Never Forget
On the 24th Anniversary of 9/11
Twenty-four years ago, the United States was forever changed.
I remember exactly where I was on September 11th, 2001: in the mountains vicinity of Dahlonega, Georgia, at Ranger School. When word came down that planes had struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we initially thought it was part of a training scenario meant to test us under stress. When the cadre told us it was real, I knew the world had changed - and that America was going to war.
The 9/11 attacks ended the brief period of peace and stability that followed the Cold War. They propelled our nation into two decades of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across the globe in the name of fighting terror. I am proud of my service in those wars, proud to have stood shoulder to shoulder with my fellow soldiers, and proud to have done my part on defense of the nation. The courage and sacrifice of our armed forces is a point of enduring pride for me.
But as I argue in my book The Folly of Realism, the War on Terror came at a strategic cost. In focusing so much of our resources and attention on counterterrorism, we were distracted from the resurgence of great-power competition with Russia and China. While we were chasing terrorists in the Hindu Kush and Anbar, Moscow was rebuilding its military, plotting its revanchism, and preparing for the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. Beijing was quietly modernizing its armed forces and laying the groundwork for the coercive power it wields today.
The aftermath of 9/11 forced Americans to grapple with what it means to be secure and what it means to be free. We expanded our domestic security apparatus, debated the balance between liberty and safety, and fought wars with no clear end state. Today, the generation born after 9/11 is serving in uniform, entering government, and defining the future of national security.
On this anniversary, I am reminded not only of the horror of that day, but also of the unity that followed. Americans put aside partisan differences to support one another and to defend the nation. We need that spirit again - not just to remember those we lost, but to face the challenges ahead. The threats we confront today are different but no less serious: Russia’s war of aggression, China’s coercion, and the contest over the future of the international order.
The lesson of 9/11 is not just about vigilance against terror - it is about the need for strategic clarity, unity of purpose, and readiness to defend our way of life against all threats. That is how we honor the memory of those who perished on September 11th and those who sacrificed in the wars that followed.
- Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, U.S. Army (Retired)
I was in Manhattan that morning. It was a lovely early fall New York day, and we’d just gotten back to school. I was 56 years old, a veteran of the Vietnam era, and since my army discharge and my last year of an interrupted college career, a sixth grade American history teacher near east 72nd Street two blocks from Central Park.I remember the Assistant Head coming around to my classroom at the end of my first morning class and quietly telling me to go down to the library where there was a TV. The Head had decreed that we were not to tell the kids anything at the time. I was in time to see what must have been the first video repeat of the second tower hit. At first it was as if someone was showing a teaser for some soon-to-come fall movie blockbuster. But the illusion was short-lived.
I was not altogether surprised. Given what had been happening in the world for some years, I’d been half expecting some kind of attack on us for some time although this particular kind was nothing like what my imaginings had been.
Getting home to Brooklyn that afternoon was nothing like ordinary. I had to use a subway line I seldom did, and as we topped the Manhattan Bridge, everyone in the car (and it was packed to the max) was able to look back and see the smoke rising from where the towers had been.
But what I remember most was the equally lovely weekend that followed except that the jets overhead were fighters, and not the usual airliners. There were little knots of people circling through the streets and around the hospitals and churches looking for any sign of people they knew who’d been in or near the towers. Fences were hung with all sorts of handmade posters asking about friends and relatives. There was a kind of anticipatory silence in the air as if there was something unfinished about the attack.
When I went back to school early Monday morning, it was raining, as if the city was finally coming out of shock and weeping for its dead. As we topped the Brooklyn Bridge on the way into Manhattan still in the dark of early morning, we could see ahead the great miasma of dusky, almost pearly gray light where the towers had been and where now they were searching for survivors. The car, usually pretty chatty even at that hour, was silent.
That day I also saw for the first time a wide scale photograph of the ruins. All I could think of were those grainy old photos of European cities bombed to rubble during the war. Looking carefully, I could see tiny figures among the giant jumble of crumpled concrete blocks. It seemed to me that the ruins could not be cleared up in the labor of a thousand years. And for days afterwards, my subway rides were often shared with dusty and grimy relief and cleanup workers, often with that thousand yard stare of exhaustion and disbelief.
I remember thinking on that first ride in of all that would follow - all the books and TV dramas, the scams, the revenge, the endless reviews of what had happened and what might have been done to prevent it, the blaming and the shaming. Already some on the religious right were blaming our 'decayed and decadent culture' and saying the attack was God’s will.
I thought of Pearl Harbor. Until the death toll steadied up, I also often wondered if it would top what was up until then the worst day in our history - that other September day along a creek in Maryland. I got to school and set up for my first class of the day, and I wondered where we would go from here.
🇨🇦🇨🇦Thank you for your heartwarming post. It brings us back to what our priorities are and what’s important. I am so disgusted, actually horrified, at what MAGA is saying about Democrats and Trans people. Now bomb threats and shootings! OMG 🇨🇦🇨🇦