A few minutes after midnight. Perhaps the last night that summer that wasn’t frigid. The last night I remember being a regular asshole.

A regular asshole? You mean you don’t know what the term means? Of course you do. A regular asshole is a man who has less regard for the feelings of others than most others might, but who can still fake it well enough to work a job and have a few people who aren’t out to kill him.

A regular asshole is not easy to spot. But spend enough time with one, and no matter how slow on the uptake you are because you believe people are inherently good, you’re gonna end up despising the fucker.

And maybe find that you aren’t alone.

Don’t feel bad about it. Human nature has a few things that limit one’s patience. Assholes are among them.

For one thing, nobody is born an asshole. There’s no genetic evidence of that. It is up to an individual and his environment to make the asshole what he is. In that manner I suppose I have come to it honestly. Therefore, I own it. To deny one’s identity is to tell oneself a lie. Those kinds of lies cannot stand; the ego never forgets. It’s a violation of nature.

Previously, I wrote about living with a woman who kicked me out and then calmly went to work. I super glued her keyholes and insured that she wasn’t going to be spending the night within the comforts of her hovel.

I had no place to go so I called my ex and asked her if she had a room she would be able to spare for rent. It would be short-term because I had a good job and just needed time to find a place. That was July, 2001.

I was still there in September. In the mean time, my daughter moved her new boyfriend in. Tony was not a regular asshole. He was a turbocharged asshole. In this time he had friends of his in and out. They hung out and smoked crack and drank the cheapest rotgut brandy I’d ever heard tell of. Oh, I didn’t sample it. My tastes were not so jaded. I drank Absolut vodka and good rum, whiskey and aged cognac. Later, I would compromise my restrictions and drink a Baltimore brand of vodka that came in a plastic bottle. The shame of it is unbearable.

But Tony became so wild and volatile that my ex put their shit on the porch and locked them out. And that brings us to just after midnight on September Eleventh, when they showed back up.

At first, Tony remained outside. Beth came in and found her mother in the kitchen. I watched the front door in the living room when the fight in the kitchen started. My ex took zero shit. That night was no exception. Whatever Beth wanted was out of bounds. I could hear it when they hit the floor and Beth made a dramatic scream as if dying, and I knew Tony would come running. It was a signal. He came through the storm door at full steam and I warned him off. He kept coming. I ran forward and tackled him high, throwing him into a glass table where I came down on top of him and began to strangle him to death.

He reached up feebly, trying to do the same to me. Then everything went black, just like a fucking novel or movie.

The strangest thing happened: when I became conscious, or aware, I’ve never been sure which, I was standing over the dining room table, leaning on it and looking down at a pool of blood. My blood. Coming from my mouth. Courtesy of a baseball bat wielded by my daughter to save her boyfriend.

Police and paramedics were called. My daughter and Tony had fled. The medics looked at my wounds and said I should go with them. But if I did, I feared that with my ex’s husband at work, they might come back. My ex and my son would have been at a serious disadvantage. I couldn’t go. Still bleeding, I went back inside. I laid down on the sofa, dizzy, and passed out.

Morning

September Eleventh

I came to with the sun shining through the window. I had dried blood on my face where it flowed until the bleeding had stopped. It was fortunate that I hadn’t choked to death. I guess at some point I did choke and turned my head enough to keep from swallowing the blood. But I felt the pain in a distant sort of way, as if it didn’t matter. I wasn’t worried about my daughter nor was I angry anymore; the night’s passing had given way to something I felt, something terrible, a feeling I’d never known in such intensity.

Something was wrong. I turned on the TV without knowing why. With my ex’s husband home now, I was free to go to the hospital. But first, something compelled me to turn on the TV. I needed MSNBC, and why that channel came to mind is beyond me; I’d never watched it.

The picture showed some sort of highrise on fire. I’d seen from the TV Guide that sometimes the channel showed retro news. I thought back. There had been a fire at a tall building where seniors lived and that was what I thought I was seeing.

