by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
It was a beautiful fall morning.
I’d already seen far more morning than I’d been used to. I’d just finished up my PhD program a few months earlier. Back then, no one ever came in before 10 a.m. Graduate classes usually started 15 minutes late and ran a half hour or more past the official end time.
But here I was teaching logic, ethics and just war theory to second-year cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
My first class of the day started promptly at 0735. Professors were expected to end classes at the 55-minute mark. Cadets who were late to their next class were derelict of duty. Professors who made them late were not looked upon kindly—that was especially true for civilian professors, who made up just 10% of West Point’s faculty. Like my cadets, I had 10 minutes to pack up and get to my second class, which started at 0840.
That morning, we were working on logic proofs. It’s not very exciting stuff at the best of times. Early mornings are not the best of times.
We were in the waning moments of class, when I heard a knock at the door. A red-faced cadet is standing outside.
“Sir, the Commandant requests that you turn on the television.”
I was puzzled. Every classroom at West Point had a television. They were all networked, so it was possible to display the same thing to all cadets at the same time. The odd part was that the request came during class time from the Commandant. West Point’s Commandant commands the military side of the academy. I was an academic. I worked for the Dean, not the Commandant.
But even though I’d been there for only a month, that was plenty long enough to learn that if someone with a star on their shoulder suggested you do something, it was a pretty good idea to do it.
The second jet had hit the World Trade Center moments before we switched on the set.
We watched, largely speechless, until class ended, when we numbly packed our things and moved to our next location. That was my last class of the day, so I headed to our department’s conference room, where I sat with my colleagues—most of them captains, majors and lieutenant colonels—as the towers fell.
My cadets carried on to class, where they learned that a third jet had crashed into the Pentagon. More than a few had parents working in the building.
West Point would not cancel class that day or in any of the days to follow.
Soldiers mourn when they’re not on duty.
Americans changed that day. For a short while, we were united in ways not really seen since the generation that secured victory in the Second World War.
We were united in our grief, our shock, our anger.
Whatever our other differences, we had those feelings in common. We understood that we all wanted the same things—punishment for wrongdoers, vigilance to prevent this from ever happening again, a return to a feeling of safety.
Even when we disagreed on how to get those things, we all agreed that everyone was trying to achieve the same goals.
But psychic wounds heal and our sense of solidarity faded with the pain. A generation born after 9/11 has reached adulthood. We’re arguably more divided now than at any other point in my lifetime.
Every year around this time, I think about that moment of solidarity, about what it really meant. The glib answer is that it was a moment when everyone—left, right and center—loved America.
But I don’t think that’s quite right. It wasn’t that the people on the left or on the right or in the center suddenly loved America, so now we could be friends.
No, it wasn’t that our political opponents suddenly developed a love for America.
It was that for one moment we were willing to acknowledge that our political opponents had loved America all along.