The official web site of A.H. Lloyd

I’m old enough to remember when December 7th was a very big deal, almost a national holiday. Everyone who was alive when Pearl Harbor was attacked could tell you exactly what they were doing when they got the news.

In many ways, the Cold War establishment of a massive standing army in peacetime and unprecedented overseas bases was a reaction against the trauma of an American fleet being wrecked in its home port.

But time moves remorselessly forward, and the commemorations became smaller each year as the veterans died off and now even their children are getting old. To even have heard the news over the radio would require someone to be in their 90s. Living memory of the event is almost extinct.

The same fate is in store for those who recall the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. It was a thing everyone remembered, but a quarter century has passed and a great many people were born after it happened, or, like my eldest, was alive but too young to recall it clearly.

My children only remember the aftermath: a growing security state and a father who was frequently absent on military duty. As it turned out, I never saw combat or even deployed to a combat zone.

(Okay, one could argue that I actually did, because I deployed to Ramstein Air Base in Germany three times, arriving via Frankfurt airport, which was the site of a terrorist attack that killed two of my fellow Airmen and wounded two others, during the time I was active. The ‘combat zone’ moniker is somewhat misleading in a war against terrorists.)

As a result of the 9/11 attack, I was in a recruiting office a week later, having decided (along with my wife) that I had an obligation to do my duty. It took almost a year for the military to untangle the chaos of my short, unsuccessful Army career, but by August 2002, I was in uniform once again, ultimately retiring from the Air National Guard at the end of 2022.

I have two uncles who served in Vietnam, and I like to joke with them that they only lost one war, while I lost two. As I said, I never saw combat, but I was surrounded by people who did, and I know people who did not come home. This fuels a certain anger that is difficult to articulate, but at the heart of it is resentment at leaders who callously sacrificed lives for career advancement, people for whom personal gain was more important than battlefield success.

I know I speak for many veterans (as well as actively serving members) when I say that retroactively reducing every flag officer of that era in rank and rescinding their medals is the least we can do to honor the dead and the wounded from that pointless conflict.

When the catastrophic evacuation of Afghanistan took place, fully 15% of my unit opted to separate. Many of those who remained did so only because they were close to their 20-year mark, a now obsolete requirement for retirement benefits.

Such are the tangled emotions I feel on this silver anniversary of an awful day.