Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Home – American Heritage News – Reflections on 9/11 After 25 Years

Reflections on 9/11 After 25 Years

Twenty-five years later, the images remain seared into our national memory: A brilliant September sky blackened by smoke; office papers drifting through the canyons of lower Manhattan; strangers running toward danger while thousands fled from it; and, by evening, an America stunned, grieving, and suddenly united.

Sept. 11, 2001, was not merely a date on the calendar or a chapter in a history book. It was a wound to the American soul—and a summons to remember what citizenship, sacrifice, and love of country truly require of us.

Like many Americans, I have spent considerable time reflecting on that day and on the quarter-century that has followed. My perspective is a deeply personal one. On 9/11, I was a vice president of a public company headquartered in New York City, working from its Washington, D.C., office. When the first hijacked aircraft struck the World Trade Center, our company lost 358 colleagues and consultants, 358 families, 358 unfinished stories. They were not statistics. They were friends, mentors, coworkers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives.

Months later, I was recalled to active duty as an officer in the United States Navy. In time, President George W. Bush appointed me Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs. Among my responsibilities, I took part in the 2006 operation that transferred high-value detainees from CIA custody to Guantanamo Bay, including alleged co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks. In a way I could never have imagined that September morning, the circle closed: from mourning colleagues murdered in New York to helping ensure that those accused of plotting the attacks faced the machinery of American justice.

In the days after the attacks, my company—like so many families, businesses, firehouses, police precincts, military units, churches, and communities touched by that evil—worked without pause to communicate, comfort, and care for those left behind. In the weeks, months, and years that followed, people and institutions found their own ways to honor the dead. Some built memorials. Some endowed scholarships. Some raised children who would know the names and stories of relatives they never had the chance........

© The Daily Signal