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 to meet. Others put on the uniform and carried America’s colors into distant and dangerous places.

Over these 25 years, I have remained close to former colleagues who endured that terrible day. I completed 30 years of Navy service in 2022, but I have also stayed connected to shipmates—many of whom deployed again and again in the long wars that followed 9/11. Their service, and the sacrifices borne quietly by their families, remind us that the cost of that morning did not end when the smoke cleared.

This week, I returned to New York to share a meal with former colleagues who lived through the horror and carried its burdens forward. We remembered those who never came home, and we spoke about what their lives—and the years since their deaths—have taught us. To honor the fallen is not simply to lower a flag, recite their names, or pause for a moment of silence, indispensable as those acts are. It is to ask whether we remain worthy of their memory; whether we still cherish the freedoms they enjoyed, defend the nation they called home, teach the next generation what happened, and summon again the courage, unity, and patriotism that illuminated one of America’s darkest days. These are the lessons we learned. These are the lessons we must carry forward.

We remember the dead as they deserved to be remembered: not as abstractions, not as statistics, but as fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, friends and colleagues, Americans and neighbors—men and women whose lives were taken from us in an act of barbarism and whose memory now imposes upon the living a sacred duty.

We remember that day and those lost in a solemn manner, without being theatrical, patriotic without being political, religious without being sectarian, and elegant without ostentation. We don’t sugarcoat what happened that day or who was responsible.  We know what happened, and we know who did it.  Our loved ones and colleagues were real people whose desks were filled, whose calendars were full, whose families expected them home, and whose colleagues still carry them in memory.

This week, and on 9/11 itself, we remember, participate, and are drawn toward events that appeal to the better angels of our national character. We look to those who invoke God’s grace and the consolations of faith. We surrender to music, to a grief that words alone cannot carry. We know that the United States is not merely a place on a map, but an inheritance—bought at great price, defended by brave souls, and entrusted to us for safekeeping.

We remember the first responders of New York City—the firefighters, police officers, emergency medical technicians, Port Authority officers, and ordinary citizens who ran toward the fire, smoke, steel, and death when every natural instinct told others to flee.

On 9/11, the courage of New York’s first responders illuminated the darkest morning in modern American history. They did not ask who needed saving before they climbed the stairs. They did not calculate the odds before they entered the towers. They went because duty called, because strangers were in peril, and because that is what civilization asks of brave men and women in the hour of trial.

Those who died that day in those towers were themselves exemplars of quiet courage. They were not soldiers on a battlefield. They were professionals at work, engaged in the ordinary pursuits of free people in a free economy: building businesses, serving clients, mentoring younger colleagues, raising families, planning futures. But history sometimes summons ordinary citizens into extraordinary consequences. Their deaths were an assault on America’s civic peace, and their memory is now inseparable from the national story of endurance after 9/11.

Those of us who worked for companies in the World Trade Center at the time remember the days and weeks that followed not as a blur, but as a sequence of wounds. We wept. We consoled. We attended funerals. We helped those whose burdens were heavier than our own. We tried, somehow, to move forward—first by the minute, then by the hour, then by the day. Grief yielded, slowly and imperfectly, to resolve. Memory became obligation. In time, those companies did what the best institutions in America have always done: They absorbed sorrow, protected the living, honored the dead, and turned tragedy into forward determination.

In an age when too many public rituals collapse into slogans, performance, or self-congratulation, we yearn for something rarer and nobler. Let the names speak. Let prayer speak. Let music speak. Let grief speak. And, above all, let love of country speak—not loudly, not boastfully, but with the quiet confidence of a people who know that evil may wound America, but it cannot define her.

Sept. 11 was a day of murder and ash, of falling steel and broken families. But it was also a day on which America saw, again, the meaning of courage: in first responders climbing upward into danger; in office workers helping one another down darkened stairwells; in families who endured the unendurable. 

We chose not to forget, not to cheapen memory, and not to allow time to dilute duty.

Twenty-five years later, the obligation remains. We remember our colleagues because their lives mattered. We remember our shipmates because their sacrifice made our country stronger.  We honor New York’s first responders because courage matters. We cherish America because freedom matters. Remembrance is not a passive act. It is the ultimate act of patriotism.

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