Never Forget

Old School here to take a brake from wargaming to ask you all to take a moment to reflect on 9/11 and the people who died in the attacks, their families and their children. If this topic is unsettling or if you disagree with the ideas presented, then kindly move on. Please keep in your thoughts the brave first responders who sacrificed their lives or their health attempting to rescue victims. Also keep in your thoughts, the passengers of Flight 93, who fought and paid with their lives. Please never forget the more than 6,100 U.S. servicemembers who gave their lives and the more than 44,000 wounded from OIF and OEF.

While the events of 9/11 are primarily a U.S. tragedy, the effects are absolutely global in nature, changing the world through war and economic turmoil and changing the way nations approach security forever. There is no doubt that if you are reading this, your life has been changed by 9/11.

 I hope that we never forget, that we think about it every day, so that we may never allow this tragedy to repeat itself in our Nation or anywhere else in this world. I hope that that we never forget that the enemies of peace are forever on our doorstep and will always seek to destroy what mankind created. I also hope that we remember the compassion mankind is capable of in the face of such tragedy.

Whenever I think of a fallen comrade in arms or of 9/11, I always come back to a particular poem that many of you may be familiar with:

Ifby Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son! 

That is all we have here today. We will refrain from posting for the remainder of the day in respect and remembrance. Comments have been turned off because I feel none are necessary. Politics aside, many people lost their lives and this is a day we should honor them.