Samuel
Turcotte (Davis)

Preface

This is not an exhaustive treatise. It is what was on my mind on this day, looking back twenty-five years.

Where I Was

9/11 is one of those “where were you when it happened” moments. Those are like, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” I am too young to have that as my own memory. I am sure there was a “Where were you when you found out about Pearl Harbor?” 9/11 belongs on that list.

Where I was is incredibly embarrassing. I was asleep. I had overslept. I did not hear the first news reports. Both towers had already fallen by the time I woke up. I saw none of it live.

It would not have made any difference to the outcome. There was nothing I could do about it. But I did not get the experience of watching it unfold. As far as I can tell, this was the first catastrophe of this proportion that unfolded over a period of time and was watched on live television by millions of people. It is incredible.

You go from a little news report about a small plane flying into one of the Twin Towers, to it being a jet, to a second jet, then the Pentagon, then the crash in Pennsylvania. I am probably not listing those in the exact right order. With each additional piece of information, the situation escalated not only as a tragedy, but in its cause. A private plane flying into a World Trade Center building is a disaster. Terrorists from the Middle East hijacking four airplanes at once and killing thousands of people is orders of magnitude more significant.

Flags and Patriotism

I will never forget the flags. They were draped over highway overpasses, on buildings, in front of houses, everywhere. Patriotism was no longer a dirty word. People were proud to be Americans.

A Veteran’s Perspective

I experienced that day differently than a non-veteran probably would. Veterans are not automatically more patriotic. In my experience, service tends to bring it out. You sign up and say you will put your life at risk for your country. That puts you in a different category. You are trained. You are taught to defend the nation. I was already passionate about this country. Being a veteran amplified it.

I also come from a military family. My biological father was a Korean War Army veteran. My stepfather was career Air Force and served two tours in Vietnam. My mother was not a veteran, but she is a super patriot. All of that shaped how I took that day.

How It Changed My Life

One potential effect of a terrorist attack is that it makes people cower. They freeze. They get confused. They get weak. They run. That is part of the point of terror.

That is not what it did to me. It made me stand up and be strong. The best response I knew was to live for my goals. Mine was to write, produce, and direct a feature film that would be accepted into film festivals and released in theaters. I achieved that. The theatrical release was limited: about a hundred theaters. The film is titled “No Pain, No Gain.”

America Came Together

After 9/11, the country came together in a way that was undeniable and amazing. That is not unique in our history. If you read any basic history of World War II, it is always mentioned: Pearl Harbor unified the country. It got Americans to support the military, to go after Japan, to fight Germany. I was not alive then, but that part is clear.

Those may be the only two moments like that. I cannot think of another. Whether one was more than the other is irrelevant. The point is we have come together before. It had been a long time. Then 9/11 did it again.

The vast majority of the country stood with America after 9/11. A select few did not. That was shocking to me. The first one I remember is Madonna. Very shortly afterward, she said America deserved it. Other celebrities said versions of the same thing. That raises a separate question: are celebrities even in touch with the same reality? Obviously some are not. To me, Madonna was the Jane Fonda of 9/11.

What she said was heinous, warped, and twisted. I was shocked she said it. I am still more astonished that people kept buying her records, listening to her music, and going to her concerts. Ask those same people what they think of that comment and most would say they disagree with it. Then they overlook it anyway. That is a fundamental thing about a person’s character. I do not understand how you set that aside.

Religion, Culture, and People

It is hard to separate the people who carried out 9/11 from the religion and the culture around them.

I reject the idea that this was caused by a fundamental flaw in Islam. President Bush went out of his way, over and over, to say this is not about Islam and not about Muslims. A lot of people do not remember that, or do not want to. It is well documented. I agree with him.

You can pull lines out of the Quran and justify almost anything. You can do the same thing with the Bible. The Spanish Inquisition was justified from the Bible. The details are different, and it was centuries ago, but the pattern is the same. So it is not the religion.

Culture is different. There are parts of some Middle Eastern cultures that have perverted Islam in ways that promote violence and justify terrorism. That is wrong. That is a perversion of the religion by parts of a culture.

Is the overall Islamic or Muslim culture to blame? You can make a case that in some respects it is. You can also make a case that it is not. A lot of it depends on how you define the culture. It is easy to oversimplify. You cannot just say the Middle East. That is many countries and many cultures. You cannot just say Islam. You cannot just say Muslim. You cannot just say Arab. For a lot of Westerners those words overlap and blur together.

