Where Were You on 9/11?

A Sailor’s journey from the PXO classroom to Afghanistan, and how a generation stood the watch.

Every generation has a moment burned into memory. For our grandparents, it was Pearl Harbor. For our parents, perhaps the day man walked on the moon or President Kennedy’s assassination. For us, it was September 11, 2001.

That morning, I was attending the Prospective Executive Officer pipeline at the Surface Warfare Officer School in Newport, Rhode Island. My wife and kids were back in Ocean Springs, Mississippi while I was on temporary duty. On a break in class, we gathered around a television and watched in disbelief as the Twin Towers fell. My first thoughts were of home—making sure my family was safe. The class schedule shifted as we scrambled to connect with loved ones.

I would imagine it felt, in some ways, like Pearl Harbor. But unlike Pearl Harbor—where the enemy was immediately known—this time there was no nation state to respond to. Inside that PXO classroom, we all knew things had changed. We didn’t yet know in what capacity, or against whom, but we knew we were going to war.

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The Navy Before and After

Before 9/11, the Navy’s deployments were fairly predictable: Western Pacific, Atlantic, Mediterranean. We showed presence, trained with allies, measured power. The Soviet Union was gone, the Cold War over—we believed we’d entered a more stable era. But signs were there—warnings that things were shifting. The USS Cole bombing in October 2000, while the ship was refueling in Aden, Yemen, killed 17 Sailors and wounded dozens more. That was a stark early signal that al-Qaeda and irregular threats could hit us far from home.

Then 9/11 happened, and everything changed. We started pouring naval assets into the Middle East in ways we hadn’t before. Carriers that had once rotated between PACOM, the Atlantic, and the Med found more of their time spent supporting operations in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. The idea of blue water operations—fleet maneuvers, large scale sea control—was still there, but power projection ashore, littoral operations, and strike missions became headline features.

Part of that shift was institutional: on 1 October 2004, the Navy officially changed Carrier Battle Groups, Carrier Groups, and Cruiser-Destroyer Groups into Carrier Strike Groups. That change in name reflected a broader doctrine: strike first, project power, be ready to operate in constrained or littoral waters as much as the open ocean.

Before 9/11, our standard six-month deployments often included time in the Pacific, the Mediterranean, or the Atlantic — with good liberty ports along the way. But after the USS Cole bombing and especially after 9/11, the focus shifted hard toward the Middle East. The priority became getting strike groups into 5th Fleet as quickly as possible. East and West Coast carriers alike spent more and more time in the Arabian (Persian) Gulf, and from Day 1 of “INCHOP” into theater, they were expected to be ready to drop ordnance on target. Even the name of the Gulf became a political signal, with “Persian” quietly replaced by “Arabian” as tensions with Iran grew.

A personal example for me: when I was with the USS Essex (LHD-2), flagship for the 31st MEU out of Okinawa. In 2005, the 31st MEU, which had been oriented toward the Pacific, was sent under CENTCOM to support operations in Iraq. That MEU fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah and other major insurgency operations, all while Afghanistan was still heating up. Those kinds of assignments—MEUs and amphibious ready groups being deployed from “Pacific orientation” into the Middle East—weren’t unheard of before, but they were far less common. After 9/11, they became a key part of the naval and Marine Corps toolbox.

When the 31st MEU finally returned aboard Essex after that long deployment to the Middle East, it wasn’t just the wear of sea and sand we saw. They came back with fewer Marines than they left with. I don’t think there was a dry eye on the ship when they walked aboard. We were proud—proud of what they had accomplished, proud of what we had all done together—and yet we were heartbroken by the cost. Those losses weren’t just numbers; they are part of the legacy of that mission.

And for me personally, that deployment underscored how much had changed. At one point, I was sent TDY off Essex to the British 4th Armoured Division in Basrah, Iraq, where the Brigadier General commanded Multi-National District Southeast (MND-SE) headquartered at the Basrah International Airport. Who would have thought a Surface Warfare Officer would find himself assigned as a liaison officer in the middle of Iraq, wearing body armor instead of standing watch on the bridge of a warship? Certainly not me, having entered the Naval Academy in 1986 at the height of the Cold War, focused on the Soviet naval threat across the GIUK Gap, the Soviet Backfire bomber menace, and the creation of the AEGIS Weapon System. But that was the reality after 9/11—the Navy’s reach and roles expanded in ways none of us could have predicted.

What this all meant was a shift in posture: from deterring and preparing for conventional threats to responding to asymmetric threats and projecting power into areas that were once peripheral. Deployments got longer. We operated closer to shore. We conducted strike operations. We supported land operations more directly. The mission set expanded—and the Navy changed with it.

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What “Winning” Looked Like

Somewhere in that first decade after 9/11, I came to a realization: the “Global War on Terror” wasn’t something you could win in the traditional sense. There was no territory to retake, no enemy capital to seize, no uniformed army to defeat. We were up against shadow networks, ideologies, and fighters who blended into the population.

