Twenty years after 9/11, many of us are still searching for answers | Opinion
Dan Hunt was in lower Manhattan when the planes hit the Twin Towers, and the sights, sounds and smells of that morning are embedded in a part of his brain that are easily triggered.
The current president of MLS’ FC Dallas franchise, Hunt was close enough to the Twin Towers that he could hear the steel girders pop.
“You could clearly see the wing of an airplane that hit the towers,” said Hunt, who was 24 then and worked in a corporate job that was four city blocks from what is now Ground Zero.
He was close enough that he saw someone jump to their death.
He was close enough that he had to run from the oncoming waves of smoke and debris that came as the towers fell.
Twenty years later Hunt is like so many of us who ponder our world since that morning, and how to explain it to the new generations of Americans who have no memory of a day that changed the world in ways we can’t fully articulate.
Every news outlet in the world will, or has run, stories on the 20-year anniversary of that horrendous day. In our 30-minute conversation a few days ago, Hunt brought up a subject I was going to avoid.
“It takes you to such a difficult place, and obviously all of the stuff that has been going on in Afghanistan,” Hunt said. “We are reliving [9/11] because Afghanistan was the fallout. We wound up back in the Middle East fighting a 20-year war, and leaving in such an abrupt manner.
“I’ve struggled with the way we exited from there. It was hard to watch U.S. service people lose their lives, and international people there fighting for different governments. It’s 20 years, and a lot of people lost their lives fighting for an ideal that has been washed away there.
“I don’t spend a lot of time on foreign policy, but I don’t think that was a war we were ever going to win. History would prove not. The real goal was to get Osama bin Laden and some of the other bad actors.”
In the summer of 2010, I interviewed Sebastian Junger, author of the best-seller “The Perfect Storm.”
Junger has covered combat all over the world. He was once embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley that he chronicled in the Academy Award nominated documentary, Restrepo.
He was in Afghanistan shortly after the U.S. arrived in 2001, and said he was greeted with hugs from citizens.
In our visit he said of our military presence in Afghanistan, “I just confirmed this with a Navy SEAL ... there is no way we could have killed Osama bin Laden without being in Afghanistan. All of this intel about his compound, a lot of it came from being in Afghanistan. You aren’t going to do it from Northern Virginia.”
That is something tangibly positive that came out of these last 20 years.
I asked Hunt if he could think of something else.
He mentioned the widespread outpouring of respect and admiration from the American public towards the police, firefighters, EMTs and members of the military.
Then he mentioned the killing of George Floyd last summer, which reversed some of that sentiment toward law enforcement.
“We are not perfect in this country; there are so many issues that have to be resolved,” Hunt said. “This is the best country in the entire world. There are going to be mistakes and there are going to be challenges, but this is a country that people pick themselves up and try to be better.
“9/11 brought our country together. We have to be better. We have to work together. We have to care about our fellow human beings. We have the power to do that in this country, and a lot of places don’t have that opportunity.”
On the surface, the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is a reminder of the worst moment in the history of America, which triggered global changes that require books, not a few paragraphs.
Beneath the surface, the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is a reminder of how that day united the nation, and, summoned from all Americans, the power of eternal decency, love and kindness that resides in every one of us.
