Today marks the 25 years since 9/11.
I was in ranger school when the Twin Towers fell. I was in the mountains of Dahlonega, Georgia when word of the attack reached us. My unit and I assumed that the news was part of a training exercise to test our resolve under stress. Only later did we learn that we were at war. Like all infantry soldiers in those days, I eventually deployed to the Middle East and dutifully served my country in Iraq and throughout diplomatic posts across the world. Rachel was living in Jerusalem on the day of the attack - as an American abroad she was appreciative of the support and warmth her new neighbors showed her. She managed to see the last years of normalcy before Israel and the Middle East were changed forever.
As Americans, we always imagined ourselves as invulnerable. We were separated from the world by two gigantic oceans, our geopolitical adversary had unraveled with the end of the Cold War, and wars were always found “somewhere else,” but 9/11 shattered that sense of invulnerability.
A quarter-century is a significant amount of time. There are many young people in this country working, voting, serving in our armed forces, and soon running for public office who were born after September 11th. For myself and countless Americans that day forever changed this country and the world as we knew it - but a growing amount of Americans have only known life in the wake of 9/11. We owe it to them to share our stories.
Today we remember the 2,977 victims of the attack on the World Trade Center and remind ourselves that freedom isn’t free.
”…It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”
Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address