https://www.tampabay28.com/news/local-news/remembering-9-11/how-9-11-hijackers-used-florida-to-blend-in-and-train-before-the-deadliest-attack-in-us-historyI don’t really remember 9/11. I was in preschool, my memories of the events are minimal and 9/11 itself is not something I remember watching happen. What I do remember is from a few days later, in my preschool class. Maybe a week after the events of 9/11, a newspaper sat on my teachers desk and she explained to us that some bad people flew a plane into a building in New York City. And that was that.
When I was around the ages of twelve or thirteen, I began to come across videos on Youtube of the events that happened that day. From first hand recorded videos of citizens who happened to have a camcorder on them, to news broadcasts and live reporting. I became totally absorbed by them. The planes making impact with the towers, the people who had to leap from their offices, the collapse of the towers, I could not believe it. I could not believe that someone would want this to happen, let alone orchestrate it. It was impossible for me to process the sheer destruction and chaos. It struck an emotional chord in me that I had never quite felt before, innocent people were the target and my brain could not process that.
Around that time I had learned of something that made these events hit a little closer to home. I grew up in Venice, Florida. Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah, three of the 9/11 hijackers had trained as pilots in Venice. Atta and al-Shehhi trained at Huffman Aviation while Jarrah trained at the Florida Flight Training Center, just minutes from my driveway. The attacks, although in the United States, felt somewhat distant to me. I had no personal connection to New York City, DC, or Pennsylvania. I was a young kid from the beach who did not have much life experience outside of that. Learning of the significance my hometown played in the hijackers buildup to 9/11, made the attacks much more personal and close to home than before.
I will not say that 9/11 is the reason I decided to enlist in the military after high school. I made that decision for my own reasons. But I wonder whether growing up in the shadow of 9/11 shaped the way I understood the world, or at least influenced it. I had grown up knowing there were people out there who were willing to deliberately hurt Americans on a massive scale. Did that understanding subconsciously push me into serving? Maybe.
It was then through my studies after my time in the military where I began to learn more about 9/11. Not about the events that happened that Tuesday morning. But about the warning signs and opportunities that were missed to prevent the attack from taking place. The failures of the intelligence community were not a matter of an analyst overlooking a piece of information, but rather significant flaws in the internal structure of the intelligence community. The IC at the time was not designed to prevent a coordinated attack on American soil, but instead to act in the event of one. Learning about the institutional weaknesses of the intelligence community changed the way I view the events of that day.
The years after 9/11 I’m not too sure the world got much right after the fact. Maybe the one thing America got right was killing the man who planned it in 2011, which feels like the closest thing to a win that America got following 9/11. Did the desire for revenge and emotion get in the way of our policymakers judgement? Perhaps, but Americans deserved answers and action. Sending troops to the mountainous terrains of Afghanistan proved to be quite the more difficult task than expected and the war outlasted any sense of what winning actually meant.
Ultimately, I did not watch the towers fall in real time, I was not watching the news when the Pentagon got hit, or when flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania. I have however spent time trying to understand what happened, why it happened, and what followed. The people that come to mind when I think of the horrific events that happened that day are not those who attacked us, but instead those who jumped into action to help others. People running into chaos to sacrifice for complete strangers. Different backgrounds, religions, and walks of life. That to me is the lesson worth taking forward. Remember the evil that took place without letting it define us.