Hundreds of people gathered at USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, moving indoors after weather forced a change of plans earlier in the morning.
The park has a particular claim to the anniversary. Earlier this year it was one of the stops on the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’s Steel Across America Tour, which carried World Trade Center steel to communities across the country to mark 25 years since the attacks.
A Sophomore at Bryant Hall
Nathan Cox, the tour stop’s primary donor, described a morning that began as an ordinary one.
“I can remember it really like it was yesterday,” Cox said. “You know, we were playing Southern Miss that week. I was a sophomore at the University of Alabama. And I walked into breakfast that morning at Bryant Hall and one of the planes had just hit the first tower.”
What followed was the experience nearly everyone who was awake that morning shares: watching without understanding.
“And none of us really knew what was going on. And by the time we turned on the TV, the second tower was flying into it at that exact, you know, moment,” Cox said. “So flood of emotions, not really understanding what was taking place at the time. And we ended up having our football game canceled that week.”
The detail about the game is a small marker of how completely ordinary life stopped. College football in Alabama does not pause easily. That weekend, it did — along with professional sports, air travel and the stock exchanges.
What Came After
Cox graduated in 2004 and joined the Marine Corps. He called it the best decision he has made.
His path was not unusual. Military recruitment rose sharply after the attacks, and a generation of Americans who were in high school and college classrooms on Sept. 11, 2001, enlisted in the years that followed. Many of them, like Cox, trace the decision directly to that morning.
Why the Battleship
Battleship Memorial Park is Alabama’s principal military memorial, home to the USS Alabama and the submarine USS Drum, and a site already devoted to the idea that service has a cost worth naming.
Hosting a Tunnel to Towers steel display and then a 25th anniversary gathering places the attacks in that same lineage — alongside the World War II service the park was built to commemorate.
The Tunnel to Towers Foundation was founded in memory of Stephen Siller, a New York firefighter who ran through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel carrying his gear to reach the towers, and who died there. The foundation’s national tours are built around physical remnants of the buildings themselves — steel that people can stand next to, rather than images on a screen.
That is a deliberate response to the problem every 25th anniversary faces. Hundreds of people came indoors out of the rain in Mobile to be near something real.