Friends,

I wanted to take some time today to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11th, 2001. That day, for me, and for so many others, was as significant and memorable a day as they come. Even for those of us who were not present in either New York or Washington that day, distinct and visceral details continue to stand out in our minds, in ways similar to the most traumatic experiences of our own lives.

It was a turning point. Those who experienced it know the distinct change in the world that occurred that day, specifically at the moment the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center, and universal recognition of what it really was emerged. Professionally, that moment shaped the nature of the next twenty-two years of my Army career.

Within a few years, however, more than half of this country will have been born after that morning. That will mean that a majority of our country will not have any personal memories of those attacks, having to rely instead on the images that pop up in their Instagram or TikTok feeds on the anniversary.

What they will not have is an understanding of what that day felt like. The fear, the grief, the confusion, the anger. The uncertainty about what it would all mean.

And those are not the same thing. Footage is a record. A record can tell you what happened, in what order, to how many people. It cannot tell you what it was to be alive inside it. That only moves one way, from somebody who was there to somebody who was not, and it only moves if the person who was there decides to say something.

What remains, then, is for those of us who remember to tell our stories. And for those that weren’t to listen, ask questions. Every year there are fewer of us who can make it, and the ones who can are increasingly likely to assume that maybe our own version is not worth the trouble.

So I am going to tell you mine. There isn’t anything remarkable in it, other than it’s mine.

That is exactly why I am telling it. And so should you.

That morning I was a captain, one of a handful of Army officers sent to the Marine Corps as exchange students at what was then the Amphibious Warfare School in Quantico, Virginia. Our oldest daughter had been born on the twenty-ninth of August, so she was two weeks old.

It was a beautiful morning on the East Coast, cool and clear, the way everyone who was here remembers it. I was sitting with two Marine classmates over a map, working on tactical graphics, when a Marine from another small group came over and told us that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. We had no television and no computer in front of us, and our reaction was the one nearly everyone had in those first few minutes. It sounded like an accident, a terrible one, and we went back to the map.

Then the second plane hit, and the school moved all of us into an auditorium where they had put the news feed up on a large screen. Our class, the majors from the Command and Staff College, the staff, all of it packed into one room. We watched the towers come down the way the rest of the country watched them. The Pentagon was just up the road from where we sat. Then came the reports out of Pennsylvania. Nobody in that auditorium had any idea what was still to come, and the whole time I sat there my thoughts kept going to my wife, home alone with a two-week-old, with no way for me to reach her.

Two nights earlier I had driven my mother-in-law to Dulles and taken a detour home through the city, because I hadn’t seen Washington since a class trip in the seventh grade. Everything was lit. I drove past the Pentagon that night, past the very side of it where the plane went in about thirty-six hours later.

They released us around midday. I called my wife from a pay phone in the building, because in 2001 what we had between us was a pager, the one she was supposed to use if she went into labor. She was frightened and had no idea what was going to happen next, and I told her I would be home soon.

We were living in an apartment complex outside Washington that the government leased and counted as base housing, though nothing about it looked like a base. There was no gate, no fence, and no guard.

By the time I pulled in that afternoon, two noncommissioned officers, one Navy and one Air Force, had built a makeshift gate at the entrance and were checking people in. Nobody had ordered them to do it. They had come home like everyone else, understood what the day now required of them, and stood up a checkpoint out of whatever they could find.

The image of that gate has remained in my mind as a symbol for twenty-five years, and it is part of what I would most want a young person to understand.

They have seen the towers. What the footage cannot give them is that on an ordinary Tuesday morning I left a place that did not need a gate, and by that afternoon I came home to one, and it has been there ever since. Nothing dramatic happened to me that day. The country I drove home through simply wasn’t the country I had driven out of a few hours earlier, and you could see the difference in a piece of plywood at the entrance to a parking lot.

What I remember most about that night is holding a two-week-old and understanding that the world she had been born into was not the world she was going to grow up in. We were frightened, not in some abstract way about the country, but immediately and specifically, about what was coming next.

And that was only part of it. What followed over those weeks and months was a cauldron of emotion. Grief for the people who were lost, and for the families who watched it happen on television. Anger, and underneath the anger a genuine thirst for vengeance that I am not going to dress up as something nobler than it was. Confusion about who had done it and what we were supposed to do about it. And running through all of it, a kind of resolve I have not felt in this country since.

It eased over the years, and it has never entirely gone. That is why the footage still does what it does to me.

Twenty-two of my twenty-six years in uniform were spent inside the war that began that morning. Every one of my children, except my oldest and only for her first two weeks, has grown up in a world that day built.

I find myself missing what came after it as well, the unity, the shared focus, the way the rest of the world stood with us, and wondering what it would take to have any of that again.

Everyone who was alive that day has a story. I have heard hundreds of them, mostly from Soldiers. Some were in basic training. Some were in the field in Germany, locked down and drawing live ammunition because nobody yet knew whether we were already at war. Not one of those is a famous story, and every one of them carries something the footage does not.

On Friday, tell yours to someone who does not have one. A son or a daughter, a young person on your staff, anyone for whom this is history rather than memory.

And if you are on the other side of that conversation, ask. Ask them where they were, what they were doing, and what they were feeling. The people who remember will not always volunteer it, in part because they have decided their version is too ordinary to matter. It isn’t. The ordinary ones are the only ones that make it feel real.