Sept. 11, 2001. The very mention of that date sends chills down the spine of all Hoosiers, indeed all Americans, who lived through it.
It was the day that terrorists from the Middle East turned commercial aircraft into weapons of mass destruction, killing nearly 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and on board four hijacked planes.
“It was the first shot in the global war on terrorism,” reflects Teri Maude, the widow of one of nine Hoosiers who died that day.
Her husband was Lt. Gen. Timothy Maude, the highest-ranking general officer to be killed in hostile action since World War II.
Tim Maude was an Indianapolis native who enlisted in the military while a student at Marian University in Indianapolis. After serving in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 and earning a Bronze Star, he opted for a career with the Army. He never looked back. Along the way, he fell in love with a fellow Marian student, Teri Campbell, and they married and had two daughters.
When American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, Maude was in a meeting with contractors discussing the military’s survivor-benefit program. Teri, a civilian Army employee, was at a conference in San Diego where she watched the events unfold on TV.
By day’s end, although his remains had not been identified, it was clear to Teri and officials in Washington that Tim was among the victims as were many of their colleagues and friends. “Not only did I suffer personal loss, but my Army family took one hell of a hit that day,” Maude says. “There was a 27 percent casualty rate in Tim’s unit and a 37 percent injury rate.”
Maude was one of four Hoosiers killed in the Pentagon attack. The others were Col. Canfield Boone, Milan; Major Stephen V. Long, Cascade; and Brenda Gibson of Indianapolis, a civilian employee.
In New York City, four Hoosiers who worked in the World Trade Center died when American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 hit the North and South Towers. They were: Gary Bright, Muncie; Katie McCloskey, South Bend; Stacy Peak, Tell City and Karen Juday, Elkhart. Eddie Dillard, raised in Gary, was a passenger on Flight 77 en route to California to visit his son when that plane struck the Pentagon.
The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 43, crashed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew learned about the earlier attacks and attempted to retake the plane.
Teri Maude views all the victims as war heroes and says she is glad their sacrifice has been remembered at memorials in Washington, New York, Pennsylvania and cities across the country, including the Maudes’ hometown.
Now living in South Carolina, Maude was in Indianapolis in 2014 to help dedicate a 600-pound slab of Indiana limestone salvaged from the Pentagon’s devastation and included in the city’s 9/11 memorial on Ohio Street. The memorial features two upright beams from the Twin Towers and a pair of granite walls inscribed with remembrances of 9/11. A life-size sculpture of a bald eagle is perched atop one of the beams, its wings outstretched and eyes looking east.
Maude has visited that memorial and the one at the Pentagon on numerous occasions.
“I find these places more a place of reflection than a war monument,” she said. “I get great peace there because it is fulfilling the promise everybody made to each other that day: We will never forget.”
Andrea Neal is an adjunct scholar with the Indiana Policy Review. Contact her at [email protected].