First Responders Set for 9/11 Memorial Sunday

Craig Sloan doesn’t need to think twice about what incited him to join the U.S. Marine Corp and serve stints in Al Anbar province in Iraq and at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

It was that fateful Tuesday in September 2001 when we West Coast residents awoke in the midst of four coordinated suicide attacks against targets in New York and Washington, D.C.

Sloan was a junior at at the time. As he sat in the school library with the rest of his friends and classmates throughout the day, “We just sat there all day in shock at what was happening,” he said.

Now a Mill Valley firefighter, the 27-year-old Sloan is set to lead Mill Valley’s Sept. 11 remembrance ceremony at the on Sunday at 9 a.m. The organized the event and will provide refreshments afterwards.

After an introduction by Mill Valley Fire Chief Greg Moore about the tragic events of 9/11, Sloan will speak about the importance of remembering the nearly 3,000 people who died that day, as well as the thousands more whose lives were irrevocably impacted by the tragedy. He’ll also lead the group in a non-denominational prayer.

While Sloan was only 17 at the time of the terrorist attacks, Police Lt. Ken Dunkel was 10 years into his career in Mill Valley. His fellow officer Jackie Graf-Reis, also now a lieutenant, was off-duty that day but called the station to inform the department, which was in the midst of its 6 a.m. daily briefing, that the first of the Twin Towers had been hit by a plane.

“And then we saw the second plane fly into the second tower,” Dunkel said. “It’s cliché to say it, but I just thought, ‘This is our Pearl Harbor.’”

After many minutes of being glued to the television in shock, Dunkel realized a prospective new police officer was waiting in the lobby for him to do a ride-along. The man, who didn’t end up joining the department, was from New York City, and was stunned when Dunkel told him what was happening.

The man contacted his brother, a New York City firefighter, and they spoke briefly on the phone before cell service went dead. Dunkel arranged to have him email his family in New York, and he learned that they were OK.

“He had been pretty panicked, understandably,” Dunkel said.

It was then that the police department was notified of a possible evacuation of San Francisco and the potential shutdown of Hwy. 101 southbound, preventing any traffic from entering the city from Marin.

“We went to corp yard and grabbed a pickup and couple of police cars and filled them all with all the traffic markers we could find,” he said.

The closure never happened. But in the midst of the commotion, Dunkel found himself looking up as a 747 plane flew over Mount Tam headed for SFO.

“It looked oddly low and we just thought, ‘Oh god, is that going to take the bridge out or something?’”

Dunkel said that as a first responder who served four years in the U.S. Army, it was frustrating to see what was going on 3,000 miles away.

“You never want bad things to happen, but when they do you want to be there to help,” he said.

But amidst the horror, Dunkel experienced a different phenomenon throughout Mill Valley, one that was reported all over the U.S. in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. As he drove down Sycamore Ave. later in the day, two cars pulled over to the side of the road and waved him through and nodded ‘thank you’ to him.

“It really caught me off guard, because I’m feeling like them, being so far away from where everything was happening,” he said.

In the days following Sept. 11, local students made and delivered cards thanking police officers and firefighters for their service, and some residents even dropped off food.

“It was great - people coping and showing their appreciation,” Dunkel said. “But it also made us feel unworthy – like, ‘why us?’ It was such a crazy, strange dichotomy of feelings.”

The 411: The Sept. 11 remembrance event begins at 9 a.m. at the approximately 20 minutes with refreshments provided by the Mill Valley Volunteer Firefighter Association after the ceremony. It is free and open to the public.