And while we called it the “Global War on Terror,” it was never formally declared a war by Congress and signed by the President. There was no clear political marker of when it began or how it would end. Yet, we deployed like crazy. Carrier groups, MEUs, squadrons, brigades — one rotation after another, year after year. That fuzziness only made the question of what “winning” meant harder to answer.

It became less about victory parades and more about constant offensive pressure—projecting power away from our shores to ensure we didn’t lose. It was a war measured not in land gained, but in attacks prevented. And when you look back, that’s not a small thing: there hasn’t been another “9/11” type attack on our homeland in over two decades.

There’s an old saying—“the price of safety is eternal vigilance.” I first heard it as a young Ensign in the early 1990s, standing watch as a Junior Officer of the Deck. Back then it was about scanning the horizon for contacts, never letting your guard down, always alert. Looking back now, I think that same principle defined our generation’s war. Eternal vigilance was our contribution, our shield for the nation.

Maybe that’s how we “won,” if you can even call it that. Not with ticker-tape parades or treaties signed on a battleship deck, but by maintaining that vigilance day in and day out, year after year. By pushing the fight forward so it never reached our shores again. By ensuring that the sacrifices—the thousands of lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond—had purpose. Their loss was not in vain. Their service, and ours, was part of a long, grinding kind of victory: the absence of another 9/11.

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The Long Road in Afghanistan

That slow realization—that we could never “win” the War on Terror in the traditional nation-state way—played out most visibly in Afghanistan. What began as a counterterrorism mission evolved into something far larger. Some called it “mission creep.”

By 2011, I found myself in Afghanistan as an Individual Augmentee, assigned to the Coalition Special Forces Component Command–Afghanistan (CFSOCC-A). I wasn’t a SEAL, and as a Surface Warfare Officer I was very much a fish out of water. But the Navy was filling billets that hadn’t even existed pre-9/11. Unlike my “deployment” to Iraq from Essex, where my weapons training had been a quick day on the flight deck with an M4 and 9mm, this time around I went through “Army training, sir!” at Fort Jackson — convoys, marksmanship, first aid, and the all-important 9-line medevac report.

For the first five or six months, I mostly kept quiet, learning as much as I could before I contributed. I was assigned to the National Village Stability Coordination Center (VSCC) at ISAF HQ in Kabul. Our mission fell along three “lines of operations”: governance, security, and development. Luckily, my VSCC “shoremates” were seasoned Army Green Berets, including the longest-serving Green Beret in history — a true Old Salt, a CWO5 who had been everywhere and seen everything. Whenever I went outside the wire, I made sure to be with him, a grizzled Army colonel, and a former command sergeant major from the 160th SOAR. I was in good hands, and they remain some of the finest Soldiers I’ve ever known.

Looking back, Afghanistan was tactical magnificence combined with strategic folly. If the strategy was to develop a new Afghanistan, then tactically we rarely lost. With SOF, we almost always had ISR support overhead — if it went kinetic, we won. The security line of effort was well in hand when we were present. But the enemy didn’t wear a uniform, and governance and development were far harder to measure, in the short term and especially in the long run. At the operational level of war it's awfully hard to win hearts and minds "with, thru, and by" your Afghan partners when in the same geographic locations you are conducting kinetic operations to kill insurgents.  Those, I think, we got wrong. Still, there hasn’t been another 9/11.

The emotional toll was always close. I was there when Extortion 17 was shot down in August 2011. I didn’t personally know those men, but I’ll never forget the ramp ceremonies at Bagram. The silence, the grief, the sight of flag-draped coffins moving across the tarmac — moments that make you ask yourself whether it was worth it.

And yet, I was also there for one of the most defining moments of the war: the night Osama bin Laden was killed. I was working late in the VSCC, right across from the ISAF Task Force satellite hub, where we’d sometimes watch raids unfold. That night, I saw General Petraeus walk by and enter the TOC.  That alone wasn't per say normal, but I wouldn't call it unusual.  But then Admiral McRaven — SOCOM Actual — walked by and entered the TOC.  I didn't even know SOCOM actual was in Afghanistan let alone right across the hallway from me. Curious, I tried to follow as I had on other nights, but was politely told, “Not tonight.”

The next morning at the daily Commanders Update Brief, things felt different. The giant wall of screens was blank, and Petraeus was late. When he finally arrived, the screens flickered on, and instead of PowerPoint slides, it was President Obama addressing the world, announcing that Osama bin Laden had been killed. The room fell silent, then surged with emotion. For all the questions about strategy, mission creep, or the future, in that moment we knew we had witnessed history.

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Honoring the Fallen, Living for the Future

On this anniversary, we hoist our mugs not only in remembrance of the nearly 3,000 lives lost on 9/11, but also in honor of the millions who answered the call afterward. From Ground Zero to Kabul, from the Pentagon to the Persian Gulf, service members, first responders, and everyday Americans stood the watch and to me that is our victory.  Standing the watch of eternal vigilance.  It's a victory I can live with and am proud to be a part of.

As Sailors say: Fair winds and following seas to the fallen. To the living, may we carry forward their legacy of courage, service, and sacrifice.

⚓ Where were you on 9/11? Share your story below as we remember together.