For a very long time on the anniversary of 9/11/2001, I have simply posted the Fox News recording of that morning that I had on in the background as I went through my daily routine in Bahrain, and generally left it at that.
Last weekend, my 25-year-old daughter and a few of her friends decided to stay with me over the weekend as I did some preseason prep work on our hunting property. Just me and a hunt camp full of young, happy, professional, and accomplished women having dinner, drinks, even making S’mores over the fire-pit—it was a joy.
It had me thinking of her, just a few months old when 9/11 took place. This reality is all that she has known: it just is.
She is a grown woman with concerns and perspectives very different than mine. She is not haunted by 9/11 any more than … well, that is when it hit me.
It is time that we move on and stop treating 9/11 as a secular holy day of some sort.
That morning of 9/11 as I was going through SIPR email taskers, was just a year further away from the Fall of Saigon than we are today to the attacks of 9/11.
It was 24 years from the attack of Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam, popularized by Hal Moore’s book and Mel Gibson’s movie, We Were Soldiers Once... and Young.
We should not forget 9/11, but it should be put is a place like the Fall of Saigon was in 2001, and the attacks on Pearl Harbor were in 1965.
I think it is time.
We also still need to have a reckoning with the conflict that—if you correctly start it in the build-up in 1990 prior to Desert Storm in 1991—I spent 19 of my 21 years of my career mostly focused on.
GWOT. Global War on Terror. We didn’t win it—and it is still being fought, at least by the terrorists.
Attackers at 9/11 were 15 Saudis, 2 from the UAE, and one each from Lebanon and Egypt—organized by a Saudi based out of Afghanistan.
We invaded and occupied Afghanistan for two decades. We were defeated on the battlefield by the same people who had defeated the Soviets before. The Soviets actually did a better job in less time in building civil society and a military than we did. At least their Afghanistan government survived for years after they left. Ours fell before we could even get our people out. Trillions of dollars expended, thousands killed, tens of thousands wounded—complete strategic failure and national humiliation.
We talked ourselves and others into invading Iraq two years later, mostly it seems because we felt we didn’t finish things in 1991. Who knowns—the people who started that war still cannot explain it.
Islamic radicalism is still on the march from Africa’s Atlantic coast to the mayor’s office in New York City.
This is also the 5th anniversary of my description of What a Whole of Government Epistemic Failure Looks Like. Read the post as linked. I stand by every word.
…we were just telling each other another of those little white lies that we do now and then.
Lies. Unaccountability. Blood. Treasure…and in the intervening years, The Smartest People in the Room™ and the institutions we trusted to steward us through this century’s first great challenge, failed the moment, themselves, their nation, and Western civilization.
Instead of clear action in the face of evil, they invited to settle here those who hated us and then enabled enough of those who shared the world view of those who attacked us a quarter century ago so well that we find ourselves in 2026 with terrorist apologists literally holding the mayoralty of Ground Zero and holding such significant influence over one of our nation’s two major political parties that they have nominated their comrades to run for seats at the national level up to the Senate.
We thought we were going “over there so we don’t have to fight them here” to change terrorist supporting nations to be more Western. Instead, while we invaded the world, we invited and enabled terrorist supporters to come here to change Western nations.
We are past the point of making sure we remember the lessons learned from 9/11. Our political class refused to, and as a result, with a quarter century passing us by, it is time to put 9/11 on a respected shelf with Pearl Harbor and the Fall of Saigon. 9/11 should be noted and remembered, but not considered a reference point or touchtone to events we need as a primary reference to be ready for in the second quarter of the 21st Century. That moment has passed.
I am much more interested in studying and learning from our failure to meet the moment so we don’t make it worse.
Just 11 years after the end of WWI—a much more civilizationally important event than GWOT—Robert Graves published, Good-bye to All That.
Yeah, that’s a good title.
Now that I’m through with that self-indulgence, we should remember that war can come to us in a whole variety of ways, and in line with thousands of years of human history, the worst of our species finds nothing more exciting than to visit death and violence to innocent and harmless civilians wanting nothing more that to have a good day.
One bright, bluebird day a quarter century ago, that specter visited the homeland.
NEVER FORGET
NEVER AGAIN
And the enemy has not changed.....they've metastasized.
For me 9/11 will be a sacred holiday until the end of time, mostly to honor the bravery of thousands that kept the number of deceased from being even higher, often at the cost of their own lives. Also, to honor the deceased due obviously no fault of their own had their lives cut short that day and their families impacted forever.
It's also really personal for me. If 9/11 was a Monday or Thursday I would have been sitting in a room in the B-ring in the section of the Pentagon that was hit that morning. Thankfully on the first three rings were destroyed. Many of my shipmates that were there received life-saving medals and are my heroes to this day.
On 9/11 I'm in another world and dimension and I can't and don't want to turn that off.