Flight 93, a Daughter's Legacy, and the Making of a Memorial

A leadership lesson can come from a classroom, a coach, or a job. Sometimes it comes from a handwritten letter and a story that still hurts to tell. I’m Larry Zilliox, Director of Culinary Services at the Warrior Retreat at Bull Run, and I’m joined by Debbie Borza, a special advisor to The 9:57 Project Student Leadership Challenge, our summer leadership camp for high school students.

Debbie brings a perspective shaped by United Flight 93. She shares the story of her daughter, Diora, who was 20 years old when she died on September 11, 2001. Because Diora was so close in age to the teens in this program, her words connect in a direct, peer-to-peer way. We talk about what Diora valued, how she treated friends and family, and why community service is more than a requirement. It’s a way to move outside yourself and build the kind of character that shows up when it matters.

We also dig into what it took to create the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, including the lengthy planning timeline, partnerships with the National Park Service, and a mix of federal, state, and private funding. Debbie previews how the 25th anniversary is being shaped to honor families while welcoming the public, and I share why the memorial is worth the trip for anyone who wants to understand 9/11 beyond headlines.

If you care about teen leadership, service projects, 9/11 history, Flight 93, or the power of kindness to create a ripple effect, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this episode with someone who leads by serving, and leave a review so more listeners can find it.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Larry Zilliox 0:14

Good morning. I'm your host, Larry Zilliox, Director of Culinary Services here at the Warrior Retreat at Bull Run. And this week we have a very special guest with us. Debbie Borza is a special advisor, we'll call her, to the 957 Project Student Leadership Challenge, which is a summer camp, day camp for teenagers that we host with the 957 Project here at the Warrior Retreat every year. And we're excited to have them back this year. We have the students here right now. And Debbie has come in from California to talk to the students and uh to lend a sort of different perspective to their course that they're taking. We'll talk about that. Um, but Debbie, welcome to the podcast.

Debbie Borza 1:01

Thank you for having me. Appreciate the time. Appreciate the audience.

Larry Zilliox 1:06

So I guess we should start by talking a little bit about what the 957 Project is and what the student leadership challenge is each year. So if you would, let's start with what the 957

What The 957 Project Does

Larry Zilliox 1:21

Project is.

Debbie Borza 1:22

Well, for me, uh, the 957 Project is an opportunity for veterans to share their stories about military life during and after they they may leave the military. And they share these stories with uh school students, high school students, sometimes middle school, even on a college level, university level. It's an opportunity for them to uh enlighten and give knowledge to and recognize uh their service to our country.

Larry Zilliox 1:59

And this is primarily in the context of 9-11. Yes, and the events that took place on 9-11. And uh, I know through uh the organization uses a protocol or a training program called CREST. The organization itself has that training program, that curriculum for kids. But this week we have the summer leadership challenge, which is a little bit different. And what is the main purpose of that program within the 957 project?

Debbie Borza 2:34

The uh leadership challenge for these high school students is an opportunity for them to take a look at their leadership. What could their leadership be? So we have speakers come in and talk to them.

The Student Leadership Challenge Mission

Debbie Borza 2:49

The speakers talk about their personal relationship to leadership, uh things that they have done in a leadership position throughout their lives. My purpose, I come in and talk about leadership from the perspective of the passengers and crew on United Flight 93, the plane that crashed outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania on September the 11th, 2001. And primarily about my 20-year-old daughter who died on that plane. And the beauty of being able to talk about my daughter, who was 20, to these high school students, is that there's a level of relationship. You know, she was young enough to be able to leave to me, and I give to them, uh, in her own words, things regarding leadership, community service, uh, her relationships with her teachers, her family, her friends, and the uh ways that she made a difference by letters that were then sent to me by faculty, staff, her girlfriends, on uh the type of difference that Dura made in their lives. And that are those are the things that I personally share with the students here at the leadership retreat because the challenge that we ask these students to take on is some kind of community service project in their area where they see a need. How do they feel they can directly, indirectly participate or give back to their community in some way? And uh, you know, we challenge them to take a look. It's that time of their lives where they're moving from, you know, thinking about themselves, thinking about themselves, thinking about themselves, to noticing now that there are people out there that support them, love them, need them, you know, to uh do something in their community. And it it's a perfect time for them to start to move outside of themselves.

