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Beautiful days...

9/11/2021

Every Sept. 11 I immerse myself in stories of that day — stories of heroes, stories about people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, first responders, reporters, everyday people. I watch the memorial services and listen to special coverage on the radio.

It’s a lot to take in. I have to take a lot of breaks. I’ve always been an emotional person, so I have to give myself time for the tears to flow.

Sometime around mid-day, I have to do something else. This year, it being a Saturday, I turned on a football game and prepped dinner for the crock pot.

Finished with my chores, I sat down and looked out the window at the beautiful, clear, sunny day. It’s a funny thing — I mentioned that to my girlfriend this morning and she said she couldn’t remember a Sept. 11 that wasn’t exactly like this. Exactly like that morning. I thought about it, and though I’m sure there must have been a cloudy, rainy or hot day in there, damned if I could remember it.

I think reading and experiencing the memories of that day are important. In time, we will be gone and the memories will fade. I reread things I have written in the past and I realize I don’t remember as many specifics as I used to about what I did that day. And so I read and experience every year to keep those moments alive.

But as I look out on that bright, sunny day right now, I know something else. I know it is important for us to live, too.

So, go outside. Play with your kids. Take them somewhere fun. Spend time with friends and loved ones. Hug your families. Call someone. Tell them you love them. Tell them you are thankful to have them in your life. Throw a burger or two on the grill. Play some golf. Go to a football game or watch it in your basement with your friends. Whatever makes you happy. Put away all the political division and bullshit for a day and just be thankful for the moment.

You see, that’s what those radicals who came here didn’t understand. They came here because they wanted to inflict pain on us. To disrupt our lives. They wanted to hurt us. To break us.

Maybe I’m nuts, but I think every moment we move beyond that pain, we give the criminals who committed those heinous acts a bigger middle finger than any drone strike ever could.

And when I think about the people on Flight 93 who decided they were going to take fate into their own hands, I become more and more convinced each moment we spend living our lives to the fullest is the greatest honor we can bestow on those we lost that tragic day.

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Remembering Sept. 11 — 20 years later

9/10/2021

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Photo by mike gieson from FreeImages

Memory is a strange thing. Never blessed with a photographic memory, as I have gotten older, I realize what I do remember are bits and pieces of things that when put together paint a picture of a day.

Even those that change the world. Even one as monumental as 9/11.

I don’t remember, for instance, if I was supposed to be off that Tuesday or simply working a later shift. What I do remember is I was sleeping in — something I could do as a young man that I could never do today.

I was awakened by my girlfriend, whom I had met when she was a reporter at the small daily I worked at outside of Philadelphia. She had recently left the paper, but being the news junkie she was, started her mornings watching the Today Show.

She told me I’d better get up and come into the living room, that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

I remember I tried to shake off the cobwebs. I remember noting the day was much like the one is today, as I write this. It was still summer, but fall was in the air. The sun was bright and the humidity was gone as I looked out the open window next to my bed.

I remember trying to wrap my brain around what she said. I remember muttering something to the effect that it had happened before. I’m a history buff, and I was thinking of 1945, when a B-25 flew into the Empire State Building in a fog.

She assured me this looked different. Knowing we had a rule that you shouldn’t lay anything heavy on me before I had my coffee, that, in combination with her voice, told me I’d better get up.

I remember I made my way to the living room in time to see what I thought was a replay of the moment the plane struck. It was shortly after 9 a.m. When I saw the smoke emerge from the second tower, I realized it wasn’t a replay.

I realized it was deliberate.

I don’t remember where I was when the plane hit the Pentagon, or when the final plane went down in Shanksville. I may have been home or listening to news radio in the car. I don’t remember if I saw the moment when President Bush was told. I don’t remember any phone calls, I don’t even remember how I got into the office that day (typically I carpooled). I just know I went in.

There were no questions asked, no requests made — it was all hands on deck and the newsroom that day was full. Reporters getting in contact with officials. Editors pulling copy from wire services and planning coverage. All of us trying to think of people to get in touch with who might be near the scene or know something.

I remember calling a friend who lived and worked in Northern Virginia. He told me how his girlfriend had seen the Pentagon.

Ironically, it was a day or two later that another editor reminded me of a former colleague who worked in New York — it completely slipped our minds. He was one of the many who walked their way back to the ferries that day.

I was the paper’s Graphics Editor, and while I pulled whatever the Associated Press moved, I spent more time building pages than anything else.

All day, the newsroom television — typically tuned in to reruns of The Simpsons or the public access show our Sports Editor worked on — showed events at the place we would soon know as Ground Zero as they happened. We watched — numb — as first one, then the other tower collapsed.

We worked long and hard that day, not sure if or when more was to come. It was well after dark when we went home. We were blessed, I like to think, to have the work. While others could only watch, while businesses and local governments shut down, we were in a position to “do something,” no matter how small it may seem today. To put down, for the record, the events of that day.

