On May 25, 2001, I graduated from the United States Naval Academy. It was one of the most important days of my life. I had the full experience of “Four Years by the Bay”. I played football, ran track, sang in the Gospel Choir, and threw myself into just about everything else that place had to offer. I also struggled the entire time. I graduated last in my class, and I was THRILLED to leave. What most people remember from that day is that I gave President George W. Bush a bear hug. What I remember is what he said. He told us that we did not know what the future held, but that we were equipped to meet it. Not one of us sitting in Navy Marine Corps Memorial Stadium imagined we would be tested so quickly, or for so long.
As we come up on the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, a lot of people are writing reflections. Reflections on how society changed. Reflections on how the world came to see itself from that point forward. I can never imagine what the families of the victims of 9/11 have had to carry. As they are interviewed again this week, you can still see the raw emotion and the shock of a day that changed their lives permanently. The targeting of innocent civilians on that scale had never been seen in this country. It changed America’s perception of the world and if we are being honest, it should have.
I want to write about my fellow classmates, because our class is a generation of veterans that has never really gotten to reflect on its own story. We were the last Annapolis class commissioned in peacetime. We had been educated and trained to serve in one Navy and were delivered four months later into another.
Despite the overwhelming shock of that moment, the United States as a whole never stepped to a war footing; not totally, not the way it did in World War II. This was an all-volunteer force that would go on to fight the nation’s longest war. You had people who volunteered, and then volunteered again, and again, and again, knowing full well that no draft was ever coming to help them. There was no rationing. There were no war bonds. There was no shared sacrifice asked of the American people. As a matter of fact, the economy picked up, taxes went down, and the nation carried on. Every so often somebody would put a yellow ribbon on the back of a car. But no mother in this country lived in fear that her son would be drafted into war.
That arithmetic falls on a very small number of people. When the country does not send for more people, it sends the same ones back. Second deployment, third, fourth, fifth. The same names on the same manifests, year after year, while the rest of the country experienced the war as news segments.
Our war did not end so much as it stopped. Even at the conclusion of the campaign in August 2021, there was no celebration. No V-E Day, parades, etc. In actuality the withdrawal from Afghanistan was rushed and chaotic, and thirteen Americans were killed at Abbey Gate on the way out; eleven Marines, a Navy corpsman, and a soldier. Like Vietnam, there was no parade or declarative statement, just a casual relinquishment of what two decades of war had gained. A generation of volunteers fought the longest conflict in American history, and for all its definitive beginning, it was given no definitive end. And to add insult to injury, constantly having to fight for adequate Veterans Administration care.
This country has never come to grips with what that generation was asked to carry. Because nobody was made to go, there has never been any wholesale acknowledgment of the cost that a lot of us live with every day. The wounds you can see and the wounds you cannot still resonate through the veterans of the Global War on Terror. The families endured it, too, deployment after deployment, with a quiet and dignified resolve, while America never really asked what it was costing them. And unlike every generation before us, we were never fully away. Email, satellite phones, video calls from the ship. You could stand a watch in the Gulf and be on the phone about a birthday party in the same hour. Our fathers and grandfathers got letters that were months old and a hard border between the war and home. We got neither the border nor the relief that came with it. In many ways, that made the separation harder.
The military that fought those two decades also looked drastically different from the ones that came before. Combat exclusion for women was repealed. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed. A multinational force had to figure out how to operate together at a scale not seen since World War II. We were joint by default in a way the generation before us never was; you did not have the luxury of staying inside your own service. And you had junior officers and senior enlisted acting as warfighters and as ambassadors at the same time, because in some of the hardest fought places there were no diplomats to be found. At times the force was stretched so thin that many of us learned to do jobs we never envisioned. As a Naval Officer, I never envisioned serving as a peacekeeper on the ground in Africa after the Liberian Civil War, but we did what we could, wherever we could, for as long as we could.
So why did we endure all of it? Why volunteer again and again to go back?
For me personally, the primary reason was the suffering I watched in real time on September 11th. Watching a live feed of people who had to choose between staying in the World Trade Center and burning to death, or going out on their own terms and jumping from a window. There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about that. There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about the shipmates and teammates I lost over the years fighting an amorphous enemy. And there is not a day that goes by that I do not carry some resentment toward those who could have volunteered and chose not to. It was their right and their choice. But I have a hard time with the ones who chose not to fight and now, 20+ years later, cosplay as tough guys and wanna-be combat leaders, when they did not have the intestinal fortitude to walk into a recruiter’s office on September 12th. I wrestle with the fact that we fought the nation’s longest war and it is rarely discussed except as a policy cautionary tale; a list of what not to do. That framing is valid but it is not enough. Our stories have not been told, not the way the conflicts of the last century were documented.
What upsets me is not the lack of acknowledgment. You do not serve as long as many of us did if being noticed was the point. What worries me is the loss of the lessons. Lessons that never got codified into the American public psyche, and that are leading straight back to the same mistakes being made again right now, right in front of us.
The thousands of Americans who died on September 11th and in the twenty years after it deserve better than that. They deserve to have us learn something and be better for it, the same as we owe the ones who fell in every American conflict before the Global War on Terror.
My classmates are what I keep coming back to. Twenty-five years out, the Class of 2001 is scattered across this country doing the same thing we did in uniform; building things, running things, standing watch in one form or another. Some of them did not come home. We were told at graduation that we did not know what was coming but that we were ready for it, and it turned out that both halves of that were true.
And just like we did stood 25 years ago, once again America is at a crossroad. The question is, will we take the lessons from the most painful day in our history and use them to create a better path?