Larry Zilliox 5:05

And do you think they relate because she was very close to their age?

Debbie Borza 5:09

I think, yes. It's made it easier for me to talk to them because I can come from uh a perspective of someone, yes, her one of their peers.

Larry Zilliox 5:20

Right.

Debbie Borza 5:20

And peer-to-peer conversation. Um, yeah. So quite amazing.

Larry Zilliox 5:25

How did you become involved with the 957 project?

Debbie Borza 5:28

I happened to meet uh John, uh, who is one of the co-founders of the organization, uh, at uh one of the anniversaries at the memorial. Oh.

Finding Her Voice As A Speaker

Debbie Borza 5:39

And I meet many people, and uh he happened to remember me a bit more than I remembered him that brief time we met. And he just kind of invited me to this leadership, you know, challenge retreat. He felt that Dior's story would make a difference for these students and would uh show to them, you know, the value of uh a community service project.

Larry Zilliox 6:08

Do you remember the first leadership challenge you you went to, what it was like?

Debbie Borza 6:13

I do. I was so nervous. You know, I'm I'm a mom, um, I've I'm a daughter, I'm a sister. Um, and the last thing I wanted to be was this preachy mother.

Larry Zilliox 6:31

Right.

Debbie Borza 6:32

And I was so nervous. I I I for the first year I really felt like I was I wasn't making a bit of difference. So the second year, I said, what was I thinking? I have things that Diora has written herself about her life, the value of community service. It's all right here. You know, in her writing, I'm just gonna speak from that. I'm just gonna be, you know, her mouthpiece to her peers. And uh years two, three, and this is my fourth year are much easier. Yeah. And uh I hope w I I hope it's what this these students want. Yeah, they they seem to have a a good time and and uh I had the opportunity to mentor some last year, so I do know some of the projects that they took on.

Larry Zilliox 7:25

And uh Well, and I I've seen it uh they just soak it up. They they absolutely just soak it up. And uh what do you find is the the thing that uh your daughter wrote that has the most impact on them?

Debbie Borza 7:41

I what might have the most impact is my daughter's relationship with her family and friends. And it started at an early age for Diora. She really enjoyed looking

Diora’s Letters And Family Ties

Debbie Borza 7:56

at the family relationships. Oh, you're my mother, you're my father, it's my sister, oh, you're my aunt. That means you're my mother's sister. So she really, really got into that to the point where it was important to her to go visit family every summer. So she started flying as an unaccompanied minor at the age of four and would go from Southern California to North Carolina to be with her grandparents. Wow. So that relationship, she had a whole world available to her, thousands of miles away from me, year after year, summer after summer, where she really developed a relationship that way with her family. And her friends, she was always there for them. She had the confidence and the love and some ability to really be outside of herself and be out there for her friends and be able to cope with all of the struggles of friendship in high school and grade school, uh, into the university, and it just became who she was. And a lot of that gets revealed in what I'm able to share with the students at the retreat.

Larry Zilliox 9:16

Well, I know here at the retreat there's a huge emphasis on family, and uh we see it all the time. Uh the warriors come with their family, and it's uh the family serves alongside the the soldier, but it's the family that is what they lean on and what the backbone is. And and uh it's it's great to hear that she really uh cherished that, probably from an early age, um was a a trooper for getting on that plane and going by herself. That's crazy.

