How 9/11 Changed Everything

It’s nearly impossible to explain to people whose conscious lives did not begin before 9/11 exactly what that day meant, and how stark the boundary was between the America before and the America after. That this is the 25th anniversary is, upon reflection, shocking. How can it be that long ago? I remember it like yesterday because that was the day everything changed. If you are under 35, you were not really aware of life before the semihuman jihadi scum murdered 2,977 Americans and others. You could have had an entire military career in that time. It’s mind-boggling. And it’s worth reflecting on what it meant, and what it still means.

September 11, 2001, was not the day America began the long war. It was the day America became aware of the long war pagan enemies had been waging against us for decades. We took casualties here and there, but we told ourselves — particularly after we prevailed in the long, expensive Cold War — that history was over. The struggle between good and evil had culminated. We had won. There was no real opposition to the Western democracy we embodied, except some scattered nutballs who blew up the occasional building or shot up the occasional airport. Those casualties were less than a rounding error. We could take that kind of damage without noticing it, without changing anything. We were at peace. Or so we thought.

Our enemies did not think so. We had enemies, even if we were too busy enjoying ourselves to acknowledge it. 9/11 threw the truth in our face.

History wasn’t over. History will never be over. And the fight against evil will never be over.

I was putting on a suit to make a court appearance in San Pedro — there was a San Pedro, CA courthouse back then — when the phone rang. It was my law partner, Erik. “America is under attack,” he blurted. I flipped on the TV. I think that was just after the second plane hit the second tower. Irina and I looked at the carnage for a moment. “I’m going to war,” I said, and I was sort of right. A few years later I would be mobilized for 16 months and ordered to Kosovo, a hostile-fire zone but essentially a sideshow in the struggle against international terrorism. It’s some consolation that nobody hears about Kosovo, because we kept a lid on it and kept a Muslim country with some jihadi actors stable and fiercely pro-American.

I was on an infantry brigade staff in the California Army National Guard, and on the phone with my commander as I drove to court. For all we knew, the attack was still going on. We didn’t know if Los Angeles was next. Would a 767 from LAX fly into the Library Tower — you know, that skyscraper where the hippies in Independence Day are celebrating before the flying saucer zaps them? We didn’t know what would happen next. We just knew our lives had changed.

Court was canceled. I came back to Manhattan Beach. Nobody went to work. We watched the news the rest of the day, and speculation turned to who the culprits were. It was pretty clear early on that it was Muslim fanatics. It was also pretty clear that we had to kill them all. We had some moral clarity then, while the wreckage was still smoking. It was George W. Bush’s finest hour. He got Congress to authorize — 420-1 in the House, 98-0 in the Senate, the lone “no” from one socialist dirtbag congresswoman — our campaign of righteous retribution, which continues to this day and must continue until every person who had a paw in this, and those still carrying the jihadi banner, have paid for what they did.

In the week of the attacks, America understood that 9/11 had to be answered with the full weight of American wrath. Many of us still understand it. If there is one overriding failure in the war on terror, it is that we did not kill enough of the terrorists. Instead, we focused on turning savages into civilized human beings. Our forebears had it right when they dealt with barbarians, whether Roman or British or whoever was disciplining the primitives. It was time to dust off the punitive expedition: go into the territory of the people who attacked you and cause so much damage that the savages use your name to scare their children for the next hundred generations.

Then the morally confused and the malign began to hint that perhaps we deserved it. Perhaps we had no right to fight back. Perhaps fighting prior terrorism had provoked it.

Or perhaps we did it ourselves — the idiotic 9/11 truthers are still out there. 

Nonsense. Islamic radicals attacked us not because we like Israel, and not because of some bogus gripe, but because we will not submit to their primitive desert cult. That’s a hard truth for people who cannot conceive of America being in the right. We were in the right. We remain in the right. As for the violence we inflicted in return, they forgot a basic truth: violence must be met with violence. Too many in the West believe the schoolmarm mantra that violence never solves anything. History teaches the opposite. Violence solves everything.

We are either going to fight our way to victory or fail to fight our way into defeat and submission. I’m with the people who want to keep fighting these savages.

But that’s the problem — the forever-war thing. After 9/11, everything changed, and we have been at war every day since. We will be at war every day until we kill enough of them to make them irrelevant, or they convince an overwhelming majority of us to surrender. Some of us will never surrender. We prefer death on a pile of hot brass to submission to goat-molesting fanatics from Scumbagistan. But when the lieutenant governor of Minnesota or the governor of New York shows up in Muslim headgear so as not to offend the local Mohammedans, you know a slice of our society yearns to be handmaidens to the barbarians.

Before 9/11, we were at peace, even with Soviet H-bombs figuratively hanging over our heads. Most of America had never seen war, especially after the disgraceful end of Vietnam, when Democrats previewed their abandonment of Afghanistan by abandoning South Vietnam after promising to support it. Only about 500,000 of us went to Desert Storm out of a population of about 250 million. Not too many years after 9/11, you walked onto an Army post and everybody had a combat zone service patch on the right shoulder — not just the occasional Gulf War guy or an old-timer from ’Nam.

If you’re under 35, you don’t remember America at peace. You don’t remember an America that was normal in the way Boomers and Gen X understand normal. It wasn’t a draft. Most of us didn’t ship out like in World War II. But this war was going on overseas. And on 9/11 it was going on here: New York, Washington, the Pentagon (my friend Colonel Rob Maness was there), and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Since then, there have been other strikes by the psychopaths’ affiliates, creeps who shot up Americans for Allah. What 9/11 did was not send all of us to war. It put all of us in the sights of our enemies.

Now, a quarter-century later, people are tired of war. Well, people need to man up. It’s a harsh world. Just because the pre-9/11 years were a relatively peaceful interregnum does not mean peace is the natural state of mankind. It wasn’t. It isn’t. That’s an illusion.

9/11 taught us a lot. The most gratifying lesson was the heroism of regular Americans in the face of evil — helping people out of burning buildings, or counterattacking the terrorists on United 93, sacrificing their lives and probably saving hundreds or thousands of others. What we did that day, and what we did afterward in hunting the vermin who dared murder Americans, is a tribute to our greatness.

But 9/11 also taught us that we are not exempt from history. The war against evil will never end. We have always been in it, even when it didn’t seem like it, and we always will be. So we have a choice. We can pretend we have no enemies, and that, to the extent we do, it’s our own fault. Or we can accept that there are bad people who want us enslaved or dead.

The reality 9/11 taught us is that we have enemies, we have to fight them, we have to defeat them, and that war is never going to end. Grow up. Lock and load, or lose.

BIG NEWS! Kurt’s next action-packed conservative novel, “American Warlord,” is out for presale now! Read Kurt’s Kelly Turnbull/People’s Republic series, including the latest "Panama Red," and follow Kurt on X @KurtSchlichter!

Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Townhall’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical Left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.

Join Townhall VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.