and eventually began to fill with smoke. I asked the general if he felt the impact. He said no (he was five stories down under the ground floor). I told him we were just hit and advised him to tell the U.S. Army around the world what happened and that, given the status of the AOC, which was unharmed, we would still maintain command and control of the Army. I told my immediate staff to call home and to evacuate. I kept my executive officer, a colonel, and my aide, a major, with me. I gave them my shirts from my office bathroom, and we soaked them in water and wrapped them around our nose and mouth and headed toward the blast site.

We were about a hundred yards away when the smoke became thicker. People were running from the blast area, and we were ensuring that everyone was getting out. At some point, my executive officer tapped my shoulder and said: “Sir, I think we need to leave this to others and go to the AOC and take command of the Army.” Of course I knew immediately that he was right, and we joined my staff in the AOC. As other officers joined us who were outside the building, we noticed that their shirts were full of blood; some had used their ties as tourniquets to assist the wounded.

We heard the report that five planes inbound to the U.S. were unaccounted for and that fighter aircraft were mustered to engage them. Vice President Cheney had given permission to shoot them down if necessary. I can remember thinking, what must be going through the mind of the pilots knowing they would kill hundreds of innocent people to save thousands. Fortunately, the pilots made visual contact with the airplanes and eventually radio contact, and all five planes were safe. The AOC has very large screens, floor to ceiling, where we monitored activities. The Secretary of the Army was taken by helicopter to our classified alternate site. He did not want to go, but he had no choice.

That night, before I visited the wounded in the hospitals in D.C. and Virginia at about 11 p.m., I told my officers that the Pentagon and the WTC represented the first battle of a new war. “The days of treating terrorists as criminals and bringing them in to the justice system are over. Today’s attack is an act of war, as all terrorist attacks are. The Army will bear the brunt of this fight, and we intend to go find them and we will kill and destroy them by the thousands.” We took one step toward the enemy that night by putting a work plan together to support CENTCOM, who we knew would be in charge of the war. I ordered the 82nd Airborne from Fort Bragg to secure the Pentagon. They were there when people came to work.

We visited five hospitals, seeing all the wounded. The worst had horrific burns. We heard stories of extraordinary heroism. We saw the first responders, many who never left, even though another shift had come on. They told me that because it was the Pentagon, so many of the wounded were initially treated by military people who are trained to treat injuries. In many cases, the bleeding had been stopped, and the wounded were being treated for shock when they arrived. The first responders indicated that lives were saved as a result. Some of the wounded would stay in the hospital for weeks.

The next day, we knew we had a number of people killed because they were unaccounted for. The Army team in the Pentagon showed up for work, on time, mostly civilians. I was so proud of them as I traveled the building to provide reassurance. They knew we were at war and they were a part of something much larger than self. I also knew as I spoke to survivors that many were hurting mentally and emotionally. I ordered the Army surgeon to bring doctors and counselors over to the building to help our folks cope. I also told the Army chief historian to document what took place, it’s part of our history now, and also to record the heroism that took place. When appropriate, I said, we would recognize those involved.

I visited the crash site on 9/12 with the chief engineer, and what I saw was quite remarkable. The upper floors at the plane’s point of entry had collapsed due to the blast and heat from the fire. The Pentagon is actually five independent rings separated by an alley between each ring. The plane entered at the ground floor, knocking down outside lampposts on the approach, and penetrated three of the five rings, with the nose of the aircraft penetrating the inner wall of the third ring. I was looking at what appeared to be a blackened multistory parking garage. I asked, “Where are all the desks, the computers, the walls, the plane?” He said all was consumed in the fire of the jet fuel, likely 2,000-degree heat. He showed me the strut of the plane which held the front tires, and it was in the alley between the third and fourth wing. The whole fuselage had entered the building but nothing was left. I realized that our dead teammates and the remains of the passengers were all around us and had been consumed by the fire.

We ordered the Old Guard, 3rd Infantry from Fort Myer, to the site. They are infantry soldiers. They would come with body bags, and when the fire department recovery teams spotted remains, we asked that all work stop. Everyone on site would stand in place. A four-man team of soldiers would move to the remains and recover them to a tent set up in the parking lot where a chaplain prayed over them with a two-man honor guard at attention. After honors, we turned the remains over to the FBI. They were later returned to us and flown by CH47 helicopter to Dover, Delaware, for identification by their families. We were determined to properly honor our dead as we would on any battlefield.

The engineer indicated that we were standing in the first renovated wedge of the Pentagon, which had not been fully reoccupied as all the new furniture had not arrived. Normally 5,000 people would have been working in that part of the building; at the time the plane hit, however, he estimated that only 2,000 people were there. Moreover, when the building was built during World War II, due to the iron shortage, no rebars were used in the cement beams holding up the floors. As part of the renovation, rebars were inserted. As such, the only part of the Pentagon that had iron rebars in the beams was the area where the plane hit, and that part was less than half occupied. He said the rebars held for 45 minutes, allowing people on the upper floors time to get out. If the plane had hit any other wedge containing approximately 5,000 people, the building would have collapsed immediately, and the casualties would have been on the same scale as the WTC or greater.

A few weeks later, we had the most extraordinary award ceremony I ever participated in. We had to create a new medal for civilians wounded in action because they are not authorized to receive the Purple Heart. The Secretary of the Army and I decorated many people that day for heroism and for their wounds, as they represented everyone who was part of the Army team. They were young and old, men and women, soldiers and civilians, officers and enlisted, black and white. Some were in great physical condition; some were not. It reminded me once again that heroism does not have a gender, a race, a religion, a size, or shape. Anyone willing to give up their life for another, acting instantaneously, has all to do with heart and character. This is about true honor. I was so proud to be among them at the largest and most unique award ceremony of my career.

