By Tiffany McDuffie
There are certain dates in American history that need no explanation. You simply say them, and those who lived through them can tell you exactly where they were. Others happened long before our time, yet their significance has been so deeply cemented into our history that the generations who weren’t there still understand what those dates represent.
July 4, 1776. December 7, 1941. June 6, 1944.
Those are dates we inherited.
September 11, 2001, is one many of us lived.
It is still difficult to believe that 25 years have passed. For those old enough to remember, the memories remain remarkably vivid. Where we were. Who we were with. The confusion of those first reports. The moment confusion became fear. The endless television coverage. Eventually, that fear turned into a resounding pride.
That September morning, 25 years ago, nearly 3,000 people went to work, boarded airplanes, reported for duty, said goodbye to their families, or simply began an ordinary Tuesday morning and never came home. It was an act of terrorism designed not simply to kill Americans, but to strike at symbols of the country itself.
Retired Green Beret Scott Neil has spent considerable time thinking about that distinction. He was already a seasoned Special Forces soldier by September 2001, having joined the Army in 1986 and spent much of the years before the attacks serving around the world.
When we spoke, Neil pointed out something that can easily disappear when September 11 is reduced to photographs and timelines: the targets themselves mattered. The World Trade Center represented American economic power. The Pentagon represented American military power. And the hijacked plane that ultimately crashed in Pennsylvania was believed to be headed toward the seat of American government. America was attacked not only physically, but symbolically. And at the time, it seemed the entire country understood that.
September 12
There is another date worth remembering. September 12, 2001. The fires were still burning. Families were searching for loved ones. First responders were digging through rubble. The death toll was not yet fully understood. But something else had happened. Overnight, America had changed. Flags appeared everywhere. Strangers helped strangers. Churches filled. People gave blood, donated supplies, stood in line to volunteer and looked for any possible way to contribute. Men and women walked into recruiting offices because sitting at home no longer felt like an option. For a country that had been deeply divided before the attacks, the response was extraordinary. Retired Green Beret John Koko remembers that feeling clearly. “The day itself [September 11] was so terrible,” Koko told me, “but what happened after, how we responded, what we chose to be on the 12th, that was a feeling that I had never experienced in my lifetime and one that I cling onto.” His description of the mentality that followed is even simpler:
“We, not me.”
Koko remembers an America where, at least temporarily, the labels that normally divided people became secondary to the thing they shared. “It was the last time in my adult life that ‘we’ was clearly more important than ‘I.’” Neil remembers it similarly. He pointed out that America had come through a bitterly contested presidential election the previous November. The country was hardly free from political or cultural division on September 10. Then came the attacks.
“It took a 9/11 to reawaken us on 9/12,” he said.
That distinction matters, because I think sometimes we romanticize the unity that followed September 11 as though Americans simply got along better 25 years ago. We didn’t. We argued. We disagreed. We had different politics, different religions, different backgrounds and different ideas about what the country should become. What changed was our understanding of what mattered most. For a while, being American was bigger than the things separating Americans. Koko does not believe that version of the country has disappeared. “It’s not lost,” he said. “It’s just quiet.” I feel like his is a point worth remembering, too.
America Answers
The unity at home was only one part of America’s response. Elsewhere, another response was already being assembled. On the morning of September 11, Neil was participating in a training exercise simulating a terrorist attack against the United States. In fact, when word came of the attacks, he and others initially thought the announcement was part of the exercise.
America didn’t just want an answer, we needed one, and quickly. A conventional military campaign could take months to assemble. Special Forces are built for a different kind of warfare. Small teams are able to enter uncertain environments, work alongside indigenous forces, understand the people and terrain, build relationships and multiply their effectiveness through those relationships. They accomplish missions without the enormous footprint of a conventional army. This is what made the Green Berets uniquely suited for what Afghanistan demanded. Most Americans know the image that came to define that opening campaign: American soldiers on horseback.
Members of U.S. Army Special Forces entered Afghanistan, linked up with fighters from the Northern Alliance and, in one of the strangest collisions of old and new warfare, rode horses through mountainous terrain while calling in precision American airpower. It sounds almost too cinematic to believe it happened. But concentrating exclusively on the horses risks missing the more important part of the story. Behind those photographs were small groups of Americans entering an extraordinarily complicated country and figuring out, in real time, how to operate within it. They had to understand tribal relationships and shifting alliances, determine who could be trusted and, just as importantly, prove that they themselves could be trusted. That didn’t happen from a distance.
“You eat what they eat, you maneuver, you trust,” Neil explained. They ate with local fighters, traveled with them and lived alongside them. Relationships were built through shared meals and shared hardship, through demonstrations of capability and, eventually, through trust earned one person at a time. In that kind of war, understanding the people beside you could be every bit as important as the weapon in your hands.
We remember the horses because they made for astounding photographs, but the men who were there remember the relationships that made the mission possible. Those Horse Soldiers became part of one of the earliest chapters in a war that would eventually consume nearly two decades of American life. Their success offered a country still reeling from September 11 something it desperately needed: proof that America was answering.
But the story of September 11 cannot end with that early victory.
