20 years ago, a day of terror brought decades of war for these Minnesotans

On the September morning 20 years ago when everything changed, Corey Berg's hulking C-130 Hercules had just taken off from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., when air traffic control radioed his crew.

Flight control instructed the Minnesota Air National Guard's military transport plane to pursue and identify an unknown aircraft. The group spotted the low-flying Boeing 757 and banked toward it.

That's when Berg, a crew chief from Savage, Minn., with two young children, heard his navigator yell: "It just crashed!"

Berg looked down from the flight deck and saw smoke rising near the nation's capital. His crew radioed back. "This is Gofer zero six," the pilot said. "It looks like that aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, sir."

As the C-130 rumbled back toward Minnesota, the crew tuned to FM radio and learned of the coordinated terrorist attacks: Two passenger jets flew into the World Trade Center in New York, another hit the Pentagon. As Berg's plane flew west over Pennsylvania, another air traffic controller asked about another unidentified aircraft. That's when the crew spotted United Airlines Flight 93 as it arced downward and crashed in a field.

The 20-year anniversary of one of America's darkest days, in the wake of a harrowing, deadly evacuation from Afghanistan, is forcing many Americans to wonder if our response to 9/11 was necessary, foolhardy, or both.

That morning in September 2001 planted the seeds for two wars that have claimed the lives of more than 7,000 American troops and cost trillions of dollars. Iraq and Afghanistan are America's longest wars. Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 mastermind, was hunted down and killed by the American military, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces and later executed. But the legacy of that day has been magnified through a spike in terrorism worldwide.

Berg knows he was just a tiny cog in a huge war machine. So the only way he can frame what's transpired is through his own experiences. He's deployed overseas five times since 9/11, twice to Afghanistan. He knows the military directly helped the war-torn land, not only in preserving peace but also by building roads, distributing water and bringing books for children.

"When I look back on everything we did, we were just hoping to make it better," Berg said. "But in the last 20 years, we haven't had [huge terror attacks on American soil] happen again. We must be doing something right. They could have blown up the Golden Gate Bridge or hit a power plant. We haven't had it happen again. And that's the most important thing."

When Acie Matthews, then a 17-year-old high school junior in Coon Rapids, signed up for the Minnesota National Guard in April 2001, his recruiter told him he'd get to be the hero racing into a community to help after a flood or tornado.

Maybe, he thought, he'd go on a peacekeeping mission to a place like Bosnia. But a long, dangerous war felt far-fetched.

Matthews wanted to experience military service. As the second-oldest in a working-class family with nine kids, he wanted college tuition, too.

"Right away I started getting phone calls from friends and family: 'Hey, are you going to war?' " he said. "It didn't really register at first, what war actually was. You think they drop you off, shoot the bad guys and it's over. Nobody realized you'd be sitting in a foreign country for a year."

By December 2003, Matthews shipped out to Iraq, which the U.S. had invaded as part of President George W. Bush's broad response to 9/11. His deployment underscored a frequent reality for Minnesotans in the National Guard and reserves after 9/11 — they are no longer seen largely as weekend warriors.

The two wars have changed the U.S. military, particularly the role of the National Guard. Nearly half the American forces sent to Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 have been from National Guard and reserve units, and nearly 20% of American casualties have come from those units.

As one of only eight states without an active duty military base, Minnesota is a National Guard state, and its citizen-soldiers have felt this shift acutely. More than 300 Minnesotans or people with strong Minnesota connections have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11.

"The Guard is completely different now," he said. "When I joined, they said the Guard is a relaxed thing — you go roll in the dirt for a weekend, barbecue and drink some beers. But after 9/11, we started practicing for war, and everything became serious. Now it's transformed to a part-time job, more of a reserve of the Army than it was before."

"My kids, they don't even really know what 9/11 was," he said. "An entire generation of young people don't know what 9/11 was. We talk about our military presence in these countries, they don't see the need for it. They don't remember buildings getting crashed into and people jumping to their death. And all the 20-year-old Afghans know is us being a presence in their lives. They don't know any life when the U.S. military wasn't there."

At the 148th Fighter Wing in Duluth, Charlie Zobitz's 9/11 was a stark example of how quickly the U.S. shifted to a war footing.

He'd spent four years in the Air Force before securing a job on the base's 13-acre munitions storage area, where his team built bombs from component parts, maintained missiles and issued munitions.

On 9/11, Zobitz was readying F-16s for training runs over Volk Field in Wisconsin. The jets were loaded with dummy bombs — 25-pound hunks of metal that mimic a 500-pound bomb in free fall.

As television news showed planes flying into the World Trade Center, Zobitz heard public-address speakers direct commanders to the emergency operations center. Zobitz worried his team wasn't prepared.

They loaded up live munitions. Troy Zierden, a farm boy from Cold Spring, Minn., piloted one of the first two F-16s that left Duluth. They flew east to escort Air Force One, then veered back to Chicago to patrol the skies after other military jets reached the president's plane first. In the back of his mind, Zierden worried about what he'd have to do if he spotted another unidentified aircraft.

"Usually when you're flying, it's constant chatter on the radio," Zierden said. "You have to find a time to get your word in edgewise. But that day was something I've never heard before. It was just this deafening quiet. Your brain is constantly wondering what's going on, but you don't get to find out until you make it back."

In the uncertain weeks after 9/11, those F-16s constantly patrolled the skies of the Upper Midwest. When two landed, two more launched.

Before 9/11, Zobitz never thought he'd deploy to war. Since then, he's headed overseas five times, including twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. Zierden, a father of four, deployed three times to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. The reality of how things had changed hit home on Zobitz's first night in Iraq when a half-dozen mortars sailed overhead. "Are we even going to make it?" he wondered.

Zobitz is 51 now and still at the 148th Fighter Wing in Duluth. The heaviness of 9/11 sticks with him. He still gets choked up, thinking of the twin towers falling. He hopes the military has made a positive change in the world since then.

"Do I think we made a difference? Yes," he said. "Do I think the difference is going to last? Probably not. Twenty years seems like a long time, but it's not really all that long. Not when you compare it to how long those countries have had problems and fighting."

Berg, who saw planes crash into the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania farm field on that fateful day, is still in the military. He plans to retire in October as an avionics superintendent at the 133rd Airlift Wing at Minneapolis-St. Paul Joint Air Reserve Station.

After a service career that has taken him to 46 states and 27 countries, he looks forward to motorcycling, snowmobiling, traveling.

But his military legacy and that of 9/11 lives on through his daughter.

Emily Berg has no memory of that fateful day. She was not yet 3 years old when her father witnessed one of America's most horrific moments. But she was born with her father's gift for tinkering and a desire to make the world a better place.

Now 23, Emily Berg is studying at Winona State University to be a nurse. She's also following her father as a crew chief on the same Minnesota Air National Guard C-130 Hercules planes he once maintained. It is, she says, "the best summer job." She deployed to Kuwait in 2019.

Over the years, Corey Berg and his daughter have spoken about 9/11. She watched a television interview featuring her father. She remembers seeing the awful pictures of that day.

For her father's generation, 9/11 was a defining moment that ushered in a new era. It was his generation's Pearl Harbor, his generation's JFK assassination.

For Emily Berg, a post-9/11 world is all her generation has known.

She can only imagine how her father felt that day — the hurt, the fear, the suddenness of it all. But there's something else she thinks of, too — how it brought a nation together, if only briefly. And how military recruiters were swamped with people who wanted to be part of something bigger.