San Diego marks anniversary of 9/11: 'You're never the same again'

Retired Navy Lt. Kevin Shaeffer, severely injured during the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, sits with his wife, Blanca, and son Steven after speaking during a ceremony at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego.

Sept. 11, 2015 7:30 PM PT

Reporting from San Diego —

Jonathan Henderson was a New York firefighter stationed in the Bronx when two planes crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

He and other firefighters from all the boroughs raced to the site in lower Manhattan and began a desperate — largely futile — search for survivors.

“Everybody wanted to be there, everybody,” Henderson said. “The families wanted to be there, searching, but they couldn’t. But we could.”

In one stretch he spent 30 hours straight on the site, digging, hoping. When the rescue effort turned into a recovery effort, his assignment changed: to attending funerals, of civilians, firefighters and other first responders.

“I lost a lot of friends that day,” Henderson said.

Now 43, he is retired — in part due to a respiratory condition linked to Sept. 11 — and living in San Diego, near the beach.

Every year, he dons his uniform and attends the anniversary memorial held on the flight deck of the Midway carrier museum on San Diego’s Embarcadero.

There is a contingent of New York firefighters who have retired in San Diego. The Midway ceremony is sponsored by the Fire Department of New York Retirees of San Diego under the motto “Never Forget.”

Friday’s ceremony — complete with a mournful recitation of names — was a moment of both remembrance and defiance. Remembrance for those who were killed, defiance bred from the determination never to be intimidated.

“On a day when buildings fell, heroes rose,” said Asst. San Diego Fire Chief Brian Fennessy. After Sept. 11, he said, America had become “a nation transformed.”

Mac McLaughlin, the retired Navy rear admiral who serves as president and CEO of the Midway Museum, said the museum will not let the importance of Sept. 11 be dimmed with time.

“We will always do this on this day to honor those who fell,” he told the assemblage of several hundred.

Joe Ciokon’s thoughts went to two buddies who were with him when terrorists attacked the Marine barracks in Lebanon on Oct. 23, 1983. The two survived that horrific day but died on Sept. 11: a Marine in the Pentagon, a firefighter when the towers fell.

Those who died in Beirut “were the first people killed in the war on terror, by the same people we’re fighting today,” said Ciokon, 76, a retired Navy senior chief. “The names change — Al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS — but it’s all the same people.”

For two dozen students in the audience, the ceremony was not about remembering but about learning the history of their country.

The students, from St. Patrick’s Catholic Elementary School in San Diego, have been studying Sept. 11 in history and religious classes. They have specific prayers for those who were killed that day; one student, Madeline Leach, sang the national anthem at the beginning of the Midway service.

“We want them to know about the sacrifice of that day,” said teacher Brian Wallace.

One of his students, Kai da Luz, 12, said the terrorists “were trying to scare Americans, to show us how strong they were.” Asked if they succeeded, he shook his head no.

Like other regions of the country, there were numerous Sept. 11 ceremonies and remembrances around San Diego County: among them, in National City, Bonita, El Cajon, and Fallbrook where a 720-pound hunk of metal from the south tower of the World Trade Center was on display.

There was also a private gathering at a neighborhood restaurant in San Diego for several of the firefighters who went to New York to assist in the rescue/recovery effort.

Sixty-two members of a regional task force formed by departments throughout San Diego County worked at the disaster site beside firefighters from departments across the country.

Lane Woolery, 51, now a San Diego battalion chief, said those frantic days probably acted as therapy for San Diego firefighters. The work was hard but staying in San Diego would have been too frustrating, he said.

“We removed lots of [body] parts, and a few intact bodies,” he said. “You go through something like that, you’re never the same again.”

Although he had seen the site on television, nothing prepared him for what it truly looked like when he and others arrived just two nights after the attack.

“It was like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time,” he said. “You couldn’t believe it.”

Tony.perry@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATsandiego