On September 10, 2010, last night, I boarded the last evening Southwest flight out of Midland for a weekend trip. I hassled with the TSA, remembered to leave my pocket knife at home, pulled my laptop out of my bag, emptied my pockets of all metal, tolerated being looked square in the eye by the guy determining if my drivers license was counterfeit and held my pants up as I walked through the metal detector, having placed my belt in the bin to be x-rayed. All in the interest of not my safety so much as the safety of my fellow passengers and the plane's crew..

On September 10, 2001, I was also at MAF in the evening, meeting my wife who was returning from a trip on Southwest to visit relatives. Security was cursory and I stood at the gate to welcome her home. She arrived safely and all was right with the world.

The next morning around dawn, I left for a several day trip to New Mexico, driving. Two hours or so into the drive, I turned off the disc player and turned on the news. I think it was a Lubbock news station, I don't remember that detail. I listened live as the reporter on the air described the second aircraft's impact into the second tower. The reports were coming in in a very haphazard fashion. The Capitol was going to be hit, then it was the Empire State Building, then the Pentagon, then the White House. Major buildings in DC were being evacuated. Manhattan was locked down yet thousands were walking across the Brooklyn Bridge to get off that island which had been clearly singled out for attack.

I had been listening for several minutes; it could have been five, it could have been twenty: another detail I have forgotten. The engine in my vehicle started missing and got my attention. I kind of came to; awakening out of a daze. I was on one of the many two lane roads that criss-cross southeastern New Mexico. I was still an hour away from my destination. I realized that my right leg was cramping because I had my right foot shoved down as hard on the accelerator as possible, totally unconsciously. Most newer cars have a "rev limiter" that kicks in at a set speed for safety reasons, usually related to the strengh of the vehicle's tires. I had just discovered that my Suburban's rev limiter was set at about 110. I slowed down immediately and then remembered, though vaguely, several oil field trucks that I had passed over the previous few minutes. It is unlikely that their drivers have seen a Suburban moving as fast since.

I grabbed my phone and began calling relatives. My parents were watching the news. My wife and my 2 kids away at school were blissfully unaware until I called. I later hated myself in retrospect for not allowing them a couple more minutes of normalcy in their lives before they, too, had to move into a new age.

When I got to where I was going, in one piece, about half of the folks in the building were gathered around a TV watching the live feed from New York. All I could think of was Pearl Harbor and, being familiar with the World Trade Center, the 10,000 or more casualties that must have resulted as both towers collapsed.

It has been nine years. We have done much good in the name of battling this evil in those intervening years. Yet we have embarked on much useless silliness as well.

Make no mistake: no matter your age, you will be in this war the rest of your life. And, among many important things, September 11, 2001 revealed that we had been in a war for quite some time, but we had not acknowledged it nor had we fought back.