The year 2001 was already a difficult one for my family. I separated from the U.S. Air Force that May, after returning from three years stationed in the UK. Those three years had taken a toll on us, so we were eager to return to America. And our family had grown: when we arrived in England in 1998, it was just me, my wife, and two-year-old Cam; when we returned, we had added two-year-old Seamus and newborn infant Lars to the family.
None of our kids remember any of these events. The two older kids were too little to understand any of it, and the memories they do have come from hearing Kate and I share our stories with friends and family.
My last year in the service had been frustrating. There are supposed to be benefits for helping airmen like me with job assistance and placement, but we wanted to live in Arizona, and no one could figure out how to find me a job there. Instead of helping me, most of the people I dealt with lectured me about what a fool I was to be leaving the military with a family of five. “There’s no way you’ll be able to survive without the military supporting you!” one MPF1 master sergeant laughed.
All that summer, I struggled to find work in my hometown of Phoenix. My parents had just built the house they are in now, and if they hadn’t been so generous and let us live in the house they had just moved out of, we would have been homeless.
I got into a truck driving school program and I was almost ready to graduate in September. I was taking our oldest to school and listening to the local rock station in the car. The morning show, The Morning Sickness, was known for its “edgy” comedy so as the song I was listening to ended, I was ready to change channels anyway when they broke in with a news report about airliners crashing into buildings in New York. I thought it must be another tasteless joke meant to wind up a gullible audience - but changing channels just brought up another news report, and another, and another.
I called Kate, and she was already watching the news, stuck on the couch breastfeeding an infant while the horror played out in real time. We knew that her brother was stationed at the Air Force Base in New Jersey, but we only found out later that his unit had been called up to the city to help, and that he was on the ground assisting with evacuation and relief efforts when the second tower fell that morning. He was alright, but for a few days, we didn’t know that.
Those weeks of confusion, anger, outrage, and the bizarre sense of coming together as a nation - but also not having the same understanding of what was happening - were awful to experience. I knew right away from hearing the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, talking about the U.S. response that we were going to start a misguided war in Iraq, even though the attack had been planned and launched from Afghanistan by a known terrorist organization led by a Saudi national. But you couldn’t tell anyone at the time that they were being irrational or misled, not without being accused of “helping the terrorists win.”
Even years later, when the evidence showed pretty conclusively that Secretary of State Colin Powell had lied to the United Nations about Iraq’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and that the intention of those who planned and carried out those attacks was to draw the U.S. into the same nightmarish quagmire that dragged down the Soviet Army in the 1980s, pointing out that Rumsfeld and Cheney had been the ones who “helped the terrorists win” was not a strategy for maintaining friendships.
But in October 2001, before I knew what the U.S. reaction would be, I went back to a recruiter and asked if I could re-enlist, so I could do my part in whatever came next. He laughed at me and said, “You are a fool if you think you’d be able to support a family of five on Senior Airman pay?”
That frustrated sense of irony and vindication has stayed with me over the years.
Amid all of the pivotal historic events unfolding around us, we also had the bittersweet experience of watching our new home team, the Arizona Diamondbacks, win their way into the 2001 World Series. Unfortunately, their rivals were the New York Yankees, and the excitement of watching our team win the championship was tempered by a sense of shame at kicking New York while it was down.
Fortunately for us, the U.S. military’s response to 9/11 opened up opportunities for work - unfortunately, those opportunities were in Maryland. So we left our chosen home, thinking that one day, we would be back. That day hasn’t come, yet, but we keep hoping and working.
One day, the country might recover, and one day, we might go home. Twin hopes that loom on our skyline, only visible in their absence.
MPF = military personnel flight; sort of the HR of the Air Force.