US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will honor September 11th victims at new memorials in New York and Pennsylvania Tuesday, accompanied by soldiers who joined up following the attacks. As part of a week of events commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Panetta will fly to New York City to pay his respects at Ground Zero, where a new memorial honors those who died in the Twin Towers, Pentagon officials said. He then heads to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where one of the four hijacked planes on September 11, 2001 crashed into a field, after passengers overpowered the hijackers. Panetta will see a new memorial in Shanksville that commemorates the 40 victims from United Flight 93, which had been scheduled to fly to San Francisco from Newark, New Jersey before it was hijacked. At both sites, Panetta will be accompanied by a member of each branch of the armed forces who signed up to serve in uniform in the aftermath of the attacks, officials said. With his one-day trip, Panetta wanted to remember those who died in the attacks and to recognize the importance of public service, particularly for those in the “9/11 generation” who joined the military, a spokesman said. “This generation of men and women in uniform, like previous generations, have stepped forward when they needed to step forward. And the country is a better as a result,” Douglas Wilson, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, told reporters. Four of the five troops traveling with Panetta deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan since 9/11, including Air Force Staff Sergeant Robert Gutierrez, who directed air strikes for Army special forces in Afghanistan. Gutierrez was wounded on one of his tours and has been awarded the prestigious Bronze Star for valor, according to the Pentagon. Officials said Panetta will be the first cabinet member to get a first-hand look at the memorials in New York and Pennsylvania, which are due to be officially unveiled on Sunday, the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The defense chief will also attend events this week in remembrance of those killed at the Pentagon ten years ago, when a hijacked plane struck the enormous Defense Department headquarters shortly after two other hijacked airliners slammed into the Twin Towers in Manhattan. The Sept. 11 attacks killed 2,977 people. The vast majority of those killed, 2,753, were in New York, while 184 people died at the Pentagon and another 40 at Shanksville. Those figures exclude the 19 hijackers.
