It’s hard to believe today marks 25 years since 9/11. Like 93 percent of Americans who were at least 10 years old that day, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I was a 27-year-old Army officer teaching military and constitutional law at West Point. During my 8am class in Thayer Hall, word came that a plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Like so many Americans that morning, we didn’t immediately understand what we were watching. By the time class ended, we all did.

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Walking back to my office, I passed a cadet at a pay phone leaving a voicemail for his father.

“Dad? I heard the Pentagon got hit. Call me and let me know you’re okay. I love you.”

I can still hear it vividly.

Later that morning, I sat in the cafeteria at West Point with soldiers and cadets glued to CNN and Fox News as the towers came down. Fresh out of Airborne and Air Assault training, I knew I’d be getting into the fight. I also knew that some of my students, the young men and women sitting in that room, would soon be fighting in Afghanistan.

I felt the patriotic instinct that had been drilled into me as a soldier: What can I do now?

Like everyone else, I was trying to understand what had just happened. But I also felt the patriotic instinct that had been drilled into me as a soldier: What can I do now?

West Point immediately moved to Force Protection Condition Delta, the military’s highest level of security, and the academy suddenly looked and felt different. Soldiers with M-16s were posted around West Point, and every car coming onto the grounds was searched. When we heard that volunteers might be needed to help with the search at the World Trade Center, I immediately put my name forward. I asked for permission to take my motorcycle down to New York to help, but the request was denied. So I started pulling nightly guard duty.

The whole place felt different. We had spent our careers preparing for the possibility of war somewhere else, and now New York was burning less than 50 miles away. I remember how frustrating that was. I was a soldier, the country had just been attacked, and all I wanted was some way to be useful — to get in the fight I was trained for.

So I did the next best thing I could think of. I borrowed a book about al-Qaeda from a colleague who specialized in terrorism and stayed up most of the night reading it. The next morning, I threw out the lecture I had planned and taught my cadets about Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, political Islam and the Taliban. Those cadets in my class hung on every word — they knew we’d all be going soon and we needed to get smart quick.

After class, I walked into Colonel Patrick Finnegan’s office and told my boss I wanted out of my two-year teaching assignment so I could join the fight with the 82nd Airborne or the 101st Airborne, where I was supposed to be assigned next.

The attacks seemed to crack open something in the country. It was an extraordinary thing to witness, and 25 years later, I wish we had more of it.

He reminded me that I had made a promise to teach and needed to honor it — but he expected and appreciated my desire to get into the fight — and that I’d be called to go soon enough, but the Army needed people in places other than the front lines for right now. If I called the Pentagon like I requested, he warned me, they would call him, and he would tell them he needed me there for right now. I knew he was right, even if it was not what I wanted to hear. So I gritted my teeth and stayed.

Looking back now, that conversation in Colonel Finnegan’s office marked the beginning of a road that would eventually take me to Iraq as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne and years later to Congress and the Pentagon.

The loss of Michele

But the events of September 11 were more than changing the course of my professional life. They were becoming painfully personal. My best friend since age six, Chris Norbeck, had recently begun dating a 27-year-old woman named Michele Hoffmann, and I had watched the relationship take shape four months earlier on a trip to Cancún, when it was still new and full of possibility. It was the first time I saw him completely head over heels in love.

Michele worked at Cantor Fitzgerald on the upper floors of the North Tower. Her father, Frederick, worked there too. Both were killed that morning along with 656 of their coworkers. This represented the largest loss of life suffered by any single organization in the attacks and nearly a quarter of all those killed in New York City. A total of 18 people from Bucks County also perished, including Josh Reiss, who was five months into his term at Cantor Fitzgerald.

Howard Lutnick, now the U.S. Commerce Secretary, was Cantor Fitzgerald’s CEO at the time. He avoided death that day because he was taking his five-year-old son Kyle to his first day of kindergarten. His younger brother Gary was killed that day. Within weeks, Cantor made a $45 million payment to the victims’ families. The firm later pledged 25 percent of its profits for five years and provided the families with 10 years of health coverage, ultimately delivering $180 million in support. He eventually built the firm back even bigger, with 60 employees being the children of those who perished that day.

I remember how different the country felt in the days after September 11. People were scared and angry, but there was also a real sense that we were in this together. American flags seemed to show up everywhere. You saw them outside homes, over roads, on fire trucks, in store windows. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” which had been released nearly two decades earlier, was suddenly everywhere again and climbed to No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. To this day, it gets me choked to think about how unified we were — and when I hear that song — it still fires up when it’s Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.”

People were scared and angry, but there was also a real sense that we were in this together.

Gallup found that the share of Americans who described themselves as “extremely proud” to be American surged to between 65 and 70 percent in the years immediately following 9/11. Today, that number is 33 percent, the lowest Gallup has recorded since it began asking the question in 2001.

Some of what followed September 11 brought out the very best in the country. People wanted to serve, and they found whatever way they could to do it. Americans lined up around blood centers to donate. Thousands of volunteers made their way to New York, Washington, D.C. and Shanksville, PA, the crash site of Flight 93, while others joined the Red Cross, enlisted in the military, started charities or simply found ways to help the people around them. Communities gathered for candlelight vigils and filled parks, churches and town squares to mourn together. American flags seemed to appear everywhere. I remember all of that because the attacks seemed to crack open something in the country. It was an extraordinary thing to witness, and 25 years later, I wish we had more of it.

Some of what followed deserves a more complicated reckoning. Muslim and Arab Americans along with Sikhs and others perceived to be Muslim or Middle Eastern were suddenly treated with suspicion, and hate crimes rose sharply in the days after the attacks. President George W. Bush deserves credit for recognizing that danger early.

Six days after 9/11, he visited the Islamic Center of Washington and famously said, “Islam is peace,” making clear that the United States was fighting terrorists, not Muslims. I mentioned his leadership last 9/11 at the Bush Presidential Library when they asked me to give my reflections on his response leadership, even though we are of different political parties. It’s the type of unity I try to live my life by, and instill in my two teenage kids Maggie and Jack.

But fear was growing in the country. Over time, it became part of the argument for going to war in Iraq, even though Iraq had not attacked us on September 11th or were connected to it. By 2003, 69 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been personally involved in 9/11. He wasn’t. Those of us who spoke up were often ostracized — I’ve lost Army buddies and friends for speaking up after I left active duty, even though it wasn’t politically popular and I was still a registered Independent.

Fear and anger sometimes make us reckless, overriding rational judgment. Some of our fellow Americans were treated shamefully. But 25 years later, I still believe we can recover some of what was best about that moment without repeating what was worst about what came afterward.

This Friday, I will be thinking first about the nearly 3,000 people who were killed 25 years ago. The men and women who went to work that morning and never came home. The 125 people killed at the Pentagon who are often forgotten. The passengers and crew of Flight 93 who learned what was happening and courageously fought back against the hijackers, bringing the plane down near Shanksville, before it could reach what was most likely the U.S. Capitol.

Twenty-five years later, remembering September 11 … is a call to rekindle the unity our fellow Americans had — where our political, economic and cultural differences didn’t matter — because we were all Americans that day.

I will also think about what ordinary Americans did for one another that day. In less than eight hours, roughly 500,000 people were evacuated by water, the largest maritime evacuation in recorded history — even larger than Dunkirk. People in private boats came to the rescue of New Yorkers stranded in Lower Manhattan.

But the list of people harmed by September 11 did not stop growing when the fires went out. Hundreds of thousands of responders, workers, residents and students were exposed to the toxic dust that settled over Lower Manhattan. Many became sick years later with respiratory illnesses and cancers. Today, the federal World Trade Center Health Program cares for more than 150,000 responders and survivors across the country. More than 9,000 people have died from these illnesses – three times the number of deaths on 9/11. More than 1,000 victims have never been identified in the recovery efforts, stunting for many the closure of a burial.

So when we say “never forget,” I hope we mean all of them. Twenty-five years later, remembering September 11 also means keeping our promise to take care of the survivors who are still living with its consequences and our military veterans who answered our nation’s call. But it’s also a call to rekindle the unity our fellow Americans had — where our political, economic and cultural differences didn’t matter — because we were all Americans that day.

The Honorable Patrick J. Murphy is a Wharton lecturer, vetrepreneur, and the 32nd Army Under Secretary after earning the Bronze Star for service in Baghdad, Iraq as an All-American with the 82nd Airborne Division — @PatrickMurphyPA on Instagram and Twitter. Murphy is a supporter of the Citizen Media Group.

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