I was a senior in college when the Towers fell. Roughly 10 weeks after that, I submitted my paperwork to the United States Peace Corps; the following summer I shipped out to Uzbekistan in their first complete training group back in country. I spent the first and second anniversaries of that date a few hundred miles north of Kabul, talking to young Muslims about America and freedom.
It’s been interesting over the past month to reflect on why I did that, what I thought of America at the time, and how things have changed. I wrote about it for Law & Liberty today, and that essay seemed like the most fitting thing to send for my second missive this week. I begin here:
I’ve always had great respect for the people who signed on for military service after September 11, 2001. They don’t get many accolades, because America is in the midst of an identity crisis, feels little pleasure in memories of Iraq or Afghanistan, and is even inclined to wonder whether we brought that pain on ourselves with all that incomprehensible meddling on foreign shores.
I don’t believe that at all, though it’s certainly true that foreign meddling gets complicated. At the same time, I also know this. After 9/11, many people were grimly determined that “this must never happen to our nation again.” It has not happened again. I don’t fully understand the causal picture, but I don’t need geopolitical omniscience to feel gratitude. People put themselves on the line to protect our country after that brutal attack, and whatever the complexities, their primary mission clearly succeeded: we’ve never experienced another day like 9/11.
I never risked life or limb like that, and signed on only for a form of service you’re allowed to quit at any time (though I didn’t, at least not until my term of service was up). Still, my little contribution meant something, at least to me, and I go on to reflect on how Americans’ understanding of themselves has changed over time. So much, in fact, that one sometimes feels wonders: Did Osama bin Laden finally win the war of hearts and minds?
Read the whole thing here.