Did we waste opportunity going to war after 9/11 attack? It feels that way after 20 years

I was in the Army stationed at a hospital in Germany on Sept. 11, 2001.

That afternoon, as we were leaving our weekly administrative meeting, one of my coworkers rushed into the hallway holding a small radio. I remember everything about her appearance in that moment — her purple suit, the concern in her eyes. I could probably pick out her shade of lipstick at the drugstore.

Everything is still so vivid in my mind.

“A plane just hit the World Trade Center,” she said.

I remember thinking she must have meant a small plane, but it quickly became clear as we listened to the broadcast that this was no accident. We were under attack. And for all we knew at the time, it was only just beginning.

The hospital immediately went into lockdown, and we set up an emergency operations center. I can’t remember if I was able to return home that night, but whenever we were finally released, we were instructed not to wear our uniforms in public and to be as inconspicuous as possible.

We didn’t yet know the extent of the terror plot. The USS Cole had been bombed less than a year before, and we now had to assume that we were all targets.

I was afraid to drive my car anywhere because I had USA plates that might attract attention. I knew they attracted attention, in fact.

Just a few months earlier, I had been driving through Luxembourg when an elderly man began waving to me while I was stopped at an intersection. He pointed to my license plate. “USA!” he called out again and again as he approached my car, waving his arms wildly and smiling.

So many years had passed since American forces had liberated his country during World War II but the mere sight of an American —any American — elicited this jubilance. I thought he might kiss me through my open car window.

After 9/11, I could no longer count on that kind of joyful reception from the wider world.

Still, within days of the attack, the local Germans had erected a shrine at the gates of our base — mounds of flowers and candles stretched halfway down the block. People stopped and prayed there. They left notes of sympathy.

In that moment, we could feel the world standing in solidarity with us. But that moment was short-lived.

The peacekeeping efforts we had been sustaining in the Balkans were quickly overshadowed by a new war in Afghanistan, and just like that, the flood of goodwill from the world dried up.

What is perhaps most striking to me 20 years later is how quickly we squandered that feeling of solidarity, both at home and abroad.

I don’t know that Muslim Americans ever experienced that brief-but-intense moment of belonging at all. I don’t know what the best response to the attack would have been. Maybe we did everything right.

But I can’t help but think that in choosing to avenge these deaths through war, we wasted an opportunity to stand together and create something stronger, nobler and more enviable from the rubble.

Maybe there’s still a way to find that sense of solidarity again and to find our place as the shining “city on a hill” that John Winthrop envisioned centuries ago. I can think of no better way to honor the innocent people who died than to recommit ourselves to that vision.

I want my children, when they venture off into the world, to be received everywhere with open arms, to feel the warmth that I felt in Luxembourg, from people who know us to be beneficent and good.

I want the world to view us as a beacon of hope. I want every life lost to have meant something, to have been catalysts for the pursuit of something greater, so that no one should have died in vain.

Joanna Manning is a Tacoma -based writer. Check out her writing blog at www.jlmanning.com