Welp. It’s today. 25 years since 9/11.
Some of you have heard my story—about where I was when it happened, and what the day was like. I rolled up to seminary in my truck with my little brother; we listened to the radio on the way in, just background noise, and maybe I heard something about an airplane and the Twin Towers, but I didn’t put anything together just yet. It was just before 6AM Pacific Time in Henderson.
The first plane hit the first tower at 8:46 Eastern. Seminary lasted about 45 minutes, and then I drove over to the school. Might have caught a snippet on the radio again, my mind was probably elsewhere. In the parking lot I ran into my best friend Derrick. He asked if I’d heard that someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center. My foggy brain recollected something from the radio and thought “huh.”
It didn’t really process at the time. In my head I envisioned some idiot in a bi-plane hitting the tower and putting a hole in it.
Then we went to first period, our U.S. Government class. My teacher put the news on the TV. They were replaying the impact of the second plane—a news chopper had come over to the WTC to capture footage of the smoke and just as we were starting to understand what we were looking at, that second plane came in and hit the other tower.
My teacher told us a third plane had hit the Pentagon and a fourth had gone down in Pennsylvania. All other flights were grounded and we were left asking just what the hell was going on.
Every teacher had the TV on for the rest of the day. I don’t remember learning anything. I doubt we studied or focused. We watched people somersaulting out of the higher windows, or clinging to the side of the building as smoke billowed out. In my youthful naivete I assumed people were only jumping because firefighters were down below with pads to catch them. That naivete didn’t last long. I understood after a few minutes how those jumps ended.
I called my brother when I got home. He was at college in Idaho. He read a lot of Clancy novels and was a big news junkie, so he had a better idea of international affairs—the question of the day was, who? Why? He thought it was China. My best guest was “someone in the Middle East.”
That’s the thing: we didn’t know. We couldn’t even process the idea that someone hated us enough to do this. That was the America of the 90s and early 2000s. We were wealthy, happy, and peaceful. And yeah, most of us didn’t care what the world thought of us, to the extent that we never even bothered to wonder. I wanted to save up and buy a muscle car, have a good senior year of high school, make out with a girl here and there, and get ready for my mission. I had six-pack abs and was making eight bucks an hour at Discount Tire and that was good money.
Then the planes hit.
That night—it was a Tuesday—we had a Young Men’s activity at church. One of our leaders worked for a towing company and he set up some cars for us to smash at the local junkyard. This activity was on the calendar for weeks before this happened. We were still trying to process it when we got there. A bunch of 16 and 17 year old kids, goofing off, having fun, but knowing something huge was happening out there in the world, and wondering whether it affected us.
(I was a cheerleader that year, and one of our rival schools had a cheer coach on the plane that hit the Pentagon, IIRC. That was as close as it got to Henderson and it was still too close.)
For the rest of September, we reeled from the sucker punch. Everyone paid tribute, and the government mobilized under President Bush to figure out who did this, where they were, and just how many bombs we were going to shove up their tailpipe in retaliation. Within days the blame landed squarely on the shoulders of Osama Bin Laden, leader of Al-Qaeda, affiliate of the Taliban, who were in charge of Afghanistan.
With a name and a face to hate, America united in the quest to exact justice. Everyone wanted a piece of this guy. South Park even rushed an episode where the kids got stuck on a military plane and wound up in the Middle East, Cartman ran into Bin Laden, and we learned that the entire debacle was the result of OBL’s tiny genitals. We were all on the same page.
In October, we hit Afghanistan. We started dropping bombs on suspected bunker sites. We narrowed the search down to thirty square miles. Twenty. Fifteen. Then the news broke that OBL had probably fled Afghanistan ten days ahead of our arrival. The search continued. November came around and my high school’s football team made a push deep into the playoffs. My sister was diagnosed with diabetes. She spent Thanksgiving in the hospital, and I spent that weekend freezing my toes off in Reno where our team lost in a snowstorm.
Whenever we got a whiff of the news, on TV or in the papers (we didn’t hang out online much), the hunt for Bin Laden was a central focus, along with the cleanup in New York. December came. Christmas felt a little…off. We wanted a pick-me up. Hopefully we’d catch him. The military was there now in full force, kicking names and taking a$$, so it’d happen any day now. Right? Nope. No joy.