But the camera changed to another. Dear God, it was one of the twin towers! “Reports say a light plane…”

As I watched, an airliner made what looked like a banked turn. It hit the other tower and a huge fireball bloomed on the screen. I was horrified but shock was quickly setting in. I don’t remember how long it took, but there came a report that the Pentagon had also been hit. Then came the last one, an airliner had crashed in Pennsylvania. In a field. No immediate speculation why, but never mind; I was seeing people at the twin towers jumping to their deaths from shattered windows through which columns of thick smoke streamed. I was so horrified that I was seeing a terrorist attack and its aftermath that all thoughts of the hospital were a million miles away.

As police and firefighters scrambled, I had no idea that it could get worse. Nothing could be worse than what I’d already seen, or what I was seeing now.

As we approach the twentieth anniversary of that infamous day, we reflect, as we do every year, on what, that we may comprehend, happened that day. We spend less time, as the years pass by, with the hundreds of conspiracy theories that came from it, and more time realizing that we are still in shock.

That no matter where we were, we were traumatized and nothing since has made sense.

For a while, powerful beams of light reached from the ground to the sky. Like ghosts of the towers, they were not there to comfort. They were there so we could mourn. Many of us have never stopped. That would be asking far too much.

To anyone watching TV coverage, who felt helpless and in torment, there was no way to truly grasp what it was like to be there. Nor can there ever be. I’ve interviewed a few of them. Most of it is a jumble and does not bear repeating. That’s not their fault; to be that traumatized is a feeling I know well by different causes. Thoughts mix together like ingredients in a blender. Things come out of mouth that make no sense. The tone of voice gains a faraway quality that is haunting.

Reality and pain slowly returned. I decided to go to the ER after all. It would be a welcome distraction.

I drove south on Business Route 3, Crain Highway. I was headed for what then was called North Arundel Hospital. As I drove, a passenger jet flew very low over the road and I had a minute of panic. I’ve never boarded nor looked at an airplane the same since. I’m always tense and terrified. I’ll never fly again.

While waiting to be seen in a treatment room, I heard the ER staff talking. Something had happened as they watched a TV in another, empty room. Mine had no TV. “I can’t believe it just fell,” said a nurse.

By the time I got back from the hospital, both towers were down.

Brooklyn

From the beginning, a nurse had seen from across the river every bit of what had happened. From that distance, she was shocked that aircraft parts and business papers rained down on her neighborhood. Body parts, too.

What’s most unforgettable is the loudness of the explosions and the stench. A veteran nurse, she had seen and done everything. A stint in mental illness wards (she was on duty at King’s County Hospital the night they brought serial killer Son of Sam in), pediatrics, even trauma. But nothing was close to this; she had never encountered the rain of flesh and metal her neighborhood was hit by. The stench remained for months. There was no forgetting that.

She spent part of that day in Manhattan at an aid station. The ash underfoot ate through her shoes. They mostly handed out bottles of water. No casualties showed up. Those were dead.

She remembers a tiny church nestled in the higher buildings and how it survived intact. A devout Catholic, to her that was a sign. As firefighters used it to shelter and rest, the little church was a tiny reminder to her that God knew what was going on. That his promise to never abandon his children was not forgotten.

That day also saw violence against muslims, more in the days that followed. They didn’t deserve it, and the nurse knew it. Bodega torching and mass beatings in the streets by enraged people of non Islamic faith turned their fury on the innocent.

It never occurred to some that Muslim people were right there, giving away and buying bottles of water. It never crossed their minds that they had shopped at the bodegas for years and knew the owners to be kind and generous folks who went out of their way to help. None of that mattered. At least some owners gave up. They left the way of life they had known, sometimes for generations, and went back to the lands of their fathers.