The Long War
The Global War on Terror would ultimately be fought by an entire generation. While some were already serving on September 11, others watched the towers fall as children or teenagers and later raised their right hands. They served in Afghanistan, Iraq and countless places most Americans would struggle to find on a map.
Some came home wounded. Some carried wounds no one could see. Some never came home.
For those who did, returning to America did not necessarily mean returning as the person who had left it. Koko believes that is one of the pieces journalism routinely misses when the GWOT story is told. “The piece they miss is how hard it is to come home from war, go back to your hometown, get a job, reconnect with old friends, and integrate into your family when you have changed so much.”
That observation carries particular weight coming from men who experienced the transition themselves.
We ask an extraordinary thing of the men and women we send to war. We ask them to leave normal lives, travel to places most of us will never see, carry responsibilities most of us will never fully understand, and all too often watch people they love die beside them. Then, when their service is finished, we ask them to come home. To find work. Raise families. Reconnect with friends. Coach Little League. Pay mortgages. Sit in school pickup lines. Become neighbors and business owners and members of their communities again. To somehow become ordinary American civilians.
The country they left home to defend was built on the idea that Americans should have the freedom to determine what comes next; to build a life, raise a family, start a business, fail, begin again and pursue something better for themselves and the generations that follow. For years, men like Neil and Koko defended that opportunity for everyone else. Eventually, they had to decide what they would do with it themselves.
Coming Home
War asks something very specific of the men and women who fight it. There is a mission, a purpose and a responsibility to the people beside you. For years, sometimes decades, life is built around that sense of duty. Coming home does not necessarily mean any of that becomes easy to leave behind. The uniform comes off, the deployments end and eventually the war moves on without you, but figuring out what comes next can be a battle of its own.
For the men who would eventually build Horse Soldier Bourbon, that transition meant confronting a question faced by generations of veterans before them: What do you do with the rest of your life after so much of it has been defined by service? They had spent years operating with a mission in front of them and a team beside them. Civilian life offered freedoms they had fought to protect, but it did not hand them a new purpose simply because they had come home.
What they did have was the same determination that had carried them through years of military service, along with the friendships forged during it. They began looking for what came next together. The answer was not immediate, and it was not bourbon from the beginning. It was the pursuit of something new, a chance to take the knowledge, skills and sense of shared purpose that had defined one chapter of their lives and use it to build another.
Many Veteran owned companies grew out of that pursuit. In many ways, its creation became an extension of the American dream these men had spent years defending: the freedom to come home, begin again, take a risk, fail, adapt and keep building. I asked Neil if everything about Horse Soldier Bourbon disappeared tomorrow, what he hoped people would remember. He smiled confidently and said, “That we had the guts to try.”
There is something distinctly American in that. The promise of this country has never been that life will be easy, or that sacrifice guarantees an easy road home. It is that we are free to determine what comes next. We are given the freedom and opportunity to try; it is up to us to make something of it.
That may be one of the quieter legacies of the 25 years since September 11. We rightly remember the men who answered when their country called, the missions they carried out and the sacrifices made along the way. But service is not supposed to be the end of an American life. There should also be room for what comes after; for veterans to come home, find purpose again and pursue the very opportunities they once put their lives on the line to protect.
Horse Soldier Bourbon was built out of that second chapter. Not as an ending to their military story, and certainly not as a way to package it, but as evidence that the American dream they defended was, and is, still here to pursue. Their story is only one part of what followed September 11, but it belongs to a much larger story our generation is now responsible for carrying forward.
What We Inherit
Twenty-five years creates an uncomfortable distance. There are now millions of Americans who have no memory of September 11 because they were too young to remember it or had not yet been born. Children sitting in classrooms today know the attacks only as history, and that will increasingly become the case. Eventually, September 11 will belong entirely to generations who did not witness it.
That is how history works. July 4, 1776. December 7, 1941. June 6, 1944. We were not there. We cannot remember the sound or the fear or what the country felt like the morning after. Those memories belonged to other Americans, but the meaning was handed down to us. Those are dates we inherited.
September 11 is now beginning that same transition. For 25 years, those of us who remember have been able to say: I was there. I remember. One day, no living American will be able to say that, and when that day comes, what remains will depend upon what we chose to preserve. That makes remembering September 11 more than an annual ritual. It makes telling the story accurately a responsibility.
Future generations deserve to know the horror of what happened that morning. They deserve to know about the 2,977 people whose lives were taken. They deserve to understand why those particular buildings were attacked and what the terrorists hoped those attacks would do to this country. But they should also know what happened next. They should know about September 12, about an imperfect and divided country that, for a time, remembered that what its people shared was greater than what separated them.
They should know about the men and women who raised their hands and went to war, about those who never returned and about those who did return and discovered that coming home could be a battle of its own. They should also know that many eventually did what generations of Americans before them had done: they came home, built families, started businesses, served their communities and continued pursuing the promise they had been willing to fight for. That, too, is part of the story of September 11 and the 25 years that followed.
We hold the responsibility of how September 11 will be remembered a hundred years from now. We control what we hand to the generation that comes next: the facts, the names, the sacrifice, the horror, the courage and the unity that followed. The truth of what happened, and the accountability to protect it.
Those are dates we inherited. This is one we lived.
Soon enough, it will be theirs to inherit from us.
