Terror attacks drove Mauians into service
After a call from her mother in California awakened Audra Sellers in the early morning of Sept. 11, 2001, she turned on the television in her studio apartment to see images of buildings collapsing after being hit by hijacked planes.
The Air National Guard member’s first thought was, “Oh, my God. I got to call in.”
She ended up being deployed to an air base in Saudi Arabia with the 292nd Combat Communications Squadron as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.
“You know it’s scary when they tell you, ‘You got to turn off the lights, you don’t want to get shot at,’ ” said Sellers, who worked the night shift in the desert where women weren’t well received.
While she loved her civilian job as a valet bellman at the Four Seasons Resort, Sellers said that after being deployed, “I realized how much I loved being in the military, how much I loved being on duty and how much I loved serving.
“It’s actually what got me into the Police Department,” said Sellers, who was on active duty before she joined the Maui Police Department in 2002 and is now a lieutenant and commander of the Community Relations Section. “That’s why I always remember 9/11.”
For her and other veterans who were deployed overseas in the war on terrorism after 9/11, the anniversary brings reminders of how the attack changed the country as well as the course of their lives.
“Every 9/11 comes around, we grieve for what happened,” said MPD officer Jared Dudoit, an Army Reserve sergeant. “We also prepare for things that may be planning to happen.
“It was a saddening time, of course. But I also think it brought together Americans and we were able to set aside our differences to stand up for something of value, which is freedom. Once that happened, I know that everybody was kind of united, not like we are today.”
Dudoit, who had a front desk job at a Kaanapali hotel on 9/11, joined the Army Reserve a couple of years later.
“I felt like we got to do our part,” he said.
After enlisting in 2003, he completed basic training and was deployed to Iraq a month later in March 2004 with the 411th Engineer Battalion as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom II.
When the battalion arrived in Baghdad, “there was still a lot going on, a lot of fighting going on,” Dudoit said.
“We were tasked to build up the base camps in support of forces there,” Dudoit said. “We traveled to all the different base camps, assisting them with construction, their living quarters, restrooms.”
Battalion members set up barriers around voting polls for the country’s first election.
Dudoit’s younger son was born in November 2004, a few months before his deployment ended in March 2005 and he returned home.
Back on Maui, he worked for the state Department of Public Safety for two years before joining MPD in 2007.
His career decisions stemmed from 9/11 and “maybe a little bit to do with a protector mentality,” Dudoit said. “I’m physically able to and mentally able to do the job. I think it kind of helped motivate me to leave the hotel and to become more of a contributor to protecting the community.”
Now he works as a Kihei community policing officer and continues to serve in the Army Reserve as a staff sergeant running an 871st Engineer Company reserve platoon.
MPD Sgt. Pius Taiwerpy, who was deployed to Iraq in the same battalion as Dudoit, was attending the University of Hawaii at Hilo and in the Army Reserve when a friend and fellow reserve member woke him with a call that Tuesday morning in 2001.
As he watched the news, Taiwerpy saw police officers, firefighters, paramedics and other first responders rushing to help people.
“9/11 was what sparked my interest in being a police officer,” he said. “I’m always going to remember 9/11.”
With a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, he joined MPD on Nov. 1, 2002, while he started in the police recruit academy. His wife and baby had moved to Maui, only to return to Hawaii island when Taiwerpy was deployed to Iraq before he completed field training.
In Baghdad, “we did a lot of convoy operations, security checkpoints, at the same time helping Iraqis rebuilding military bases,” he said.
After his deployment ended, Taiwerpy completed his recruit training to become a police officer. He left the Army Reserve in 2013. In 2017, he was promoted to sergeant and now works in the Lahaina Patrol District.
“I love the job,” he said. “I love being a policeman, helping people, serving, giving back to the community.”
Kihei resident Walter Sweeney was 15 and living in Cairo, Egypt, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred.
He and his brother were running errands for their parents, buying produce at a street market, when they noticed fuzzy television images of the Pentagon and World Trade Center before it collapsed.
The brothers called home on a pay phone, talking to their tearful mother who said, “You need to get back to the house right now.”
“We dropped all the groceries and ran” the 2 miles home, he said.
“The towers had collapsed while we were running home,” he said. “By the end of the night, the Egyptians were celebrating in the streets. We didn’t leave home for two and a half weeks.”
Along with his grandfather’s service in the Pacific during World War II, 9/11 influenced his decision to join the Marine Corps in 2007. He served in Afghanistan from June 2010 to January 2011 in Marjah, Southern Helmand Province.
“At the time, it was the most active deployment the Marine Corps experienced in several years,” he said.
While he was there, he said 17 Marines were killed in action and over 200 Purple Hearts were awarded.
“We inflicted 10 times that number of casualties or more,” he said. “Every day was a firefight. It was a lot less glamorous than the movies, but it was the wild, wild west.”
Sweeney, who teaches scuba diving at Maui Dreams Dive Co. in Kihei after moving here about three months ago, said he has done community service on past 9/11 anniversaries.
Today, he planned a pau hana with a small group of veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq to “watch the sunset, have a beer and just kind of be together.”
Taiwerpy will be working the overnight shift in Lahaina.
Dudoit will be participating in a military drill.
Sellers will take time to remember.
“It definitely makes me reflect on the lives that were lost and the lives that are going on and how important it is to do the best work and help people and tell your family you love them cause you never know,” she said. “Everything changed that day.”