Manhattan

The dust and ash had chased people right down the streets as they ran from the dense clouds following the collapse of the buildings. Absolute shock was depicted clearly as cameras caught them losing their bearings, walking blind. Store owners quickly opened their doors and grabbed people, pulling them to shelter, giving them water. The gesture seemed small given what was happening. The enormity of it all made simple gestures seem small, but that’s how New Yorkers are; they don’t give up even when facing long odds. Small things matter in the Big Apple.

Foot traffic jammed the Brooklyn Bridge. Nobody knew where they were going. They just had to leave Manhattan.

At Ground Zero, what has come to be known as “the Pile” was about to be assaulted by firefighters searching for survivors. There was hope and an urgency. But nobody would come out of the Pile. Some were so far underground that even if they lived following the twin towers falling, they didn’t last long. Mostly they had been dead since the buildings began to fall. There wasn’t much left of them.

Finally the Pile was abandoned. Left for an endless chain of trucks to haul away. Parts of bodies that were too small to pick out went with them.

There were weeks of continuing news coverage. TV went all news except for premium channels and entertainment channels. Late night shows weren’t on, replaced by repetitive news stories. The planes crashed over and over again. The people ran through the streets over and over.

Finally, days later, it was decided that we needed to force or fake it, but which did not matter; a return to normalcy was required. David Letterman opened his first show without the theme music and introduction. Not standing up to do a monologue, he was instead seated at his desk. What followed was magic.

https://youtu.be/XZeEdye0h9A

What more could he or anyone have said?

But American people aren’t good at just mourning and letting go of the sins against them. They get downright nasty. And if the offense is grave enough, the bloodletting will commence shortly. Count on it.

But I didn’t want war. I didn’t want revenge. Both come at a price never considered before either commence. A price to be paid in blood and terror. If I could not be there to fight, I knew I would never understand what was about to happen. As a soldier, you swear an oath. That’s not a mere prerequisite to service; it literally means that you are willing to kill or to be killed in the service of the country.

As divided as we are, it is not easy to admit anything we all have in common: a love for the United States that is unfailing. Officially one’s oath is null upon discharge from the service. But you never think of it that way. You’ll always feel compelled to salute the Colors when you see them. Everyone is “sir” or “ma’am” and you’ll never grow used to hearing Taps because it means two things, soldiers going to sleep or soldiers already sleeping, sleeping forever under a stone.

You hope that your chain of command will respect your commitment. That they will never send you in harm’s way without a definite mission and a righteous cause. If those two things are in place, any soldier will willingly go forth to kick ass.

We never had both of those requirements in either Iraq or Afghanistan. First was Afghanistan. We had intel that Al Qaeda was there, that bin Laden was there, but he wasn’t found. We modified ordnance for planes to drop into caves. They were so big that on detonation they’d suck all the breathing air out of an entire section of cave. We sent tanks, hummers with turret-mounted grenade guns that fired rounds as fast as machine guns. Then it seemed like we had a purpose. But after declaring the Taliban dead, we stayed.

***

Marines in the desert outpost of one sector were thirsty. A pile of bottled water was dumped into their midst and they drank, drank more, pissed, and then drank more. Some dumbass lieutenant ordered them to stop. He said the water wasn’t safe because it was irradiated. They could, he said, wind up sterile. Water is irradiated to make it safe to drink. It’s a method of purification.

One day when a squad was definitely not on the high ground, they heard noises above them. Having learned the hard way that the situation was dangerous, they backed away and called the coordinates in.

Air strike, Arty barrage, it never mattered. The Marines quickly moved in and found what was left of two little girls and their bicycles. That sight was burned onto their retinas.

Marines are, as a rule, extremely well trained and tough. But being responsible for the deaths of those girls was hard to take.

A couple of them said, “Fuck em, we can’t take chances in a situation like that.”

Others, very troubled, kept their mouths shut. Later they would pay for doing so.

They rotated home. Some were discharged. And went home with a burden they eventually found was impossible to live with. They died by their own hands.

