9-11: Honoring America's Own
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the last week we’ve seen countless television specials and read innumerable columns about that day which saw 2,977 people murdered in the world’s deadliest ever terror attack. The attack that launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that became our nation’s longest, with thousands of more casualties.
This twentieth anniversary is especially poignant with the end of what became known as the “Forever War” in Afghanistan. Over the course of the last two decades more than 800,000 American servicemen and women have served in those combat zones. Every one of those 800,000 a volunteer. Someone who offered their life and limb to protect others.
During the last twenty years, we’ve had thousands killed and tens of thousands more wounded. The casualties aren’t limited to Americans, our NATO and non-NATO allies have likewise suffered, with Britain, Canada, Germany, Poland and Spain suffering significant losses.
Few of us over the age of thirty will ever forget what we were doing on that Tuesday morning twenty years ago. That day is a generation defining moment. Just as November 11, 1918, was for my grandparents, December 7, 1941, was for my parents, so 9-11 is for my generation and anyone over the age of thirty.
A sense of naivete, a sense of invulnerability for Americans ended that day. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s left the United States as the world’s only superpower. China was yet to become the economic and military behemoth that it is today. North Korea had yet to develop nuclear weapons. Iran and Iraq had fought to a bloody stalemate with neither side victors.
The years immediately preceding the attacks of September 11, 2001, had seen a drawdown in military forces worldwide and cutbacks in military spending. A friend, who had left a career he loved as an active- duty Marine Corps officer for the reserves, told me he left active duty “because peace was breaking out everywhere”.
In the National Guard, while our role as a disaster response force hadn’t changed for floods, hurricanes and forest fires, our military role as a strategic reserve to defend against a European attack by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies had disappeared. We were in search of a mission. That all changed on 9-11. It changed as so many other things did. We didn’t find a new mission, a new mission found us.
The relatively casual security at airports disappeared overnight. The typically raucous and divisive political debates vanished as virtually all Americans forged a bond in the aftermath of the attacks. Flags lined the streets and red, white and blue bunting draped windows. There wasn’t a flag to be purchased at WalMart.
With no military draft and no political will to institute one, tens of thousands of National Guard and reserve troops were mobilized to fill the ranks of the military. Even though public support for the war in Afghanistan waned after nigh on to two decades, support for the military never faltered.
As I have watched the television specials over the last week commemorating the twentieth anniversary of those terrible events and horrific losses of so many people, I began to realize there is something to celebrate, not of the attacks and our losses that awful day, but of the American people’s actions that day.
We see and re-see the images of New York City firefighters, laden with heavy loads, dashing up World Trade Center staircases into burning, crashing buildings, facing death in an attempt to save others’ lives. A pair of Washington DC Air National Guard fighter pilots scrambled into the skies seeking yet more attackers. Those two pilots, one man, one woman, launched even though there was no time to arm the peacetime F-16s. They agreed one would crash into the front of a terrorist flown 747, as the other would crash into the tail, bringing it down before it could fly into yet another skyscraper to kill thousands more Americans. They did that in spite of knowing it would result in their certain death. Luckily for those two warriors the passengers and crew of Flight 93 fought back that day and the plane crashed in Pennsylvania. The fighter pilots’ lives, unlike so many others that day, were spared.
There are countless more acts of bravery and self-sacrifice on the part of Americans on that awful day and the days of war that followed.
The American people are grateful for the bravery shown on that day and since. Even though I no longer wear a uniform, I still have people thank me for my service when I happen to wear my veteran ball cap or my Army t-shirt or they spot my veteran license plate. It never fails to cause me a start. I always think: “How do they know I’m a veteran?” Then I realize, “It’s my hat, or: It’s my license plate.”
I smile and say “Thank you. It was my privilege,” and go on about my business. It WAS my privilege. It was my privilege to serve with the finest soldiers and airmen in the world. Veterans known and unknown. All those other veterans who continue to serve our great nation, whether in uniform or while working for companies. They, for little pay and less acclaim, risked life and limb in a far-away war.
I can tell you of the nineteen soldiers I lost in combat zones during my five years of command. I can tell you their names. I can tell you their ranks. I can tell you their hometowns. I can tell you of the grief their families endure. What I can’t tell you are all the ones I’ve lost since they’ve come home. Oh, I know some. I know one who ended his struggle with a forty-five caliber pistol. I know one who ended his struggle with an empty whiskey bottle. I know one who ended his struggle with a 2 am, hundred mile an hour motorcycle ride. I know there are others. Others who’ve slipped through the cracks. I know there are on average twenty-two veterans a day who end their struggle.
As we remember those who lost their lives on that fateful day and the days of war since, let us not forget the veterans, the average of twenty-two veterans a day, who lose their battle each day. Let us work to end the tragedy of veteran suicide.
Let us always remember. Let us never forget.
E:mail: bill@billenyart.com
(c) William L. Enyart, 2021