Service academy athletes recall Sept. 11 – KIRO 7 News Seattle

That September day 20 years ago hit an emotional nerve that still holds true for Chad Jenkins, then a senior quarterback in the Army.

“It was an absolute shock,” said Jenkins. “I remember feeling like adrenaline pumping through my veins too when I tried to gauge the scale of the event at the time. At that point there was only the realization that the careers of every single cadet at West Point would change dramatically after we graduated. Since we were the upper class, we recognized from that Tuesday morning that it was no longer a peacetime military. We wanted to go out there and do exactly what the military academy was meant to do. We actually really wanted to do it. “

Like a lot of army players this century and before when he was recruited, Jenkins believed he was playing on a big stage at the top tier of college football even though he thought West Point was in Indiana, not 80 miles north of New York City. Waging a war abroad or dealing with post-traumatic stress was no thought for the determined 175-pound firstie. After his sophomore year, he remembers being excited and ready to serve as an infantryman.

“I wanted to be with the best of the best and it was the 75th Ranger Regiment,” said Jenkins.

Less than two years after leading the army to victory over the Navy in his last college game, Jenkins was on one of his four missions in Iraq when his platoon, the 82nd insurgent, shot down a Chinook transport helicopter, killing 16 American soldiers killed.

That, too, is burned into his memory. Jenkins received three Bronze Stars for his services and is now back home in Dublin, Ohio after four years with the FBI. He runs a management consultancy and runs a state-owned, family-owned contract company.

“I’m looking back now, I’m not going to lie, I’m getting emotional because it’s not just the day,” said Jenkins, who was diagnosed with PTSD on his first assignment to Iraq and survived therapy with the help of the Veterans Administration. “It is the totality of the trajectory of these missions, the scars of the fight, the invisible wounds of the fight that I still fight every day, and the lifelong realization that the fight is the most terrible thing in this world. Sending men and women to experience war is the most incredible thing. It should be noted that it is the absolute last choice that we make.

“I’m not saying it’s a decision that never has to be made. I think 9/11 is a perfect example. I think we had to hunt down those who did that, but I also think that with God it is better the last option if we oblige our sons and daughters to wage our wars. “

Jenkins and his wife have a 13-year-old daughter Aubrey and an 11-year-old son Bryce. He calls them the two greatest gifts of God and makes sure they know all about what happened in the world two decades ago.

“It’s being discussed,” said Jenkins. “My son, he has these who-is books, what-is books, and one of them is 9/11. We read that together. We don’t talk about the specific events, but place great emphasis on mental health and talk to our children about these events in order to teach them the emotional, psychological and mental aspects of life and use them as educational moments. “

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Kellen Grave de Peralta, a suitor in the Navy, was born on July 25, 2001. His mother, Tiffany, was a hiring officer at the Pentagon even though she was on maternity leave with him and was out of the building on September 11th.

“I think when I got to a certain age, maybe 11, 12, 13 years old, a lot of these things started to hit me,” he said. “Wow, my mother could have been in the building that day. She could have died, she could have been hurt, and it’s just crazy for me for having all these connections to things like that, and now I have even more respect for both of my parents for the things they did before this one Day and after that day. “

Ricardo Grave de Peralta, Kellen’s father, is a former Navy SEAL who worked for the FBI for over 20 years and has a separate 9/11 link. He was in Virginia that day, training with an FBI SWAT team.

“When he got the news of the attacks, they raced back to DC immediately, and he actually passed the Pentagon, which was on fire at the time,” said Grave de Peralta. “Two weeks later he was hired to conduct the 9/11 investigations and spent the next two or more years trying to house four al-Qaida terrorists who were part of the 9/11 conspiracy in Guantanamo Bay.”

Although Grave de Peralta was only a newborn at the time of the attacks, he understood the enormity of what happened that day.

“When you start making friends in high school and tell them about all the things your SEAL-FBI-SWAT dad did, they kind of go mad,” he said. “Even they helped me realize like, ‘Do you know how amazing this is?'”

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Before the beginning of the class youth year, the cadets of all three service academies can go without military obligation and never look back. Once the junior year begins, they are locked up.

When Army trainer Todd Berry spoke to the team at a lunchtime meeting on September 11, 2001, the players’ questions took him by surprise.

“All the questions I got that day from freshmen and sophomores all turned around: ‘What does this mean for me? How will that affect me? ‘ “Berry recalled. “And all the questions I got from the senior classes, juniors and seniors were all about ‘What can I do?’

“Although I had seen this metamorphosis before September 11th, it was so evident at this meeting. It was just so clear how that one decision (to visit West Point) affected the way they saw things. It was just really, really unique. “

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The Army lost their 2001 season opener at Michie Stadium by three points to Cincinnati, and the 9/11 attacks occurred the following week, giving the Black Knights time to take the breathtaking turn of events as they turned on the game from UAB concentrated the street.

“I didn’t think we’d play well,” said then coach Todd Berry. “There were far too many distractions. I call them peripheral opponents. Most universities are women, drugs, frat parties and all these other kinds. ”There aren’t a lot of fringe opponents at the academy because it’s just the nature of the academy. Every cadet had to check who he was at this point. Everything had changed for her. “

Except for one thing. They continued to practice, even on September 11th.

“I pay tribute to the coaching staff that day for saying, ‘Okay, if you want to practice let’s practice because bad things can happen on the battlefield and there are many nuances in the fighting room. But you’re always focused on your mission, your mission, and your task, ”recalls Chad Jenkins, a senior quarterback on the team. “And that day as an Army soccer player, our mission was to prepare for soccer games and the way to do that is to keep practicing and continuing that thought process.

“I think it led to this way of thinking about what to wear in combat. It is exactly the same. Maybe things don’t go that way, but that doesn’t mean you can get unlucky and quit. “

Army flew to Birmingham, Alabama, looked after bomb detection dogs on buses to airplanes, and the night before the game, the Black Knights had to evacuate their hotel three times due to bomb horror.

“I don’t know if they were real or not,” said Berry. “Sleeping that night was just an impossibility.”

UAB defeated Army 55-3, the worst loss of the century and the fifth worst in the history of the Academy. That didn’t stop hometown fans from giving the Black Knights a standing ovation.

“I ended up standing there when they did that. It was a proud moment, “said Berry.

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Berry often gets a bad rap for his record as a coach at Army, which included a winless season. He was in his sophomore year at West Point when the terrorist attacks struck, and he turned out to be the man for the job, running like a plainclothes general.

“Todd was just fantastic how he handled the whole situation with our team, gave them the space, let them talk. He was such a pillar, ”said Bob Beretta, who worked at West Point for more than three decades and is in his freshman year as an athletic director at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

“All of these young men, their lives changed in an instant,” he said. “They knew they would go out and defend our nation’s freedom. They had to be around each other. Nobody knew what it all meant, but they were in together and had to be together right now. Todd led these boys to men through the most difficult time of their lives. “

Beretta said he was thinking back a little. He was in control of the media’s capabilities and was overwhelmed with requests that greatly distracted the team.

“Of course there have been huge distractions this week just from the events themselves, but there was just a horde of media outlets wanting to speak to our football players,” said Beretta. “I thought maybe I should have cut media opportunities, but I felt it was very important for the nation to hear from these young people because I knew they would represent the US Military Academy and Army in the best possible way, and I felt me “that the nation really needed to hear from you because you would feel what I felt – that tremendous trust.”

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AP Sports Writer Noah Trister and Pat Graham contributed.

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