This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

I cannot.

Believe it, that is.

I remember exactly where I was when word came across the television that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers.  No one new whether it was a plane that had good off-line or something intentional.  Of course, turned out to be the latter. 

Remembering 9/11 is like when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated or when Americans first walked on the moon.  I remember exactly where I was.

For 9/11, I was with a lobbyist friend over in Central Oregon for a political fundraising golf tournament.  Before we were scheduled to tee off, we went into the pro shop and couldn’t believe what we were seeing on the TV.

A better word — stunned, even though, as I said above, we didn’t have much good information at the moment.  But what we saw created an indelible image, one that lives to this very day.

Think of the good word “indelible.”  Here’s what it means:

“That that cannot be removed, washed away, or erased.”

Exactly.

My friend and I immediately called our wives back home in Salem, Oregon who also had seen the TV coverage and were just trying to adjust to it.  My friend’s wife was a grade school principal in Salem, so, to support her as she dealt with young kids in class, she asked him to come home.

Without question, he did.  And we did.

Of course, 21 years later, we know much more than we did at the time.

In the Washington Post, columnist David Van Drehle wrote under this headline:

21 YEARS AFTER 9/11, THE WAR HAS NOT ENDED FOR ANYONE

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“Twenty-one years after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan, one can ask whether the United States has yet learned the principal lesson of that shocking, savage day.  It is a lesson well-known to military planners, yet hard for a nation with allies on its borders and oceans at its sides to believe bone-deep.

“In the starting and ending of wars, the letting of blood and the waging of battle, the enemy has a vote.  The day that has come to be known as 9/11 began a war only for us; for the enemy, the war had been raging for years. The little army of Osama bin Laden had hit American embassies in Africa, bombed a U.S. naval ship atAden Harbor in Yemen, even signaled its intentions to destroy the twin towers by planting a truck bomb in a World Trade Center garage in 1993.

“The audacity of 9/11 — using 19 al-Qaeda fighters,civilian lives and lakes of jet fuel to carry out a massively destructive attack — finally convinced Americans that we were at war.  And for the next 20 years, we fought until we tired of the idea.”

Every president going back to George W. Bush wanted to end the awful business.  Barack Obama promised to wrap things up.  Donald Trump also promised to wrap things up and negotiated the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.  President Biden completed the withdrawal in ugly fashion just in time for the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

But, Von Drehle adds, “we no more control the ending of the war than we controlled the beginning.  With the drone-strike killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in July, the known enemy commanders of 9/11 are all captured or dead.  Yet, the enemy has morphed and migrated.  The war has not ended for the Islamic State or for other violent jihadist groups around the world. It hasn’t ended for the governments offering them support and encouragement.”

Therefore, the war has not ended for us.

And, it’s impossible, Von Drehle writes, when the “War on Terror,” as it was named by President Bush, will end.  Mostly, that war goes on behind-the-scenes and often at night as America’s highly-skilled commandos and special operation forces work to end terror.

This kind of war takes a physical, mental and emotion toll for those who fight it and it is important for all of us to recognize the work they do on our behalf, even, if, as was the case with 9/11, we don’t see it every day.

As another 9/11 anniversary comes and goes, we owe allegiance to those who died on that terrible – at the Twin Towers, at the Pentagon, or the field in Pennsylvania – as well as to those who protect us day and night at their own risk.