For National Guard units in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania whose units responded where the attacks happened at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a rural field, remembering 9/11 is not merely looking back—it is the driving force behind their posture today, said Col. Joseph J. Miller, Group Commander, 224th Eastern Air Defense Sector.
“For the personnel of EADS, honoring their legacy means transforming memory into
Resolve: learning from the past, fortifying our operational readiness, and standing an unbroken watch over the skies of North America,” Col. Joseph Miller said.
On Sept. 11, 2026, at 10:45 a.m., airmen stationed at the United States Eastern Air Defense Sector in New York—the home of the military unit that first responded to the terrorist attacks—gathered at the site’s memorial at 10:45 a.m.
“Twenty-five years later, September 11 remains a foundational touchstone for the entire homeland defense enterprise,” Col. Joseph Miller said.
New York National Guard spokesman Eric Durr shared that only approximately 73 individuals who were active during that time remain in service, mostly in senior leadership roles.
“Twenty-five years later, we still have 1,000 Guardsmen on state active duty in New York City, acting as a supplement to the police in the transit hubs and things like that,” Durr said.
Of those who remain serving, three men can remember significant moments from Sept. 11, 2001, as it shaped the trajectory of the rest of their lives.
All three describe the same pivot: a country that ‘felt untouchable’ lost its innocence in a morning, and they decided to spend the next quarter‑century trying to make sure it never happens again.
‘People are going to be hungry’
Staff Sgt. Todd Monger, currently knowledge manager for the Washington, D.C., National Guard, was 20 years old at the time of the attacks. He described the events as a “turning point in history that you can’t go backward from.”
Monger remembers being woken up ahead of his shift at the McDonald’s in Seven Corners, a suburb of Washington, D.C. He stepped outside and saw smoke billowing up where the plane had struck the Pentagon.
He insisted on leaving home to show up for his shift despite his mom advising him to stay home.
“I told her, ‘Look, if I don’t go to work, they win,’” he said. “Every single person that’s able to go to work, get in some kind of a job of service—even food service—needs to be there, because people are going to be hungry.”
Monger and his coworkers served meals to firefighters and first responders. They provided support by giving them water and setting up cots, offering them rooms to take breaks in and nap.
His involvement from the restaurant sparked his determination to finish the process he’d begun earlier in the year to join the military, which he discontinued when his mom got breast cancer.
A year or two following the attacks, the Arlington County Fire Battalion chief invited the workers from that restaurant to the 9/11 commemoration as a way to thank them for being “a part of it.”
“Even though we don’t live with each other, and we probably pass each other at 60 miles an hour on the highway every day, in that moment, everyone was together,” he said. “There was more of a collective consciousness.”
‘Getting ready to walk into hell’
Lt. Col. Matthew Nowlin was a part of the category of individuals Monger served that day. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the 28-year-old Fairfax County volunteer firefighter received a page that he hadn’t seen before.
“I’ll never forget the page; the page said, ‘All volunteers report to your stations now,’” Nowlin told Reserve + National Guard Magazine.
He drove to the station and climbed into his gear before jumping into Ambulance 422 rolling out. From I-395, they could see smoke in the city and damage to surrounding infrastructure painted the picture of what had happened.
“You could see light poles that had been clipped by the plane on its way down,” he said.
After Nowlin and his fellow first responders were queued up to go inside, he said they got word to stand down—the military wanted to go inside to “recover their own.”
They handed out protective equipment to soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen—many of them junior enlisted, Nowlin said.
“One thing that I’ll never forget from that day is the expressions: these kids were getting ready to walk into hell, and you could see it on their faces,” he said. “I’ll never forget it.”
Nowlin realized later that among the remains recovered were two of his engineering colleagues and fellow Maryland National Guardsman, retired Chief Warrant Officer 4 William Ruth. They had been on American Airlines Flight 77.
Connected to the day by loss, Nowlin would spend the next three years following its consequences into his own military service.
“Here I am, in the south parking lot, seeing pieces of the tail that said ‘American Airlines,’ and then, [I] find myself three years later flying missions in Iraq,” he said. “The reason was burned in.”
Nowlin—currently a lieutenant colonel—admitted he doesn’t talk about his involvement much, but he carried the losses of his comrades through each anniversary of the attacks. He said the beeps he heard on the newscasts from scenes at the Pentagon and the towers still haunt him.
He recognized the sound immediately as from a Personal Alert Safety System, or PASS device. The alarm will sound when its user lays down on the ground for more than a certain amount of time.
“It looks almost like it’s evening downtown because there’s so much dust and people are trying to figure out what had just happened—and you hear beeping going on,” he said.
“It’s the hundreds of firefighters that are down in that rubble,” he went on. “It is still fresh after 25 years.”
25 years of service and remembrance
Sgt. Maj. Christopher Miller (no relation to Joseph Miller) commemorates each year since the attack because it coincides with the beginning of his service. Sgt. Maj. Christopher Miller was a 17-year-old junior in high school, but as news rolled in about the attacks and who was responsible, he felt strongly that he wanted to do his part to “get revenge.”
Although he’d been against following in his father’s military-career footsteps, he said he related to his grandfather who had the same mindset when the attacks on Pearl Harbor happened.
“‘Hey, we got punched, so we’re gonna go punch ‘em back,’” he said.
He first spoke to a Marine Corps recruiter, but upon finding out the path to medical would have been as a Navy corpsman, he instead let his previous plans to study sports medicine pave his way into joining the Army National Guard as a combat medic.
His father, after a conversation over dinner, signed for him and administered his oath of enlistment.
A motivated teenager, Sgt. Maj. Christopher Miller was certain he was ready for war. Instead of going straight to the Middle East, though, he was diverted into Army nursing school and sent to Walter Reed.
“I got a lot of stories from a lot of people coming back, hearing about what was going on, what they did,” he said. “There were quite a lot of them, though. Hundreds of hundreds of guys coming through, coming back.”
Sgt. Maj. Christopher Miller said he cherished the experiences he got at Walter Reed, but that it left him feeling that “the real work is being done in theater, not back in a Role 4 hospital.”
He fought his way into deploying: first as a personnel security detachment medic in Iraq from 2008 to 2009, and then as a Blackhawk flight medic in Afghanistan in 2011 during the surge, which he said finally “…scratched every bit of that itch, and then some.”
Afterward, his career shifted from individual medic to senior leader and homeland defender. He helped stand up a Washington, D.C., medevac program, then spending about nine years on the 33rd Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Team in Washington, D.C., as operations noncommissioned officer and first sergeant.
Three men among the ranks fought to be the ones to help defend a nation, and all three continue to serve in the D.C. Army National Guard as part of the Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force.
