By Mike Nelson
Friday, September 11, 2026
On September 9, 2001, Americans across the country
gathered in front of their TVs for the first episode of a new HBO miniseries—a
series that remains one of their most enduring successes. After the distinctive
HBO logo and static played, but before the opening theme music that would later
become iconic, audiences watched a series of short interviews with old men.
These men had lived full lives as fathers and grandfathers and had succeeded in
a wide range of careers. But despite these long personal histories, separate
from one another, they were speaking about a relatively brief period that would
prove to be the defining event of their lives. They were the paratroopers of
Easy Company 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and between June 6,
1944 and May 8, 1945, they fought and defeated Nazi evil. We know them, of
course, as the Band of Brothers.
Two days after this premier episode, a different group of
paratroopers was culminating a brigade field training exercise on Fort Bragg
when, roughly 500 miles away, the event that would set in motion the defining
period of their history was happening—and changing the course of the world.
September 11 was not only a shocking tragedy and an inhuman mass murder, it
marked a delineation in history, a turning point from the path the world had
been on, and a denial of what might have been. Like the assassination of
Archduke Ferdinand or the fall of the Iron Curtain, there was the world before
these events, and then there was the very different world afterward.
I was one of the paratroopers of 2nd Brigade,
82nd Airborne Division who had been in the field that day. We are
not alone in saying September 11 changed our lives forever and set in motion a
course of events that would define who we were for the rest of our days–just as
their service in World War II defined who the men of Easy Company had been. We
thought we would be off to war, almost immediately, to respond to this attack
on the United States—in fact, we would have to wait 18 months until the
invasion of Iraq to get “our war.” For many of us, September 11 began a new
constant in our lives, of repeated deployments over the course of two decades,
to the point where the deployments became “real life” more than the time at
home between them, a phenomenon written about by Special Forces Team Sgt. Josh Thompson.
Some deployed once but had their lives altered by what
they saw and did. Some, like my fellow Dispatch contributor David
French, or Sen. Tom Cotton, or Pete Hegseth, decided to leave lucrative,
stable, and safe careers behind to answer their country’s call, when nothing
but patriotism compelled them to do so. Many did not return and, unlike the men
speaking at the beginning of Band of Brothers, would not have long lives
to reflect on their service. Many of us who served over the course of two
decades remember exactly where we were on September 11; others were not born
yet or were too young to remember, including Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, Lance
Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, Lance Cpl. Dylan R.
Merola, and Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui. Despite all being 8 months old or
younger on September 11, they were five of the final 13 American casualties of
the war that September 11 started. They were killed in 2021 at Abbey Gate
during the evacuation from Afghanistan. These Marines had literally lived their
entire lives in the shadow of the war on terror, and, ultimately, their life
stories and that of America’s involvement in Afghanistan tragically ended
together. Who knows what they might have done with their lives had September 11
never happened—a question that applies equally to all service members lost in
the war and the thousands who died 25 years ago during the attacks.
The attacks affected thousands of families in New York,
Virginia, and across the country. There were empty chairs at Thanksgiving
dinner, representing those who had merely gone to work or boarded a plane as
though it were any other day. Graduation parties and wedding ceremonies would
forever feel incomplete because a loved one was missing. That scale of the loss
of that day is hard to fathom. Any tragedy that claimed 343 firefighters would
have been previously unimaginable, but that represented just about 11 percent
of the human toll that day. September 11 shook us all to our core. But for the
families of those lost to hatred and evil that day, it was not just a day of
horror, fear, and anger but also incalculable grief, in some cases without
confirmation of what had happened to their loved ones for days.
I had grown up as an Army brat, attended a military
college, and then served in the Army. The war after September 11 had a bit of a
siloing effect for me. Most of my college friends had gone into the military.
All the friends I made after college were those I met in the military. The war
was a constant and common factor in our lives, complete with too-frequent
reports that a friend one hadn’t seen in years had been killed in combat. In
2011, when I was on my fifth deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, my younger
brother was deployed to Iraq at the same time. I found myself anxious and
worried because, despite my experience, my brother was in a situation I could
not control, affect, or even have day-to-day visibility on. It was my first
time experiencing the stress of the unknown borne by so many families in the
United States.
The sudden departure from the post-Cold War new world
order and relative stability of the ’90s has been attributed to a “failure of
imagination,” that American intelligence and law enforcement services did not
anticipate the means by which determined, malign actors could exploit the seams
in our security network and use everyday civilian items (boxcutters and
airplane tickets) to inflict the worst attack against the American homeland
since Pearl Harbor—this one primarily against our civilian population. While
the nature of the attack was something with which we were not prepared to
contend, the larger issue was that we, as a country, did not take the threats
against us seriously. Al-Qaeda, for its part, had not been hiding its desire to
attack Americans. Al-Qaeda terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993,
killed American service members in Saudi Arabia in 1995, bombed two American
embassies in 1998, and attacked the USS Cole in 2000. They went so far as to
explicitly tell us their intentions with a declaration of war in 1996 and a
fatwa against the United States in 1998. Despite all of this, we continued to
believe terror would remain an unfortunate but manageable threat. We did not
properly understand how destructive it could be, nor how much the subsequent
effort to defeat it would set a new course for America around the world.
While we may wonder to ourselves what the world and our
country would be like had it not been for September 11, a less theoretical and
more practical exercise would be to ask ourselves what threats today represent
the modern equivalent of al-Qaeda’s growing danger that was unleashed that day.
What enemies and adversaries, while signaling their nefarious intent, are
mistakenly believed to be manageable nuisances instead of actors bent on
carrying out the next world-altering action? The number of adversaries is
myriad, their intent and desire to disrupt the world order is growing, and the
potential to invite attacks in the face of American insouciance and
impulsiveness is real. If we are not vigilant now, we may find ourselves asking
similar questions about the human lives lost on some other 25th
anniversary in the future.
I have now lived more of my life in a post-9/11 world
than the one in which I grew up. But even without the passage of time, the
attacks and the subsequent wars that resulted would still be what defined so
much of my life and the lives of those close to me, just as it did to those men
speaking in interviews on HBO. And, as much as I love and will constantly
rewatch this series about the heroes who came before, one thing gives me pause.
After the interviews, the opening credits play to the familiar notes of the
series theme song. I cannot stand that iconic music. You see, that’s what would
play at the beginning of every memorial ceremony held at 5th Special
Forces Group for those killed in the wars that defined my generation. It has
come to represent those lives that, without the attacks of September 11, would
not have been lost.
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