25 Years After 9/11: Teaching the Why

Yesterday marked 25 years since the 9/11 attacks. I spent almost two decades in uniform because of that day, and here's the lesson I keep coming back to: you can win every battle and still lose the war if you don't teach the next generation why it mattered.

I was a sophomore in high school, working through my homeschool day and thinking about a cross country meet that afternoon, when the first plane hit. A neighbor called on the land line to tell us. We turned on our old cathode ray TV, and I remember thinking, "this is a terrible accident." Minutes later the second plane hit, and the truth set in: we were under attack. That day sent me, like a lot of my generation, into the Army. I went to West Point, deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010 and 2013, and spent my last years in uniform teaching the next wave of soldiers at West Point and in ROTC.

If there's one thing those years taught me, it's that the Army is relentless about the why. At West Point, every subject ran through the same filter: how does this help you win the Global War on Terror? Instructors just home from combat would set the lesson plan aside to talk about what they'd actually seen. The moments of silence in the Cadet Mess Hall for fallen graduates came too often in those early years, names of guys who'd been sitting at our table a year or two before, now just a memory, another one who gave, in Lincoln's words, "the last full measure of devotion." Nobody let you wonder why it mattered. Somebody made sure you knew. Attention to detail mattered because one mistake could "kill your platoon." It was kind of a running joke, but there was a sobering reality beneath it.

Here's what I didn't understand until much later: while the Army was busy teaching soldiers the why, the teachers, professors, and cultural voices shaping the next generation back home weren't doing the same.

We fought that war for 25 years to keep this destructive ideology off our shores, and tactically, we won. We killed the men who planned that attack and kept the fight overseas. But somewhere in those same 25 years we lost the strategic fight, the one over the ideology itself, without anyone noticing it had shifted its target.

Before we deployed to Iraq, we sat through threat awareness classes, the small signs that told you something was wrong in a town or a crowd. One of them was a flag: solid black, white Arabic script, the kind Al Qaeda and other radical groups flew. See that flag, we were told, and you're in a radicalized neighborhood, be on your guard. You've probably seen that same flag since, flying on American college campuses and at protests recently here at home. Nobody smuggled it in. It walked in the front door, because the people who should have explained why it was dangerous never did.

You can see the same pattern in smaller moments too. Twenty-five years ago, could we have imagined the governor of New York, the home state of the 9/11 attacks, showing up to an event on our own soil wearing a hijab? I don't buy that it's about respect, because I'd bet she doesn't cover her head when she visits an Amish community in her own state. That's not respect, that's fear, the same passive deference that turned a blind eye to that flag and what it represents.

That's the whole problem in one image. We trained soldiers to recognize a threat on foreign streets and never trained our own kids to recognize it at home.

God ran into this exact problem with Israel, over and over, in Deuteronomy. He didn't just tell them what to do, he told them to keep telling their children why, generation after generation, so the reason for it never got lost. Every time Israel drifted, it traced back to the same failure: somebody stopped teaching the next generation why.

So that's my job now, not defending a perimeter overseas, but teaching my own kids, and the young people around me, why I believe what I believe as a Christian and a patriot, and why it's worth defending. If you don't believe in your own values enough to explain them to the next generation, don't be surprised when they inherit someone else's instead. The threat isn't just radical Islam anymore, it's Marxism and socialism riding the same current. The fight looks different this time. But teach the next generation what you believe and why, and we still have a chance of winning.