A few days later, I visited Ground Zero as a senior military leader from New York City representing the Department of Defense. The fire chief in charge of the recovery walked me over the WTC complex of smoldering ruins. It was a macabre and overwhelming experience, as we had all witnessed on TV. I attended the mayor’s evening brief on a pier along the Hudson River. I was impressed; it was as organized as any military operations center. The people were steady, firm, and determined. I offered the mayor the assistance of his military, which had been already offered to him on the phone. As I left, with sirens blasting to take me back to my aircraft, there were hundreds of New Yorkers along the West Side Highway cheering and waving American flags. I was proud of my city, its leaders, and its people. I knew we would never be the same again.

—General Jack Keane, a four-star general, completed more than 37 years of public service in December 2003, culminating in his appointment as acting chief of staff and vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army. General Keane is a 1966 graduate of Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business.

The documentary, entitled In Our Son’s Name, follows the journey of Orlando Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology, and his wife, Phyllis, to reconcile the death of their son. Gregory Rodriguez died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The documentary tells the story of a friendship that formed following the tragedy between Gregory’s bereaved parents and the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the 9/11 conspirators.

In Our Son’s Name premiered at Fordham in the spring of 2015. Since then it has been shown at numerous film festivals, academic institutions, churches, and mosques. It was one of the selections shown in the Global Peace, Peace on Earth, and Atlanta Film Festivals, and has been called: “a compelling message that further violence does not ease the pain of victims’ family members…” complete list of air times can be found at www.inoursonsname.com/tv.php

Locally, the documentary will air on New York stations WLIW21 and on  WLIW21.3 – see air times below.

WLIW21 – September 8 at  2 pm
September 15 at 2 am

Related Articles:

Couple’s Strength Fosters Forgiveness After 9/11

Professor Finds Restorative Justice and Reconciliation After 9/11

Ten years ago, Orlando Rodriguez, Ph.D., was teaching at Fordham on the day his 31-year-old son, Gregory, an assistant vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald, died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Through the awful, lasting grief of losing a child, through searing emotions and sobering realizations, Rodriguez and his wife, Phyllis, transformed their pain into a restorative brand of justice that would bring meaning and dignity to their son’s sacrifice.

Rodriguez’ journey from anger and grief to forgiveness, acceptance and hope, he said, comes from “right out of the Gospels.”

“I can’t tell you that on September 11, 2001, I consulted the Gospels and thought, ‘This is how to act,’” he recalled. “But now, 10 years later, I can see that my journey took me in the direction of peacemaking. It sounds trite—turn the other cheek, judge not lest you be judged, examine yourself—but these kinds of honest examinations were the kinds of emotions that went into what we decided to do.”

In the days after the attacks, the couple wrote a letter titled “Not In Our Son’s Name,” which called on the United States government to reject military reprisals against the Afghan people. Its popularity on the Internet led Rodriguez and his wife to meet like-minded people who also lost family members in the attacks. Together they founded the group September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

Then, in November 2002, they and some others were invited to meet the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “21st hijacker,” who faced the death penalty for helping to plan the 9/11 attacks.

At Moussaoui’s sentencing trial, Rodriguez gave a victim impact statement on behalf of the defense, describing, among other things, the course he co-taught in the spring of 2002 on terrorism and society. The defense’s intention—successful, as it turned out—was to show jurors that many families of 9/11 victims were able to turn their grief into productive action.

Ultimately, Moussaoui was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison.

It was a huge emotional challenge to testify, said the professor of sociology and criminology, but he had come to view his son as one of many victims of unjust wars and incursions waged in a “mad century of mutual violence.”

“Nearly 3,000 of our people, including Greg, were killed in that first incursion, and then many more than 3,000 Afghan and Iraqi civilians were killed next, and since then it has only climbed,” Rodriguez said. “Is my son’s death more meaningful than the death of some poor Iraqi boy who happened to be in the wrong place when a bomb fell? Or that of one of our soldiers killed by a roadside bomb?

“Honestly, I can’t say that it is. I have learned to equate their suffering with losing Greg.”

The couple’s story is being captured in the documentary film In Our Son’s Name. Produced and directed by Gayla Jamison and funded by the Catholic Communication Campaign and Al Jazeera English, it details the couple’s decision to befriend Moussaoui’s mother and to testify in the sentencing trial.

“We didn’t want to do the movie at first,” Rodriguez said. “We knew it was going to heighten the feelings we had experienced, just make them more raw.

“But we also knew there was potential here for opening people up, especially Americans, to the fact that there is such a thing as reconciliation and restorative justice.”

Once the film is complete, Rodriguez said he would like to show it at Fordham because it offers what he calls a teachable opportunity for students who were children when the attacks happened; and he is a teacher, after all.

“Ten years ago, the media showed us a lot of images of Arabs dancing in the streets after the towers fell,” Rodriguez recalled. “When Bin Laden was killed, I was taken aback by the fact that people who were 9 or 10 years old on 9/11 were cheering, celebrating—almost treating it like a sports event in which the United States had won. How is that different from Arabs dancing in the streets?

“I believe that there are a lot of misconceptions about political violence and terrorism, and that the message in this film can show students that there is another way of thinking about 9/11 and its aftermath.”

Rodriguez spent the 10th anniversary of his son’s death participating in a Fordham memorial event at Rose Hill, and he and his family also had a private gathering at his son’s gravesite. It was a day, he said, that was guaranteed to open wounds, but it was also a day to create opportunities to offer comfort to others.

“A lot of things have happened since 9/11,” he said. “But in some ways, it just happened yesterday.”