On 9/11/01 plus six

This is how the enemy defines success — chunks of American bodies strewn across a landscape so large that it requires a satellite photo to show, in a photo too large for your web browser to encompass when it's enlarged enough to show any real detail, and whose scale would even then still barely permit an intact human body to be made out as anything but a dot.

If you have a fast connection, go ahead and click on the photo to see it full-sized in a new browser window, and then scroll around over the piles. Be grateful that it comes without the smell and texture of dust and greasy ashes that hung over the original. Close your eyes then, and take a few moments to imagine yourself flying slowly upward from this ground, at this same hour of the day only a few days earlier, ghostlike through the more than 100 stories of mixed, motley, mostly happy people, many thousands of them, who all worked in a pair of soaring towers on a brilliant fall morning when mostly all of us were naïve and complacent. We were unaware that we were at war at all, much less that every one of us is a potential casualty. The smell then would have been morning donuts and bagels and coffee, fresh-washed unburnt hair, and innocence. The air had no texture at all.

(A photograph that is simultaneously sublimely innocuous and horrifically disturbing appears after the jump, if you're reading this from my blog's home page.)

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Every day for the last six years, brave Americans in and out of uniform — and their brave allies from countries like Britain and Australia and, sometimes, Germany and Spain and Canada and South Korea and Japan and Poland and Honduras and the Ukraine and lots of other places — have worked diligently, sometimes at risk of their own lives, to spare you and me from the kind of choice that this man had to make, six years ago today:

I hope all their efforts keep us all safe on this sixth anniversary, as they have kept most of us safe on the past five, and on the days in between. I thank them, for my sake and my family's and friends' and countrymen's sake. I thank them even for the sake of my countrymen who have already forgotten, or never grasped the lessons — the ones who blame ourselves collectively, our society, or even just our president, instead of blaming our enemies. They persuade themselves against all logic and evidence that if we'd just "support our troops by bringing them home," our enemies wouldn't keep trying to make scenes like the ones in these photos. They nod to one another sagely when one of them declares that fire can't melt steel, or when another of them says that America today is just like Nazi Germany, or when another says that Fox News is worse than al Qaeda. They buy full-page ads in the New York Times (at special discount rates!) to label as a "betrayer" the commander whose troops are engaging al Qaeda in Iraq so that the NYC PD & FD aren't overwhelmed again by al Qaeda in America. Yes, thank you, brave men and women, in and out of uniform, American and non-, who mostly keep us all, including even our idiots, safe from harm at our enemies' hands.

Our enemies laugh and laugh at our idiots, and at us for tolerating them, and they'll keep on laughing until the very moment when an American Hellfire missile rides up their light truck's exhaust pipe to take them straight to a different sort of hellfire. One way or another, there's hellfire waiting for them; personally, I just hope they get it both ways. I wasn't sure, six years and one day ago, whether there even is a hell. But now I understand that there has to be one, if only as a cosmological and theological counterweight to our enemies' evil. (I was late to the lesson; my father learned it at a much younger age, for example, when he went ashore with his shipmates from the USS Zeilin in the spring of 1945, after the liberation of Manila and most of the island of Luzon in the Philippines.) I can't do the math, but I'm nevertheless very confident that electromagnetism, gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, quantum mechanics, string theory, the as-yet-unpublished Grand Unified Theory, and the whole universal ball of wax would stop working properly if there weren't a hell for such evil to be punished appropriately in. And I'm confident that Dante suffered from a failure of sufficient imagination. In contrast to our idiots, though, I concede that these are matters of faith, not empiricism or conspiracy.

For those of us who not only understood, but still remember, the lessons published six years ago today, there's exactly one simple, solemn vow to re-affirm today:

Never forget.