friend of Israel 🇮🇱🇺🇸🧡

As I’ve gotten older and reflected on 9/11, I’ve realized how much I truly experienced that day through a child’s eyes. I was in 10th grade. I was just about to turn 15. My dad was in the Pentagon that morning. I can still remember nearly every moment of it, though I understand now that memory is a tricky thing. Images shift. Details blur or sharpen with time. But as different pieces of that day have slotted and settled into place in my mind, I have increasingly come to understand just how profoundly September 11 shaped my life. There are the obvious consequences - my decision to go to West Point, my time in Afghanistan, my work years later helping evacuate people from that same country. But 9/11 did more than shape my professional life. It profoundly altered my relationship with America. For so many people, the years that followed corrupted something small inside them. Disappointment became cynicism. Then cynicism hardened into bitterness. And from those seeds, conspiratorial trees began to grow. I harbor no illusions about the limitations of our government - the mistakes made in waging war, the terrible costs of some of those decisions, or our failures in managing what came afterward. I have known many who died in those wars, and many more who died after coming home, taking their own lives because, somewhere along the way, we became very good at prescribing trauma and remarkably bad at prescribing the most essential elements of being human - purpose, meaning, and belonging. I watched fellow veterans fall prey to that same disillusionment and embrace the idea that war is simply a racket; that because we had fought in wars where good intentions coexisted with terrible decisions, every war must therefore be bad, every sacrifice a manipulation, and every cause fraudulent. And perhaps the greatest tragedy is that this is exactly what those hijackers hoped for. Their objective was never limited to the thousands of Americans they murdered that morning. Terrorism is designed to reach beyond the bodies it destroys. It seeks to poison what remains - to replace confidence with fear, unity with suspicion, and patriotism with contempt. They already hated this country. What greater victory could we hand them than learning to hate it too? I have always refused to grant them that. We used to say that we could not let the terrorists win. That choice is every bit as meaningful today as it was on September 12, 2001. We cannot let ourselves hate America. She is imperfect because she is human, but she and her people are also remarkably good in ways that can be difficult to quantify. We create. We innovate. We reach for the stars and then try to tame the chaos of space. We are joyous and silly and loud and overexuberant. We like things big, supersized, occasionally absurdly so - and somehow it matches the size of our hearts. We rush toward strangers in danger. We rebuild. We volunteer. We argue ferociously about what this country ought to be because, beneath all that noise, we still believe she is worth fighting over and fighting for. I experienced 9/11 as a frightened girl who did not know whether her father was safe, and who could not possibly understand what it would mean when her country went to war. Now I see it as a mother of two daughters. And in an extraordinarily strange, deeply painful, almost paradoxical way, September 11 became the opening salvo in my love story with America. Because if someone could hate her that fiercely, then we must love her more fiercely in return.