It left grieving families wondering what happened to make such a desperate act so inevitable. It was so final, so shocking. They had never let on that anything serious was wrong. Yet there still came that day when the grave had to be filled and Taps had to be blown.

There were viewing services, sometimes with the lids closed on the coffins because TV never shows what really happens when you murder yourself with a gun in your mouth.

By the time some rotated back to the States, the war in Iraq had begun and they were sent to that combat theater. On evidence that proved wholly unreliable, and pushed hard on the Bush administration, we invaded Iraq beginning on 20 March, 2003. Intel had it that Sadam Hussein was working with the terrorists who had planned the 9/11 attacks. And that, against United Nations rules, he had manufactured weapons of mass destruction. It wasn’t proven, but thousands of soldiers would die there along with millions of civilians. Hussein was hanged for crimes no one remembers.

That should have been it but it was not; many troops of the coalition left and insurgent forces of various groups poured over the border from Iran. The Islamic State of Iraw and the Levant, or ISIL, and more came with a bounty on American and other Coalition troops. It happened again in 2011.

The wars were causing the budget for the military to bulge and recruitment to drop off.

***

Walking in a squad, a Marine was dropped by a sniper one day. It was an immediate kill; a headshot. His buddy was beside him. The fallen Marine’s brain was exposed, some of it thrown to the pavement. The second Marine called for a corpsman. As the rest of the squad put suppressive fire into where they thought the sniper was, the second Marine screamed as he held his dead friend’s head, trying to force the brain fragments back inside his skull. He screamed and screamed, never able afterward to know that time had slowed for him, that the medic did not take too long to respond, or that his friend was dead when he hit the ground. The second Marine went home fucked up in the head, hating the medic.

He knew something was wrong but feared seeking help because other jarheads would shame him for it. He would be considered weak, a non-hacker. He was on his own. He paid for it.

War carries a price nobody should ever take lightly, but they always do. And now, just shy of the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we look back at that day. We realize it changed us. We realized that we were not so safe as we imagined ourselves to be. And we learned as every generation before has learned, that flag-covered coffins are too sad a sight to bear. With all our faults and disagreements, we are not left untouched by the deaths of our fallen. And no matter who it is in that box, they met a horrible end and most often suffered before the end came.

Measure wars however you like. Was it worthwhile? Did we fight for and with honor? What did we gain?

And why did we rush so to engage the opposing forces? Was it for others? Did we help them? Are they better off now?

Keep measuring. Use whatever you like as a reference. The total casualties. The torn and bombed buildings. The children going hungry and staring with glassy eyes unfocused. Dead kids lying next to their bicycles, and the death from above that killed them echoing for eternity.

Or just ask yourself this: was the mission accomplished?

If you know that it wasn’t, you should feel as lousy about it as I do.

After September Eleventh of 2001, we wanted revenge. We wanted blood, and there was no such thing as too much.

Did we get it? In the narrowest of ways, yes, we did. We killed the man who ordered the attacks.

He was a hollow victory, reduced to masturbating to porn. All alone, knowing he was wanted, suspecting he might be found. Hoping he wouldn’t be. He was no longer a leader. He was watching people fuck and doing little else.

We killed him. Excellent. What else?

Really, what else did we do for vengeance?

The truth is, ISIL and ISIS and every other Islamic terrorist group are stronger now. The truth is that we are in terrible danger. The truth is that bin Laden’s death means nothing. It wasn’t even worth it. Who did his death return to us from the grave?

He didn’t matter anymore. But we sure did get him, didn’t we?

And men and women are here now, suffering from trauma, missing limbs, disfigured and suicidal.

And the Twin Towers are gone. And all those whom we lost on that horrible day twenty years ago are still gone. We will never stop mourning for them. The date lives on in infamy. It always will.

I can’t get the sight of those towers burning out of my head. The people jumping. I can’t forget. A generation has grown up since that day. They didn’t see it.

They don’t get just how lucky they are.