Debbie Borza 9:52

Can you believe it? I I think the uh most important thing about family, it's your longest relationships, you know, with some of your family members. But it's that unspoken love that's always there. Uh I know there's a lot of families out there that have their troubles and you know, dysfunctionality, whatever label you may want to give them. And I I have this belief, and I've just witnessed it so many times, when it all boils down. It really is. Down deep, if just for a brief moment, they all admit to themselves and to others that they really, really do have love there. And um for those who are put under the test, I think it's the love that gets them through.

Larry Zilliox 10:44

Right. Wow. Um, where was Dior going on 9-11?

Debbie Borza 10:49

Dior was uh entering her junior year at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, but she wanted to go back east to be with

Where Diora Traveled On 9/11

Debbie Borza 10:58

some of her close girlfriends that she had had all through grade school, high school. Wow. And she wanted to just get together with them. So she flew out from San Francisco to New Jersey, uh, went up into New York City and uh visited a girlfriend of hers there, and then went back to New Jersey and stayed with a girlfriend who was attending Farley Dickinson. And uh her other girlfriend in New York was starting her junior year at Harvard. So she they got together, and um on September the 11th, uh Diora was flying home. Uh her girlfriend had her first class that day. So Diora said, drop me off at the airport early. You get to your class earlier on time, don't miss your class. And Deora was a standby passenger on United Flight 93. Wow. And uh along with about 50% of those people on board were standby passengers. Uh Diora was the youngest female passenger at 20, and the youngest male passenger is Toshiakuge from Japan. He was heading home after summer vacation. Wow. Here in the States. Yeah.

Larry Zilliox 12:17

So talk a little bit about what it took to get the Flight 93 Memorial going. I know you were instrumental in that.

Debbie Borza 12:25

The Flight 93 Memorial, what an amazing project to be on. You know, President

Building The Flight 93 Memorial

Debbie Borza 12:32

Bush signed a memorial act for Flight 93, which put it under the Department of the Interior, so it's a national park. Right. Um a lot of planning. Uh we formed the families of Flight 93. We were family members of anyone who had passed away on that plane. Uh, we worked with the Park Service and the National Park Foundation, so it was a a partnership. And uh uh it all it's such a I could talk for hours on this show about all of what we went through. We had a a design competition, uh, we had an advisory commission and a task force because we had reporting to do to the uh federal government, to the and the Department of Interior on how we were progressing. And as a comparison, uh when Flight 93 went to bid for contracts to start the building of the memorial, which was around 2007, uh when we dedicated the first phase of the park in 2011 at the 10th anniversary, the Martin Luther King Memorial had gone to bid at the same time. So Flight 93, when it was complete in 2018 to the design. So we started in 2002 at the Memorial Act, and in 2018 the memorial was complete.

Larry Zilliox 14:02

And was it privately funded or federally funded?

Debbie Borza 14:06

Federally funded, there was um wow, now you're testing my memory. Um, there was 20 million in the Memorial Act, state

Funding And Working With Government

Debbie Borza 14:17

of Pennsylvania raised 20 million. Oh wow. And then the rest was private funding, around uh 30 something million. I think the original cost of the memorial that the Park Service put it at was around 53 million. Um that was the initial figure.

Larry Zilliox 14:37

Uh that had to have doubled.

Debbie Borza 14:40

Yes, but in the eyes of the of the government, that doesn't that that doesn't change, you know. And if it does change, then that means more private money and not more federal money. But yeah, I mean that that's part of the education that I received.

Larry Zilliox 14:56

Yeah.

Debbie Borza 14:57

You know, it was a bipartisan project. It was it was, you know, it had its difficulties, but it was easy to talk about at a federal level. It was easy to share about it at a state level. Right. And it was always something we just had to have the right ask.

Larry Zilliox 15:16

Yeah.

Debbie Borza 15:17

When you go talk to the government. You just have to know what to ask for, when to ask for it. And of course, we were fortunate to have people who made sure we knew when to ask, what to ask.

Larry Zilliox 15:28

Yeah. Yeah, it's it takes special. Yeah. Yeah. We're coming up on the 25th anniversary. What um I I'm sure you'll be there for for that, of course. We will, yes. Yeah. What is that gonna look like?

