DASHER – As president of Georgia Christian School, Dr. Brad Lawson watches as students honor the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Georgia Christian School students wear a mix of red, white and blue symbolic of the American flag. They gather in these clothes to create a giant, human flag.

Students have learned about Petty Officer First Class Adam McSween. A man whose name is memorialized at the intersection of North Valdosta Road and Inner Perimeter Road. A man who was an explosive ordinance disposal technician killed in action near Kirkuk, Iraq, in April 2007. McSween and several others were deployed with an Army patrol. An insurgent rocket struck his resting convoy. He and two others were killed immediately from the blast.

One of many tragic aftershocks from 9/11.

While the students remember a date that happened before they were born, Lawson recalls Sept. 11, 2001, as a veteran who was there.

From 2000-04, Lawson served in A Company, 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) headquartered at Ft. Myer, Va.

Twenty years ago, on 9/11, he was about a mile and half away in when Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

He had heard about the planes striking the Twin Towers in New York City. He knew it was a terrorist attack. Lawson and his regiment were gathered awaiting orders.

They heard and felt what Lawson describes as a “a sonic boom.”

“I didn’t know what they hit,” he said, “but they hit something hard.”

He learned terrorists had crashed a commercial jet into the Pentagon.

“At that point, those of us in A Company had to make our way back into Washington, D.C., as it was the only company actually inside the district,” Lawson said in a past presentation to students. “Going past the Pentagon as it billowed smoke into the bright blue sky showed the grim reality of just how far terrorists would go to hurt us. All roads were full of traffic leaving the city and our bus had to stop. We jogged the rest of the way back to Ft. McNair and helped secure that base.”

He knew he would be working a long time but didn’t know how long. Unable to reach his wife, Patience, he reached her relatives by phone in Valdosta. Lawson asked them to relay to her that he would be working long shifts and didn’t know when he would be home.

The shifts and days were brutally long, terribly grim.

Lawson and his regiment worked 12-hour shifts, 12 on, 12 off, for several days. The mission: Search and recovery at the Pentagon. They recovered human remains from people killed, pieces of the plane and classified information left swirling around the wreckage.

Lawson said the area around the search-and-recovery site at the Pentagon became like a fast-growing city. Fast-food chains, massage therapists, AT&T with long-distance phone cards in the era before smart phones, etc., all set up shop and provided free services to the searchers.

Following the search-and-recovery mission, Lawson returned to his primary duty: conducting full-honors funerals in Arlington National Cemetery. 

“This was the first time we conducted funerals on Saturdays during my years of being stationed there,” he said in a previous interview. “Those who perished at the Pentagon and were buried in Arlington were placed in the section directly across the highway dividing the two.”

Lawson said through the attacks, through the recovery, through the anthrax attacks that occurred a short time after 9/11 and through the build-up to war, the nation stood together in the days and weeks following Sept. 11, 2001.

“There were all sorts of rumors going through D.C. of the possibility of additional attacks,” Lawson said, “but people were cheering us on. … It was terrible what we were going through but we were going through it together.”

Lawson shares his 9/11 experiences with Georgia Christian School students. He has done it in the past, planned to do it on the 20th anniversary and will likely do it in the future. He stresses that national togetherness as one lesson from the attacks. He said that is why GCS students wore red, white and blue to mark the anniversary.

In an era of stark political divide, he wants them to know that something terrible happened to the country shortly before they were born, but he wants them to understand that for a brief period Americans were united because of 9/11.