You can point to aspects of the culture in some countries that contributed to 9/11. You can just as easily point to many other aspects of those same cultures that are opposed to it. Individuals still chose to do this.

A Failure of Imagination?

The 9/11 Commission Report said the failure to prevent 9/11 was a failure of imagination. That use of the word has always struck me as odd. You do not think of security, counterintelligence, and police work as somehow relating to “imagination.” You think of due diligence, attention to detail, perseverance, policies, and procedures. Imagination is not the word that comes to mind. That is not a slight against the people in those jobs. It is just not the trait we list first.

I did not immediately understand what they meant. The idea is that the people tasked with protecting the country were not considering the crazy options and scenarios that we, as Americans, might not think of.

People of different cultures think differently. Not in some completely alien way. They are raised differently. They have different leaders and different educational systems. Somebody sitting in an apartment in Kabul, or in a cave in the Afghan mountains, trying to harm America, will not start from the same list we start from when we ask what they would use against us.

We will, understandably, focus on what has been done before: hijacking airplanes, bombs in buildings, kidnapping. Those things have to be considered. If it happened before, it can happen again, maybe not the same way, but close.

But what are the other ways? The ways that might at first appear to be crazy to us? Do our security and intelligence people sit in a room and brainstorm ideas? I doubt they do it much, if they do it at all. How about thousands of balloons floating over the ocean, filled with cyanide? Ridiculous? Perhaps. But maybe that idea leads to an idea that is in fact something our enemies might actually be considering.

That is what failure of imagination means: you are not considering the options that are not obvious to someone like us.

Was the Response Appropriate?

Opinions ran the full spectrum. I had friends who said we should nuke Afghanistan, nuke the Taliban, nuke the entire Middle East. That is extreme, and it is exactly how many people felt at the time. By that measure, what Bush did was mild.

At the other end you had people like Madonna saying we deserved it, and that we should apologize for being a heinous country. That is the other extreme.

Overall, Bush took a much milder course than a lot of people wanted. I agree that in some respects it went on too long, especially in some areas. However, when it was going wrong, he pulled back, thought it through, and changed the approach. The surge in Iraq is the prime example. It was lingering. They came up with a new strategy. The surge worked. Then we were able to pull back considerably.

Unfortunately, they did not take that same approach in Afghanistan. We left in humiliation when Biden pulled us out, not only prematurely, but in the wrong way.

In retrospect, I think Bush’s overall response to 9/11 was appropriate. I believe history has validated that, and will continue to do so.

One aspect of the response is justice. Not revenge. Justice: track down the people who did it, capture them, punish them. He did an excellent job of that. Not perfect, but he got the job done.

The other important aspect of the response is prevention. Look at the record. It has been twenty-five years. Has there been another 9/11? No. Has there been something half as bad? No. Has there been anything in America that can even remotely be called a significant terrorist act on that scale? I cannot think of one. On both counts, justice and prevention, the response was justifiable, appropriate, and successful.

How do we keep it that way? I am no security expert, but I believe two things matter most: do not have another failure of imagination, and use technology.

A lot of the surveillance tools used by the CIA and the NSA make people fear for their privacy. Those are the same tools that can stop something like this. There is a trade-off. The question is not complicated: would you prefer another 9/11, or would you prefer to lose some privacy?

It is not about losing all privacy, and it is certainly not about losing freedom. It is about striking a balance. I think that balance should be in favor of preventing another attack, even if it means losing some of our privacy.

In Closing

What I wrote above does not capture everything I thought about today, and it certainly does not capture everything I think about 9/11. It is simply what most readily came to mind as I wrote this, off and on, throughout the day.

I know a lot of people will agree with me on these points, or at least most of them. I know some people will not. I respect the views of people who disagree with me, as long as those views are well thought out. Indeed, my views on 9/11 have evolved and changed over the years, and I am sure that will continue.

However, my overall perspective on 9/11 has remained unchanged. It was a tragic event of unparalleled proportion. It should not be forgotten, and it never will be. It was an act of savage aggression by an insane and truly evil group of people that predominantly harmed the completely innocent.

Though the event itself is an undeniable catastrophe, it has personally made me a better and stronger person. And I believe our nation will continue to thrive and to benefit all of humanity, as it has done since its inception over 250 years ago.

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Disclaimer: In writing this article, I used the assistance of Grok for editing, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.