I can vividly remember the morning of [Sept. 11, 2001] … . The current duty station was to be our last in the [Marine Corps] so our children could settle down and finish high school in one place. This was to be a non-deploying position for my husband. … When my Marine came home from work that night, I knew all bets were off for a quiet command and retirement. For an incredibly stressful time, it was also a time
of incredible bonding with those sharing our world as the family of a Marine deployed to a war zone. In many ways it [fostered] a wonderfully rich neighbor- hood community and friendship time that has yet to be rivaled. Our children learned what their father truly has trained his whole adult life to do, as millions of military family members also discovered. … I think we reevaluated what is truly important, and our children learned about the fragility of life, as not all their friends had their parents return alive and whole. I think it made us more aware of others’ losses, visible and invisible. It also spurred a greater sense of charity in action and word in an effort to “make things all right.”
—Ellyn Dunford
I volunteered to join the fi rst group of civil aff airs soldiers into both Afghanistan and Iraq and was chosen for Iraq. …
Like the rest of the American
Army, I discovered that Sad- dam’s Iraq was a big Potemkin village falling apart right in our hands. I liked all the Iraqis I met who weren’t actually shooting at me. I discovered that they had wildly diff ering views of 9/11 and did not understand America’s trauma. After all, some said, they had been bombed during the Iran-Iraq war. Two years later, I mobilized and
deployed to Afghanistan, where I did justice reform for a year. I was similarly taken with the Afghan people, concluding that noth- ing was ever easy in that country, for them or for us, and “where to start” was a very credible question in planning reconstruction. … Real life seemed like an inter- ruption to my vocation as a war- rior against the scum who caused 9/11 as well as misery to both the Iraqi and Afghan peoples. … My absences blew holes in the time I spent with my family, which in- cluded both high school and col- lege time for my children. Today, my son is a cavalry offi cer in Iraq. His deployment aff ected me far more than my own. Yet I regret none of it and would go again tomorrow if allowed. —Col. Michael P. Finn, USAR
The Pentagon Me- morial was unveiled Sept. 11, 2008.
88 MILITARY OFFICER MONTH 2005 PHOTOS: ROBERT D. WARD/DOD; FACING PAGE, COURTESY
WWW.911MEMORIAL.ORG PHOTOS/IMAGES: TKTK
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