September 10, 2001
A letter from twenty years after 9/11 on the end of history and the legacy of heroes
Today is September 10, 2001. This letter finds its way to you as you’re starting your sophomore year at college. You’re still young and naive to believe the world has carved out a space for you to make your way. But you do not know the barriers and difficulties that you have since experienced will only lightly prepare you for the weight that falls on every man’s shoulders who bears witness to a life unafraid of charging forward up the hill of challenge, hoping there is an earthly respite from the war – if not too as a redeemed soul as spiritual reward.
Tomorrow you will know the meaning of war. A war of new modern age with faceless evil and abstruse roots. Tomorrow the sun will rise on a day like no other.
In the next weeks you will be faced with the worst of humanity. There will be questions about how this cataclysmic tragedy sprung up from a font half a world away. How the gleaming windows and bright dreams of a great city – the greatest city – became shattered ruins and ash-laden rubble. In beat of a heart, New York City at once is the shadow of its invincible self and a modern Pompeii burned into the minds of everyone who witnessed the collapse of seemingly impenetrable armor.
Next will come the type of chaos that comes with being stripped naked of the security America wrapped herself in for decades. The incredible loss will mix with an apocalyptic landscape unfamiliar with generations who thought we were finally at the end of history. There should be no more lessons to learn. There should be no more problems we cannot fix with statecraft, diplomacy, or free trade. But to quote the novelist Samuel Butler, “The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.” We marched forward as a nation with eyes wide shut and now the price of such willful ignorance comes at too high a cost.
In the next year, you will see the true cost of such ignorance and the true cost of war. America will strike out as a nation forced out of hibernation too soon. Not yet steady on her feet but ready to fight that which interrupted a state suspended between reality and dreams. Thousands of Americans will feel an incisive rage. You will be one of those Americans. You will sign your name at the recruiting desk of the United States Marine Corps and never look back.
This call to action – twenty years ago – is a part of American history that cannot be erased. It is recorded in the history books as the actions of bravery and valor of heroes. It’s commemorated on monuments and stamped in street signs in towns across the country. But the true soul of the American citizen soldiers is passed down through the American Spirit. Just as tomorrow will shock the world into how deep the depths of depravity flow, it will bring into the brightest light the people who selflessly stand in the path of destruction for no other reason than altruism for the lives of his brother and sister.
A bleary-eyed nation will wake up on September 12, 2001 and understand a world it didn’t see. Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters will wake up with only the searing pain from loss. They will face the rest of their lives in a new world, yearning for the life of September 10. They may share the public side of the heroics – the firefights who ran up the stairs of the Twin Towers, the medics who rushed into the smoldering fires of the Pentagon, the passengers of United Flight 93 who saw the fate before them and charged ahead without a second thought – but the whispered promises, the silent glances, the knowing touches that are private to each heart will live on only in the memories of devastating sadness assuaged by Tennyson’s bittersweet words, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
I wish I could tell you that in the twenty years since this fateful, horrible day we would learn something as a country. That we would approach the future with this event burning as hot as the day it happened as a branding on America’s soul that would keep it from the same self-absorbed arrogance that is filled y petty politicians and pompous bureaucrats. But as we approach twenty years and look back at our anger and passion and a single-minded purpose of defense of the greatest nation in the world, it becomes apparent that the desire is as much a mirage as our sense of security on September 10th. Maybe it was a nation stunned and stiff-legged, unable to process fully the enormity of devastation and tragedy. Maybe it was a lack of time between a nation in mourning and a nation on a new war footing. Maybe it was the hope that an annual remembrance would be enough to rekindle the spirit of the bravest among us – and realize that we fell far short of living lives worthy of that sacrifice. So the memory and emotion fade like an old weathered flag bleached from the sun, torn from raging winds; the emotions too extreme to touch because it could all disintegrate under our prying fingers.
Twenty years will pass since the events of tomorrow. And a nation has left the very place that harbored such evil. The nature of the exit won’t come as a surprise to the cynic you will become. We will put niceties ahead of necessity, trade leadership for timidity, abandon victory in exchange for acquiescence. But you must remember that the history of this nation is built on the spirit of heroes. It isn’t a perfect nation, but it is a good nation. Take heart that in such a cowardly act of a President more interested in perception than reality, Americans are passionate enough about our role and responsibility in the world that they were disgusted and outraged by the form and function of such a betrayal of American values – instead of accepting the situation with jaded passivity.
America is not where history ends. It is where it begins. It begins not alone and in isolation, but with each generation on the shoulders of those who came before. From the Revolutionary War to Gettysburg, Argonne and Iwo Jima, Ia Drang and Battle of 73 Easting, men have accepted the call of battle not as conquerors, but defenders of freedom, and the lives of their brothers and sisters in arms. They are the last line of defense against belligerent forces that threaten our way of life.
America’s heroes aren’t always in uniform. Heroics always happen when men go to war; it can happen when the war is brought to them. Tomorrow one man, Thomas Burnett, Jr. will be a name you will come to know well. He graduated from your high school, went to church down the street from your house. He was on Flight 93. He was a man who knew the consequences of his actions just as well as the consequences of his inaction. The last call he made from that flight was to his wife, Deena. The transcript comes from the Thomas Burnett Family Foundation:
6:54 a.m. Fourth cell phone call to Tom to Deena
Deena: Tom?
Tom: Hi. Anything new?
Deena: No
Tom: Where are the kids?
Deena: They’re fine. They’re sitting at the table having breakfast. They’re asking to talk to you.
Tom: Tell them I’ll talk to them later
Deena: I called your parents. They know your plane has been hijacked.
Tom: Oh…you shouldn’t have worried them. How are they doing?
Deena: They’re O.K.. Mary and Martha are with them.
Tom: Good. (a long quiet pause) We’re waiting until we’re over a rural area. We’re going to take back the airplane.
Deena: No! Sit down, be still, be quiet, and don’t draw attention to yourself! (The exact words taught to me by Delta Airlines Flight Attendant Training).
Tom: Deena! If they’re going to crash this plane into the ground, we’re going to have do something!
Deena: What about the authorities?
Tom: We can’t wait for the authorities. I don’t know what they could do anyway.
It’s up to us. I think we can do it.Deena: What do you want me to do?
Tom: Pray, Deena, just pray.
Deena: (after a long pause) I love you.
Tom: Don’t worry, we’re going to do something.
He hung up
In twenty years you will move back to Minnesota after the military and marry the love of your life. In twenty years almost to the day you will be giving birth to a son of your own, laying in a hospital bed and watching the events of an unbelievable end to this twenty-years-war. I will tell you this: Be confident in your decision to defend America at its most vulnerable. Be confident in the virtue of America and the objective truth of the ideals on which it was founded. Be confident that good men will defend the defenseless and be selfless stewards of liberty and freedom. Be confident in those things because you have the opportunity to raise your baby boy into a man who will run into a burning building, not turn his head from the cries for help. Tom Burnett embodied the bravery and valor and courage found in the heart of American patriots. Raise your boy to know and understand the words “We’re going to do something.” Because anyone can be a hero when called to action. Tom Burnett was an anyone. That flight was full of anyones.
Cherish this day of peace. Cherish the history of heroes that will make the next generation of heroes, because as terrible and shocking tomorrow will be, there is one antidote for feckless politicians who see these men as expendable: they are just men. But heroes transcend the unimaginable horror of disaster and tragedy and mend the tears in the fabric of this still great nation.
Never Forget.
-J
“All men can be criminals, if tempted. All men can be heroes, if inspired.”
-G.K. Chesterton