REMEMBERING 9/11

Well, 9/11 has come and gone, and I failed to post anything about it. But make no mistake, the importance of the day weighed heavily on my mind. I spent 9/11 --and the entire weekend, for that matter -- in uniform. It was a busy drill weekend. We spent it preparing for an upcoming exercise.

I was surprised and disappointed that no mention was made of the anniversary of 9/11 by the powers that be on my base. Last year 9/11 fell on a drill weekend as well. An announcement was made on the PA system to coincide with the time that the first plane hit the WTC and a moment of silence was observed across the base. This year, as far as I could tell, there was no such announcement.

Equally dismaying was the media's tepid treatment of the occasion. Oh, there were news reports on the anniversary and a few specials on some of the channels, but nothing fitting the importance of the anniversary of the deadliest attack by a foreign power on American soil in history.

I'm concerned that the enormity of what happened -- and the seriousness of the threat we still face -- has been forgotten by many of us. Have we broken our promise to never forget? I hope not. But this eerily prophetic quote from the 1993 video Red Cell keeps reverberating in my head:

I was just up in New York right after the World Trade Center got hit, and two blocks away it's like it's just...as if they didn't pick up garbage last week. You know, "if you weren't involved, don't worry about it." So they forgot about it. That's just part of our American way.

-Cdr. Dick Marcinko, founder of SEAL Team 6