America: Twenty Five Years Later

The morning was already warm when I stepped out of Bancroft Hall and started walking across the Yard toward class. Summer hangs on in Annapolis well into September, filling the air with humidity off the Chesapeake and leaving the brick walkways warm beneath the morning sun. The sky was clear and blue above the chapel dome, the sunlight glinting off the copper surface.

The campus was already alive. Midshipmen moved between Bancroft Hall and the academic buildings, backpacks slung over their shoulders as they hurried toward morning classes. Officers and enlisted instructors crossed in the opposite direction.

It was almost eight o'clock and my English class would start soon. I quickened my pace down Stribling Walk toward Sampson Hall and barely made it into my seat before the bell rang.

I don't remember what we were studying that Tuesday morning. I don't even remember the name of the class. At some point, our professor stopped teaching and left the room. A few minutes later, he returned, wheeling a television into the classroom.

The World Trade Center was already burning when he turned it on. Smoke poured from a black hole in the side of the North Tower as the news anchors tried to make sense of what had happened.

Then another airplane appeared on the screen.

We watched it disappear into the South Tower in a ball of fire.

I was a second class midshipman, two years into the Naval Academy and only a few months past my twenty-first birthday. Nothing would be quite the same after that morning.

The Naval Academy changed almost overnight. The Marines came and built sandbagged machine-gun positions at the gates, turning the entrances to the Yard into fighting positions. The Navy parked a destroyer in the Severn River to protect us from any follow-on attacks. The Superintendent told us that the hijackers had considered the Naval Academy as a possible alternate target for the September 11 attacks.

We were ready.

But nothing happened.

So, I went back to class. We ate our meals in King Hall, studied for exams, and went about the business of becoming naval officers while Green Berets fought across Afghanistan on horseback. Most of us anyway. One of our fitness instructors was a Navy SEAL. I remember that he cleared out his office shortly after the attacks and left. No explanation or anything. We never saw him again. I assume he went back to the Teams and joined the war that was beginning to take shape.

The rest of us stayed behind.

I was so jealous of that Senior Chief. We all were. It seemed unfair that we could dedicate our lives to the defense of our nation and miss the war just so we could take two more years of physics.

We could not have been more wrong.

Two years came and went, and I spent the next decade of my life putting men to the sword. Iraq and Afghanistan became my home away from home. The war I was so afraid of missing consumed most of my youth.

The Global War on Terrorism cost us much more than my youth. It stole the best that America had to offer, our brightest souls laid in sacrifice for a war that refused to end.

Dylan Merola was four months old when the airplanes struck the World Trade Center.

While he was too young to witness the reason for the war, he grew up with it. By the time Merola entered Los Osos High School in Rancho Cucamonga, Americans had been fighting in Afghanistan for fourteen years. While Marines patrolled Helmand and soldiers hunted the Taliban through the mountains, Merola spent his afternoons backstage in the school theater, hanging lights, running sound, building props, and doing whatever else needed to be done. His theater teacher remembered a kid who arrived early, stayed late, and was always looking for someone who needed help.

Merola had wanted to become a Marine all his life. His mother wanted him to go to college, but Merola worried that if he waited, the war would end without him. So, after graduating from high school in 2019, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. College would have to wait.

The war was eighteen years old.

So was he.

Merola went through boot camp and infantry training before joining 2d Battalion, 1st Marines at Camp Pendleton. Time was running out. By the time he reached the Fleet, the United States was already drawing down its forces in Afghanistan. The war had lasted his entire childhood, only to end just as he became old enough to fight in it.

In the summer of 2021, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines deployed to Jordan to serve as a Marine crisis-response force. They weren't scheduled to go to combat, but Afghanistan was collapsing faster than anyone expected. The Taliban were retaking their country. Provincial capitals fell one after another until, on August 15, Taliban fighters entered Kabul.

Victor Two One was already there. Thousands of people pressed toward the Hamid Karzai International Airport looking for a way out of an impossible situation. The Marines were the only thing standing between the Taliban and freedom. These young men and women stood along the walls and canals, pulling people from the crowd, checking documents, searching for those authorized to enter, and trying to maintain order in the chaos.

On August 26, a suicide bomber walked toward Abbey Gate and ended Lance Corporal Merola's life. He was twenty years old.

Four days later, the war would officially end as the last of the American troops departed.

September 11 was a day of profound loss and tragedy. There is no question about that. But the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center also revealed the depths of American courage. Hundreds of first responders ran toward the destruction to save as many people as they could. Ordinary men and women sifted through the rubble searching for survivors and helping wherever they could. In the days that followed, Americans lined up outside recruiting offices, ready to defend their country against the threat of terrorism.

Brave men and women like Lance Corporal Merola answered our nation's call and gave their lives for the promise of a better tomorrow.

Twenty-five years have passed since the attacks on September 11, and five since the last American troops left Afghanistan. The world has changed considerably since then, but the courage that carried our nation through those difficult years has not disappeared. It lives in ordinary Americans who are still willing to serve their communities, stand beside their neighbors, and step forward when others need them.

This is the part of America that is worth dying for. My thoughts today, as always, are with those brave souls who have given their lives in the service of our great nation.

Twelve servicemembers died with Lance Corporal Merola. I chose him for this piece because he was one of the youngest who gave his life that day. Their names are listed below:

• SSgt Darin T. Hoover
• Sgt Johanny Rosario Pichardo
• Sgt Nicole L. Gee
• Cpl Hunter Lopez
• Cpl Daegan W. Page
• Cpl Humberto A. Sanchez
• LCpl David L. Espinoza
• LCpl Jared M. Schmitz
• LCpl Rylee J. McCollum
• LCpl Dylan R. Merola
• LCpl Kareem M. Nikoui
• HM3 Maxton W. Soviak
• SSG Ryan C. Knauss

Author: Byron Owen

Byron is a Reconnaissance Marine with tours as both a platoon commander and commanding officer at the elite 1st Force Reconnaissance Company. He also had the honor of commanding several intelligence and cyber units to include Cyberspace Warfare Task Group One and 3d Radio. He writes about information warfare at keyterraincyber.com, business intelligence at broadswordsix.substack.com, and is the author of the upcoming book Bury my Heart in Baghdad.