By Jack Freedman, Staff Writer

On Saturday, Sept. 5, the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor Reserve Officers’ Training Corps placed 2,977 American flags in front of Luther Memorial on UMHB campus. Every flag placed was in memory of one of the many victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks 25 years ago. The flags will fly in front of Walton Chapel for the entire week of Sept.11.

“This is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, so it’s gonna be a big one,” Cadet Mikyla Bachert, a UMHB junior, said. “I think the flags are a good way to honor something that had a big impact on our country.”

At 9 a.m. Saturday, the ROTC met at Luther Memorial to start setting up the flags. Over 30 staff members and students arrived to help, and they were served free breakfast by the ROTC. The group finished around 11 a.m. and placed two signs listing the names of the victims.

“I feel like it’s a really good way to bring the community together,” Bachert said.

Most of the officers were alive when 9/11 occurred and have vivid memories of the attacks. Not only do they have memories of where they were on 9/11, but some of them were deployed in the War on Terror as one of their first missions.

“I was very little when it happened,” Sergeant First Class Jhonny Mancia said. “The only real thing that I know is I was going to school. But when I joined the Army, my first mission was for Operation Iraqi Freedom, which was obviously the result of the U.S. response to 9/11.”

Not only were the ROTC officers’ careers affected by 9/11, but a few officers came close to losing family members in the attacks.

“My [father-in-law] is from Connecticut, and he was supposed to be in the Twin Towers on that day,” Captain Casey Batley said. “The only reason he wasn’t was to take [his wife] to a doctor’s appointment. It seemed like an inconvenience at the time, but it probably saved his life. Since then, he and my family have really memorialized 9/11. My father-in-law still has a photo of the World Trade Center in his room.”

Even though most of the UMHB student body had not been born when 9/11 happened, they still have respect for the tragedy that shook American society.

“I grew up around family and military who had stories from that day, and I believe our response to it really brought us together,” Bachert said.

Young Conservatives of Texas started the yearly tradition of placing the flags at UMHB. 

“When Yvette Shackleford, the old coordinator of this event, saw that the group was inactive, she couldn’t let this stop due to the importance of it,” Batley said.

Since the school’s YCT chapter is currently inactive, the tradition has been taken over by the ROTC.

“[Yvette] passed the flag ceremony along to us and we’re providing the manpower for this,” Batley said.

The devastation caused by the attacks lives in the hearts and minds of all Americans, whether or not they were alive in 2001 or not. Older Americans remember where they were the day the Twin Towers were destroyed so well that they don’t feel like 25 years have passed, while young adults and older children have grown to know the impact left on the country in which they were raised.