Today, 9/11/2019 is certainly someone's 18th Birthday and is also a weekday. There is a very good, near certain, chance that some kid who was being born on 9/11/2001 is taking the Oath of Enlistment today. We have now passed that point where a non-zero number of soldiers fighting the vague "Global War on Terror" or training to do so were not born before the day that brought that conflict to the front and center of our military efforts.
I remember I was working at a tech center and I was getting into day trading and noticed I couldn't get online to check the markets that day and then, curiously, checked the news and - well - there it was. Tower one was hit, then tower two, then the Pentagon was hit, then one tower fell, then a plane crashed in Pennsylvania, then another tower fell, then ANOTHER tower fell. Airspace was shut down, the National Guard was mobilized, eventually our leadership emerged, we donated blood or volunteered and eventually a story emerged about hijackings and training camps and so on.
I started to train my body to enlist, and raised my hand in front of that flag some months later - shipped out some time after that. This act of terrorism would be the defining image of the "Enemy" that has been the primary adversary of our deployed armed forces since that time. A soldier with Army Special Forces was killed in Afghanistan already this September in 2019, along with a Romanian and many of the Afghans around them. The war continues, a few thousand of our nation's of hundreds of millions are doing all the bleeding, but the war continues.
I had this silly notion that after 9/11 the ENTIRE nation would have been mobilized. Draft Cards and Victory Gardens, Balls to the Wall, everyone do their part, roll up your sleeves, "Let's get this done!" kind of a fight.
Most of the world had moved on to Representative Governments with legitimacy derived from the governed and so on, but a stretch of the world "Middle East North Africa" as we call it had only a few regions of stable democracy and instead were led by Archaic and Authoritarian Kings, Emirs, Military Dictators, Warlords, Ayatollahs... of COURSE this region grew misery and exported it - eventually to even our largest city and capital. We were no longer able to ignore that part of the world never was brought into the global consensus or the end of history or whatever we were calling it.
The task was huge, but I lived in a nation that had taken on huge tasks before. Once upon a time the Emperor of Japan was considered a living god, and after an astounding defeat he was transformed into a human constitutional figurehead. The Nazis believed they were destined to lead a thousand year Reich of Aryan Supremacy and were rebuilt into one of the most open and progressive societies on Earth. There is not that much Americans can't do when properly motivated. I thought this was the natural next step in our fight, a full mobilization of the United States, from Privates to Politicians to Brass to CEOs all throwing in to drag this holdout of barbarism kicking and screaming into the modern world.
I was wrong.
Before the embers of the fire were out people were planning on how to turn this tragedy into enacting their personal goals. Saudi Royals were being flown home on specially authorized flights, stories that would both cover up incompetence and fuel two decades of conspiracy theories were being formulated, maps of oil fields were being drawn up, contracts were being written. Previously suppressed ideas about rendition, surveillance, even torture were being elevated. Think pieces were being written about how dissent about any of this was unamerican. The folks that build mansions for Defense Contractors and Lobbyists have had a good 18 years. Now, the five highest income counties in the US are Louden and Fairfax in VA, Howard in MD, and Falls Church and Arlington in VA. those ring-around-DC places up next to Pentagon, NSA Headquarters, Langley, Dulles... the forever war is good for business. The Middle East is still full of Kings and Ayatollahs. A couple of the Military Dictators fell.
There was some unity. NATO mobilized against a common enemy after the U.S., a member state, was attacked. We served along Brits and Australians and Poles and Estonians and Italians and Georgians and a coalition so broad you would have to look up the flag that guy and the checkpoint was wearing later on down the line. Our enemy shifted from "Al Qaeda" who remained kind of global and vague and amorphous to "The Taliban" who had a territory and leaders and so on and that became the fight that we are still fighting today.
By the time my training was complete, Ft. Leonard Wood, Ft. Bragg, Monterrey... there would be a war in Iraq. I would end up spending four years in that place. I never went to Afghanistan. The "Authorization of Military Force" that was passed to fight Al Qaeda was broad enough to see American Forces deployed in combat in Indonesia, the Philippines, Yemen, Somalia, Niger, Syria, and eventually enough nations that members of the Senate Armed Services committee admitted they did not know how many countries American Forces had combat operations in. This has become the new normal.
The world kept moving. On 9/11/2001 there was no iPhone, no Gmail, no Android, no Youtube, no Facebook, no Tesla, No Segways (remember them?), No Xbox, no Trump University, no AirBnB, no "Marvel Cinematic Universe", and no Cracked.com, or a hundred other things we would notice as missing if we returned to that day.
I have always felt a certain hesitancy to join the "Never Forget" crowd. I don't know what that means, but the folks who say it sure know what it means. It is often used to tell critics of the forever war to quit trying to explore the idea that maybe our children and grandchildren shouldn't fight the same war. "Don't you remember that day?" as we fight people less and less related to the Al Qaeda that attacked our nation.
Germany and Japan became our allies. We never "Forgot" but we were allowed to accept a surrender and accept that things had changed and bring our boys home. Eventually those WWII era folks moved on and built that post-war prosperity America and enacted the Marshall Plan and led the civil rights movement and created Spider Man and went to the moon and built the world's coolest cars and so on. The world kept moving and that was OK.
Bin Laden was killed in 2011, Osama's son in 2015, Mullar Omar in 2013 (look him up), Saddam was hung in a basement before that back in 2006. Ayman Al-Zawahiri just released a statement today asking his remaining followers to kill Americans on the 18th Anniversary of 9/11 but Al Qaeda is so degraded that isn't front page news
anywhere. The "Islamic State" fighters in the region are the children and grandchildren of these original folks. Many of their children want to have nothing to do with the fight of their parents. Do they want to move on too?
18 years. Kids old enough to vote have lived their whole lives in the post-9/11 world. Bombs dropped on live targets somewhere every single month of their lives. So common it isn't even news. Dog bites man. US forces dropped 40 tons of bombs on an "ISIS Island"
this week and it's just another day. Further down my news feed below "E-Cigarette Crackdown". Hard to explain to my boys that there used to be stretches of American History where this wasn't always the case. Wars ended.
Mourn the dead, revere the heroes, respect the sacrifices, remember the history, but we can't keep doing this. No one wants their memorial to be a war that never ends.
We all remember 9/11, but how do we get to a world where it is history and not the present?