This was the new reality. 2002 came along. We kept hunting. The War on Terror was real and rumor had it that in addition to Afghanistan harboring Bin Laden, Iraq was up to its old tricks under Saddam Hussein, and he had WMDs in production. We’d head over there the following spring, in 2003. Suddenly there were divisions on that point, and America became a place of Left and Right again. Didn’t matter. We expanded the GWOT to Iraq and overthrew Saddam. We’d catch him in the fall of 2003, but Bin Laden remained at large.
For years the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns carried on. They were staples of the entire Bush presidency, and remained a key point of the 2008 presidential campaign, at least until the housing market crashed and the subprime mortgage crisis obliterated most of everyone’s money. Barack Obama succeeded Bush, and foreign policy objectives shifted in the Middle East. We found Bin Laden hiding out in Pakistan, almost ten years after 9/11. SEALs took him out and expedited his arrival to the ocean floor. It was over. Right?
Wrong. Ten years in Afghanistan would become twenty. Iraq would become a staging ground for ISIS, and the leadership landscape would shuffle, and the conflict would stretch into a third presidency (Trump), and then a fourth (Biden), where it was swiftly “resolved” in the form of a hasty desertion, putting the Taliban back in charge with billions of dollars’ worth of American guns and armor. I suspect that at some point we will end up back in Afghanistan, and for the third time in my lifetime, a superpower will waste huge amounts of capital in the Graveyard of Empires—this time, fighting our own weapons.
For twenty-five years we’ve seen a mixed bag of responses to the most shocking casus belli in living memory. It marked the end of the world I grew up in, and hastened the departure onto the road that got us here. Granted, it wasn’t the only cause, but everything that’s happened was downstream of it, or connected in some meaningful way. It influenced our leaders, who were also in charge of our capital, who made policy decisions that incinerated the value of our currency, and also altered our border and immigration and refugee policies that rapidly remade our demographics, landing us in a swamp of fourth- and fifth-order consequences that we’re still figuring out.
And don’t even get me started on the conspiracy theories that came out of it. If you think Candace Owens has thrown spaghetti at the wall over Charlie Kirk, 9/11 has her begging for mercy. Somehow it was the Saudis, but it was also Bush, but it was also the Jews, depending on whether you ask Ron Paul potheads or Leftist crackheads. I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know. I think plenty of conspiracies are viable and I also think most of the people peddling them are retarded. All I know at the end of the day is that it upended the world and now I tell my children about it like it’s a fantastical place they can’t visit.
Is this new? Not really. My dad grew up in the 70s and that wasn’t like the 90s all that much. He’s a Boomer, I’m a Millennial. But my world was more similar to his than the Alphas’ is to mine, and that matters. I remember having the faintest, vaguest inkling of that as I was out smashing cars with my fellow Priests at the Pic-A-Part that night:
This is a big deal. I’m gonna tell my kids about this someday.
Here I am. Today is “someday.” I have three kids. One of them says he wants to join the military. We’ve had talks about what that entails. I have a mortgage that I’m going to spend the next few decades paying off. Gas is still really expensive. We’re finding new ways to get bogged down in not-wars in the Middle East. Everyone is chronically online and we’re all really good at finding ways to hate each other.
Maybe I look at the past with rose-colored glasses. Maybe I have 42 years of life experience and I see things I just couldn’t see at 17. I’m just living through my fair share of intense historical events, right? I mean hell, my mom was almost 5 when Kennedy got shot. She was 15 when Nixon resigned—which had never been done before. My parents saw the Cold War end in their 20s—a war that started ten years before they were born. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The rise of the Internet. Their parents fought in Italy and Korea. Half of my life is comprised of the Global War on Terror. Historically speaking…these things happen.
It’s just that, for me, that was the beginning of the end. Do I know who “really” did it? No. I’m sure I don’t have the whole story. More to the point, I’m sure it doesn’t matter—not for me, individually, on the ground. What matters to me is giving my kids as much of a great childhood as I can. Giving them skills and memories and preparation for adulthood, so that they have that safe cache of 18 years of memories to look back on when they think of how the world should be.
I remember a more peaceful time. A more prosperous time. I remember when it all changed, and everything that has come in the wake of it. And if I know anything, I know this: I will have it again. Even better: I will give it to my kids. I can’t fix everything—I can just give them that vision, that ambition, that expectation, and send them out into the world to make it.
So here we are. 25 years after 9/11. I remember the world before.
Let’s build it again.
Yeah. Their mfing kicker nailed a 57 yard FG with a tailwind.
You got your ass beat by McQueen too?