In the days and weeks that followed, we continued our coverage. I wrote a column that tried to put into context my thoughts. Reporters travelled to the site to report on the recovery, and friends volunteered their time to support those efforts. We told the stories of those we lost, and those who were struggling with loss.

We were together in a way we hadn’t been prior and seldom have been since. We were all Americans. In the face of tragedy, we were all proud.

By Sept. 14, the war authorization was passed and by October, we invaded Afghanistan.

In between, life attempted to get back to something akin to normal.

Baseball returned. Locally, the Hall of Fame voice of the Phillies, Harry Kalas, made an impassioned intro welcoming fans back from “the cradle of liberty.” A couple of weeks later, I attended the United States Grand Prix Formula 1 race in Indianapolis, the first international sporting event held in the wake of the attacks. We waved our flags and cheered our nation and its people for the fans who had come from all over the world.

We — and what we stood for — would not be defeated so easily.

In the subsequent years, I had the honor of helping cover our armed forces and the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Photo/Graphics Editor for Stars and Stripes, the independent newspaper for the military community. And, through my columns, I have tried to bring attention to the lingering wounds many who were part of that fateful day — victims, families, first responders and others — still suffer. As national attention moves on, I feel it is vitally important to do so.

For we must never forget.

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The inevitable and ignominious end of our longest war

8/15/2021

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Left to right: NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Defense Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper prepare to speak in Kabul, Afghanistan, Feb. 29, 2020, regarding a joint declaration that could result in all foreign troops leaving Afghanistan within 14 months. NATO photo.

A country is rapidly falling apart and helicopters are evacuating the last Americans from the embassy.

We’ve been here before. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of history has seen that image, but this isn’t black and white, and this isn’t Vietnam. This is the reboot.

As of this writing, reports have Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fleeing Afghanistan and the Taliban demanding the “unconditional surrender” of the government. America’s longest war finally heads to the inevitable conclusion that should have been so easy to see 20 years ago.

But it was a different time, and it wasn’t fashionable to question then. In fact, some thought it downright treasonous.

The urge to “do something” in the wake of the heinous 9/11 attacks — to get those responsible — was all-consuming. While it felt something like bringing a gun to a knife fight, we went all in with the full brunt of the U.S. military. No matter that the removal of an Osama bin Laden seemed exactly why we had the precision of special forces and a CIA in the first place.

Yet, invade we did, and with the Taliban and al-Qaida driven from power (albeit temporarily, we know now), the scope of the mission changed. Despite the lessons of very recent history — we laughed at the Soviets as they ground their empire into the ground in Afghanistan — we allowed ourselves to be deceived into believing we could establish a democracy there in our own image.

It ultimately led to nearly 100,000 troops on the ground — a far cry from George W. Bush’s campaign trail pledge that we shouldn’t be in the nation-building business.

He was right.

Bush handed the war off to Barack Obama, who promised to end it while, in fact, escalating it. He, in turn, handed it to Donald J. Trump, who eventually set us on the path to withdrawal that Joe Biden has executed.

Along the way, we spent trillions. More than 2,400 U.S. service members died. Untold thousands more will carry the scars — visible and invisible — for the rest of their lives. A generation of kids have graduated from high school never knowing a nation not at war. Parents who served so their kids would not have to in turn watched as those children went overseas.

Meanwhile, the lofty days of “paid patriotism” arrangements with sports leagues and “America Supports You” are things of the past. Today’s troops have been shunted to the background, drowned out by culture wars, Trump follies and Kardashians. Vietnam veterans returned to a nation where many were hostile to what they represented. Today’s war fighters return to one that is largely indifferent.

All this for what?

We were never going to stay in perpetuity, no matter what the Defense Department believed, and the results would have been the same had we left ten years ago or ten years from now. The Afghan military and government were rife with corruption, unprepared and unmotivated to stand on their own. A final indignity? Intelligence had them holding out for months. Weeks or days would have been accurate. The Taliban and al-Qaeda were never defeated. They simply waited us out.

The spin doctors will have you believe we achieved our goals in Afghanistan — the elimination of bin Laden and the squelching of terrorism in the region. Sorry, you can’t retcon this war’s objectives 15 years after the fact. At any rate, I’d be hesitant at this moment to put my eggs in the “no terrorism” basket. And while today’s Taliban claims to be kinder and gentler, I’m not sure I’d be placing any bets on that one, either. This is going to be ugly.

Richard Nixon coined “peace with honor.” In Afghanistan, we don’t even get that. It’s “same as it ever was.”

We ask our service members — volunteers, mind you — to do for us what we will not undertake ourselves. For a nation that so often touts its moral superiority, we must do better. They ought not to have been used this way. What a waste.

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Beautiful days...

Remembering Sept. 11 — 20 years later

The inevitable and ignominious end of our longest war

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