Debbie Borza 15:42

Well, um, for the 25th anniversary, I know the park

Planning The 25th Anniversary Services

Debbie Borza 15:46

service, or at least a superintendent there at United Flight 93, wanted to really make it special for the families. Uh the families have opened our arms and our hearts to so many visitors on all the anniversaries. It's difficult to have time to oneself on that day. Sure. So this year, the superintendent has uh given this opportunity for both the families and the public to have an opportunity to participate in the 25th anniversary. So us our typical, not typical, but what we've been doing traditionally over the years is a morning service so that we can read the names and ring the bells at the time of the crash. So we'll still have that one in the morning. And this year we're going to have one in the afternoon, which makes it possible for more visitors to attend.

Larry Zilliox 16:48

Sure, sure.

Debbie Borza 16:49

Uh, when we have the service in the morning, sometimes we have these dignitaries come in and we have to shut the park down for security. Now we're asking the dignitaries to come at the one o'clock so the park can stay open longer for people to be able to come and participate in the anniversary.

Larry Zilliox 17:08

Wow, wow. Well, I know too that tomorrow you're gonna take the students up there, um, which is uh always uh a big deal each year for the students. I get to uh uh talk

Why Visiting The Memorial Matters

Larry Zilliox 17:23

to them on Friday when they come back, and they're all um well, first of all, it's an amazing memorial. If you haven't been there, listeners, you need to go and you need to see it. Um it's uh it's very interesting because just the design and the way it is on the the flight path of the plane that it took it's that long kind of walk runway with the the square uh looking out, um, and then the kind of museum and everything is off to the um to the left, and then you can go out and you can see the actual crash site, which is not open to the public, um, only to family. But uh it is also um it's the same with the 9-11 uh memorial in New York City. This is an incident that took place uh in a fairly digital age. So there was a lot of communications around the event, which you can listen to the recordings and the phone calls and the voicemails that uh uh people aboard the various flights left uh for loved ones. That's part of the um museum as well. Uh, but I encourage everybody, it's it's out in the middle of nowhere. I'll be honest with you, uh, but it's worth the trip. It really is worth the trip to see it. Um it's uh it's very memorable, it's very moving, um, for sure. Uh next year is going to be a very special event. And uh the kids they just have such a great time when they go up there. Uh what when I think about kind of wrapping things up, what do you what what's the most important thing that you want listeners to know about Dior?

Debbie Borza 19:17

The most important thing I want listeners to know about Diora is she demonstrated the opportunity

Making A Difference And Final Reflections

Debbie Borza 19:27

for people to make a difference. Yeah. That was that was uh something that was very important to her, you know, back in 2001. Since then, um I've just taken up the torch for that. The opportunity for people to make a difference is uh it improves the quality of other people's lives, it brings such value to oneself. Um it's definitely needed, wanted. It's um it helps in keeping a legacy alive. Yeah. Uh it's something that you'll never know. The impact you'll have on people who know people, who know people, who know people. It's an amazing ripple effect. And uh for the for you listeners, the opportunity to make a difference in the quality of someone's life, it's uh beyond words for me. It is just a beautiful way to demonstrate who you are as a person for others.

Larry Zilliox 20:37

Be kind, be be kind to people, and uh uh they will be kind to you. And um it's not it's a great way to go through life for sure.

Debbie Borza 20:49

Just like how it shows up in your cooking, Chef Larry. All the love and the difference that you make in that area. Well let's not shy away from that.

Larry Zilliox 20:59

I uh I'm pretty fortunate to be able to help out like that. That's uh great. Thank you so much. Well, Liza, yeah, thank you. I can't uh thank you enough for coming on and joining us today. I really appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you. Listeners, we'll have another episode next Monday morning at 0500. You can find us on all the major podcast platforms. We're on YouTube and Wreaths Across America Radio. So until then, thanks for listening.