[night bird calling]
[man] I'm from South Carolina.
Lexington, South Carolina, to be exact.
Born and raised.
[blowing bird call whistle]
My name is Michael Smoak.
Everybody just calls me Smoak.
[imitating bird call]
I've been called
by my last name my entire life.
Everybody from when I was a child
has called me Smoak.
If you call me Michael,
I'm in big trouble. So
[soft, somber music playing]
I was five years old when 9/11 happened.
I didn't really know what was going on,
but I could tell
by the emotion in the room
that something serious had happened.
I was actually home sick
from school that day.
I was at my grandmother's house,
and I remember me, her,
and my granddad watching it on the TV.
I just remember both of them
standing up out of their chairs
and kind of walked towards the TV,
getting closer to it.
[Tom Brokaw] It looks like
a big chunk of it has just peeled away.
[reporter] One can only hope that the area
has been evacuated, but of course
[Smoak] I started to understand 9/11
more and more as I got older.
I understood what happened,
but not really why it happened.
[indistinct dialog]
Later, on YouTube,
I saw videos of the w*r
[soldier] Target!
[firing]
[Smoak] and I wanted to serve my country.
I don't even remember
where I heard the term "Marine Corps,"
but I just remember
looking at all the videos
and the uniforms
and all that stuff on the internet.
I was like, "That's gonna be me one day."
"I'm going to be a Marine
when I get older."
[helicopter whirring]
We got told that we were going in
for a non-combative evacuation.
[reporter] The w*r in Afghanistan is over.
This puts an end to America's longest w*r.
Twenty years, 2,400 lives lost.
[Smoak] And then it got pretty crazy.
[people clamoring and shouting]
This was nearly 20 years after 9/11.
[clamoring continues]
-[distant siren wailing]
-And what started on 9/11
ended right here at Abbey Gate.
[woman screams]
My thoughts were, "What the hell
have we been doing for 20 years?"
If they didn't have the right paperwork,
most of the time,
you're sending them to their death,
which is a pretty crazy responsibility
for a 23-year-old.
[dramatic music playing]
[soldier] Move!
[expl*si*n]
[people clamoring and screaming]
[solemn music playing]
[Garrett M. Graff]
We're at a moment in American life
when the events of 9/11 are beginning
to slip meaningfully
from living memory into history.
[rumbling and whooshing]
At some point in the next couple of years,
we will cross the point
where 50% of Americans
were born after 9/11 or were too young
to remember the events of that day.
Now they're learning about the attacks
and seeing those images from the day
in school.
[student] It's just, like, taught as,
it happened, and we should
just know that it happened.
I haven't really heard of it much
outside of, like, the anniversary of 9/11.
It just feels like another part of
the wars that we've learned about
because I wasn't alive for it
or there for it.
[Azmat Khan] On 9/11,
I was in English class.
I was in 11th grade.
I think we were
the only Muslims at school.
[Laurel Homer]
I was ten months old on September 11th.
A lot of times
I feel kind of like collateral.
[Wyatt Wilson]
I had just turned three years old.
I was probably getting my diaper changed.
I was three years old.
[An Nguyen] I just turned four.
That's 25 years past.
It's basically a generation
since the attacks.
It's critical to know
the pain and the grief.
The ramifications of 9/11 are evolving.
And even some consequences from that event
are still unfolding to this day.
[whooshing, then exploding]
[Graff] 25 years later,
the current generation lives in
a world that was created by 9/11.
[somber music playing]
[Anand Gopal] We had a sense back then
that we were at a transformative moment.
And we were.
I was asleep.
I was an undergrad at NYU at that time.
I was living in Lower Manhattan,
and I felt a loud sound.
[airplane approaching]
[airplane gets louder]
[loud expl*si*n]
[Stephen McArdle] That was an expl*si*n.
That was an expl*si*n.
[indistinct clamoring]
[man] Holy sh*t!
[Gopal] I turned the TV on.
[reporter] We have a breaking news story
to tell you about.
Apparently, a plane has just crashed
into the World Trade Center here in
[Gopal] That's all we had,
is the main television stations.
I don't mean to interrupt the fun,
but this is a breaking news story.
A plane has crashed
-Hold it Into the World Trade Center.
-[Robin Quivers] You're kidding!
[reporter 2] We have no further details.
We don't know anything about
what they have concluded happened there.
So anyway, we go on now. How are you?
-I know you're in shock.
-I'm really in shock.
I've never I don't know what to say.
[reporter 3] CNN Center right now
is just beginning to work on this story,
obviously calling our sources and trying
to figure out exactly what happened.
[reporter 4] fire is
nowhere near under control
[Jenny Pachucki] For 10 years,
I was an oral historian
and curator at the 9/11 Museum,
recording oral histories with survivors,
first responders, family members.
If you're trying
to have hope for a generation,
I think that helping them
understand what happened
is an important part
of creating good for the future.
When these people become real
and this event becomes personal,
that's the most powerful way
to understand, ultimately,
what this was and why it mattered.
[sirens wailing]
[police operator] Police operator 133,
what's the emergency?
[Battaglia] I'm on the 100th floor of
the World Trade Center with 30 people.
[Pachucki] People are calling 911.
They're reporting being trapped.
They're reporting being stuck.
[operator] How are you doing?
This is the fire department.
[Battaglia] Hi. It's hard to talk.
-[operator] Yeah.
-A lot of smoke.
-[operator] Right.
-The heat
We're all overreacting.
Please come right now.
-[operator] What floor are you on?
-[Battaglia] 100 Northeast.
