9/11

 I debated writing anything about 9/11 today, on the twentieth anniversary. My thoughts are, as always, complicated... and it also felt a bit performative and obligatory. 

So many people are sharing memes or posts talking about where they were that day, what they were doing, and how they felt. 

I'll probably do some of that as well, but all those thoughts and feelings are overshadowed by where we are now.

Twenty years later...

We left Afghanistan, a nation we invaded in the first place because of 9/11.

We are in the midst of a pandemic. One that has killed 220x more Americans than died during 9/11. 

And it doesn't feel like the world is better, or safer... but rather has grown increasingly more dangerous and darker.

I don't know how much of the latter is just... growing up, I guess. It could be it was always like this and I just wasn't aware of it.

It had felt though, for a brief moment between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, like there was hope and reason to believe we'd build a better future. 

It is harder to believe that, now. And I don't know how to convey that to the young adults (they're adults now! The children who grow up in a post 9/11 world). 

On 9/11, I was a junior officer at Fort Bliss, TX. In El Paso. 

I was driving to work when I heard it on the radio. I didn't believe it at first and switched radio stations, only to hear the same thing there.

My brother and I talked about how the impact differed... for him it was tragic, but he was in school at IU at the time and didn't really know anyone affected. The next day was pretty much like any other day for him.

I, on the other hand, saw an immediate change. Security to Fort Bliss immediately was ramped up, and the line to get onto base was looooong. They were now doing 100% ID checks (if your car had been registered and had the sticker, you hadn't needed to before. As an officer my sticker was blue, and the gate guards would just salute and allow me through) and random car inspections.

Even as we adjusted to those changes, a buzz went through our units. We all knew the US would respond somehow, and it was just a question of who'd be sent and when. 

I don't know how to convey to civilians what the threat of impeding war means when you serve. Of course there's the risk of death and injury, and you'd have to be a fool to truly wish for or want a war. (Not saying there aren't such fools, especially when young and convinced your invincible.) 

But at the same time, a peace time army is like a baseball team that constantly trains and never actually has any games. It's all training, and paperwork, and vehicle maintenance and more training and more paperwork and more training...

Peacetime service is actually rather boring. Well, not exactly. We do try to make our training exercises as realistic as possible, and you can definitely wind up in high stress and/or dangerous situations. But everything is just rehearsing and practicing for if or when it's needed, as well as doing the regular bureaucratic stuff that keeps equipment maintained, soldiers equipped, people promoted or disciplined, etc.

But 9/11 happened, and someone was going to be going somewhere, and that someone might be us.

That all seems clearcut and simple, but you can't really talk about Afghanistan without talking about Iraq. 

Even if you wanted to ignore all the bad decisions and problems of Iraq, you can't deny that Iraq drew off resources that could have been used in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan became the forgotten theater. 

Not by the soldiers sent there, of course. Not by the people living there. 

But Afghanistan got a fraction of the coverage Iraq did, as well as a fraction of the troops and supplies. 

It is impossible to imagine what would have happened if we'd kept our focus on Afghanistan instead of getting distracted by Iraq, but it's hard to believe we'd have been in the same place.

That's part of what was so annoying about all the negative coverage for our withdrawal...

You'd had twenty years to take Afghanistan seriously and do something different. Nobody was covering it, nobody was reporting it, the average American tended to forget we even had troops there. 

And now suddenly it's this super critically important place that we shouldn't abandon? 

Sure, whatever. 

There are still terrorist networks, and it's possible that we'll face another such attack because of the way we mishandled everything. 

But we need an honest and unpartisan look into just how we got where we are today, and I don't have much confidence that we'll see that. 

It's either pseudo-patriotism where people wave the flag and act as though any criticism is an attack on America, or it's a rejection of the notion that we could have done anything good. That it's all 'imperialist behavior' or aggression or whatever and that we should never have invaded in the first place. 

It seems to be impossible to find any sort of nuanced, knowledgeable analysis that doesn't ignore our mistakes but doesn't assume any action on foreign soil whatsoever is a mistake.

It's like all the problems with the Iraq news coverage all over again, and I'm heartily sick of pundits and decision-makers from both sides - left and right - who have such biased and flawed thinking that it's almost impossible to actually do things right.

Over and over and over again.

9/11...

I, like many Americans, was caught off guard. Had to ask myself 'why do they hate us'? 

And so I read, and studied, and learned that it wasn't actually some random act of madness. Learned more about how and why al Qaeda attacked us that day. 

I do not have confidence we've really resolved the root causes.

Also...

Even though the pandemic is not related to 9/11, the callousness and willingness to do nothing when over 600,000 Americans have died vs the demand for action when less than 3,000 did...

It's hard not to feel like we've grown more callous and cruel. 

So yes, 9/11... I remember that day. And I feel for all the Americans who lost a loved one.

I'm not sure I want us to 'never forget' though. Not when it's led us here, to the America of today.