There's an old photo from the Spanish Civil War, depicting the moment of death of a Loyalist soldier whose name I did not know for decades. It's chased by the jumpy silent footage of Zapruder's film as President Kennedy's head explodes from the impact of a bullet.
There are the grainy picture postcards from a long ago, hard-fought and hastily forgotten war (though not by those who were sent to fight it), the first of one man executing another while in the second, a naked child literally runs for her life.
All of those images pale when recalling street level video of a brilliantly blue heaven over a lower Manhattan skyline on September 11, 2001 and the startling and sudden appearance of a commercial airliner entering one of the Twin Towers about two thirds of the way up, disappearing inside, forever, while the mind struggles to process what the eyes and neural network have shared. And there's this one that breaks my heart every time I look at it.
Who among us doesn't have a story on where you were when you first learned of the attacks on 9/11? I think nearly every story that can be told by the tenth anniversary of those attacks this Sunday will have been told. The shock and horror never dulls, no matter how often the telling of the tale. As we prepare to mark the first decade, it has sometimes felt as if history stopped at the moment when the first plane impacted. And when time began again, the Age of Innocent Ignorance was over and that of the Dark Hard World had begun.
In our two plus centuries as the last best hope for the world, as the bastion of democracy and the sanctuary of freedom, the United States has never faced a more implacable foe and relentless enemy. The attacks of 9/11 created a shared frame of reference for every American, regardless of race, creed, politics, sexual persuasion or color and were on all of us, to include those not yet born and for whom, endless war has always been a natural state with memories and mentions of pre 9/11 America being mythical.
As often as we speak about the way we were before 9/11, there's a strange quiet when we talk of what has happened in its wake. We've attempted to reduce a decade of conflict to a mathematical exercise as we measure dollars in goods and services expended in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps to distract us from the all too-real human cost.
We talk in abstractions about the Global War on Terror and of the thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of men and women in uniform deployed half way across the world in defense of freedoms we too often on the home front take for granted. We devote a few extra moments in thought for the victims of 9/11 and for all the fallen since, on Memorial Day, July 4th and Veterans Day, and to better understand the price of freedom we visit the memorials at Chelsea Parade. That will surely be the case again this Sunday.
But there's one story that hasn't yet been told, beyond a circle of family and friends, and that should be fully told. And it's of the service and sacrifice of Norwich residents Jacob Martir and Keith Heidtman both of whom died during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Telling their stories is the mission of the "Post 9/11 Memorial Committee" (of the Norwich Area Veterans Council) by creating a memorial to honor Martir and Heidtman and future Norwich casualties of the Global War on Terror. That memorial will join the others at Chelsea Parade, a few steps from Norwich Free Academy where both Martir and Heidtman were students. In such a way does the circle remain unbroken.
Partnering with commmunity leaders, merchants and businesses, teachers and students as well as residents in every phase of the memorial from design through construction, the Post 9/11 Memorial Committee will be more than a local headline on a somber anniversary but a way of remembering young men who ran towards, not from, danger when their nation most needed them because they realized courage is not the absence of fear, but, rather, that something else is more important than fear.
There's a German proverb that says "fear makes the wolf bigger than he is." There are already too many wolves in our world without creating more. As Franklin Roosevelt offered to a very different America in a very perilous time, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
Remembering the selflessness of Jacob Martir and Keith Heidtman and all those who have served in the uniforms of our armed forces in the last decade, not just on the anniversary of 9/11, but everyday, by living fearlessly and out loud is how we can best honor them.
-bill kenny
