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Today marks another 9/11.
Every year, it arrives with a gravity I can’t ignore.
While I’ve written about this day many times in the past two-plus decades, no matter how many years pass, the memories return like clockwork. Sometimes in fragments. Sometimes in waves: overwhelming.
I was in uniform that morning. Sitting in a military classroom for training. The TV was on for current events, and the broadcast cut in: a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers.
We thought it was a tragic accident.
Then the second plane hit.
Everything stopped.
We sat in silence as the towers fell. I remember thinking: this must be what it felt like to see Kennedy shot.
Minutes later, someone walked into the room and ordered us to return to the unit immediately to draw weapons. The base went to full lockdown. We didn’t know what was coming, but we were preparing for the worst.
That dread never fully left me.
Weeks later, when flights resumed, I remember the knot in my stomach the first time I saw a plane in the sky again: wondering if the Stingers, Avengers and Patriots stationed around base might shoot it down.
And then the deployments began. Friends of mine went off to Afghanistan.
One by one, they returned: some safely, some… changed.
One came back early: alive, but missing a leg.
I remember rehearsing what I’d say when I finally spoke to him.
I remember the guilt.
In those early years, after my contract ended, I left the country to try to find myself. Most of those I served with were soon frozen in place, unable to separate before being sent off to Iraq.
I was lucky. That knowledge never sat easy.
It took fifteen years before I came back to the US. Several more years passed before I felt like I had truly come home.
Even now, I'm still trying to make peace with the version of America that emerged in the wake of 9/11.
I’ve mourned this day many times: not just for those lost in the towers, but for what followed. The wars. The vengeance. The policy shifts. The surveillance. The fear turned to infrastructure.
I’ve mourned for my friends who went to war, including the one killed while serving in Afghanistan more than a decade after 9/11.
I’ve mourned for the strangers I’ll never meet whose lives were shattered.
I’ve mourned for the country I once thought I understood.
And one day, years ago, I found myself sitting alone in a quiet office, looking through a gallery of memorial photographs. I didn’t expect it to hit me so hard. But it did. Something broke through. I closed the door. Put my head in my hands. And I finally wept.
Two years after the towers fell, I cried for the very first time.
Now, decades later, the ache still lingers.
Not always visible. But always there.
Like a bruise just under the skin of memory.
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