[operator] All right.
[people clamoring and coughing]
[woman] It's too hot!
[operator] What's your phone number there?
[Battaglia] I'm on a cell phone.
[operator] All right, no problem.
We'll get to you.
-[Battaglia] Please, immediately.
-[operator] They're on the way.
[Pachucki] Really, the only thing
that people can say is,
"Hang on, we're coming for you.
We'll be there as soon as we can."
Our son, Brad, had just graduated
from Bucknell University.
On September 11th, he was working
on the 89th floor of the South Tower.
Hey, Mom, it's Brad.
I just wanted to call
and let you know, I'm sure that you heard
that a plane crashed
into World Trade Center One.
We're fine,
we're in World Trade Center Two.
I'm not
I'm obviously alive and well over here.
But obviously a pretty scary experience.
[Pachucki] For most people, it was just
a confusing, atrocious accident.
[woman] They believe it was an airplane.
I'm going to go watch the news now.
We thought we were invincible,
but we also thought we were invulnerable.
In other words,
that no one could attack us.
9/11 shatters that complacency.
[news playing in background]
[woman on phone] get through,
and I'm far away right now,
I thought it might be
a little dangerous to get too close.
I saw lots of debris coming
[Graff] You see in that moment
between 8:46 and 9:03
how innocent America actually is.
In those 17 minutes,
America still felt innocent.
[reporter] And as fire crews
are descending on this area,
it does not appear that there's
any kind of an effort up there yet.
Now remember-- Oh my God!
[newsreader] My God. My
[newsreader 2]
That looks like a second plane.
[plane approaching]
[woman on phone] It was a jet. It was
a very large plane. It was going fast.
It went past the Ritz-Carlton Hotel
that's being built in Battery Park.
It went through right past, almost hit it
-[people screaming]
-and then went in.
[newsreader 2] So this looks like
it is some sort of a concerted effort
to attack the World Trade Center
that is underway in downtown New York.
[sirens wailing]
[man] My name is Andrew Ansbro.
I joined the FDNY in February of 2001.
I was assigned to Engine 58 in Harlem.
On September 11th, I was 29 years old.
I was the new guy.
You know, I was actually
getting off a 24-hour shift
when, uh, you know, the first plane hit.
We got assigned to the second
fifth alarm, which was the South Tower.
-[fire alarm bell ringing]
-You get the alarm, get the adrenaline.
I thought, "Here we are,
we're going down there to put it out."
[siren wailing]
The street was very different.
Everyone got out of the way of the rig,
and, uh, people were cheering for us.
It was like being a gladiator
heading down to battle.
Everyone was, you know,
cheering and clapping as we're going.
And I just remember
passing a block in the 70s
and focusing on this one person who was
standing there looking at us, crying.
And then it hit me.
[indistinct dialog over dispatch radio]
sh*t.
[Ansbro] And then the lieutenant said,
"Listen, make no mistake,
everyone above that fire
is dead or gonna die."
[sirens wailing]
[newsreader] Thousands,
tens of thousands of people
actually work inside those two buildings
in the heart
of New York's financial district.
You could see the fire,
the flames, and all the smoke.
And I said, "Oh my God, my wife is there."
She worked on the 96th floor,
but I was hoping for the best.
My daughter was two years old.
A few days later, she just started
screaming and crying, calling her mother.
That's when it hit me.
[sirens wailing]
[Pachucki] People are
coming down the stairwells.
It is smoky, depending on where you were.
It is crowded.
There's women wearing
full stiletto heels walking down
many, many stairs.
People describe people helping each other
in the stairwells.
There were stations set up by responders
to provide people with oxygen.
People were being handed water.
There's this moment
when the first responders
are gathering
at the incident command post,
and they're preparing to go up
and developing their strategy.
And somebody looked at the little group
that was about to go up the stairs
and said, "We may not live through today."
[sniffles, stifles sob]
[crying] And they took a moment
to shake each other's hands.
[sirens wailing]
[Rudy Giuliani] All that we know
All that we know right now
is that two airplanes struck the two
large towers of the World Trade Center.
[man on radio]
Stand by. Just stand by. We'll get 'em.
[Pachucki] There was no question
that the city was being attacked.
Later, we realized it was the country.
Another plane is headed
towards Washington, D.C.
[man] I'm An Nguyen.
I am the son of Khang Nguyen,
who was working
at the Pentagon on September 11th.
My father, he was born in South Vietnam.
And then he came to America
after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
But he is a testament of
basically the American dream.
There were opportunities here in the US
that was not given to him when he was
younger back in Vietnam.
My father was an electrical engineer
with the Navy Command Center
at the Pentagon.
I'd just turned four.
I was in preschool,
and on that Tuesday morning,
when my mom was taking me out
to the bus to go to preschool,
my father ran towards the bus
to just say goodbye to me one more,
just one last one last time.
[melancholy music playing]
[plane approaching]
[Pachucki] At 9:37, Flight 77 crashed
into the E ring of the Pentagon.
[dispatcher] Engine 101, [indistinct]
[firefighter] 105 is on the scene.
I have a [indistinct]
transport, the Pentagon.
[siren wailing]
[newsreader] It would appear that
there has been another major expl*si*n,
this one in the nation's capital.
You are looking at a scene
of apparent blast aftermath.
There is smoke in the air
over the Pentagon.
[Nguyen] I just went home
when preschool ended.
And I was just waiting for my father
to show up on the driveway with his car.
And I just kept waiting and waiting
just hoping that he would come home.
With the days that followed,
especially the funeral,
that's when I realized
that he's not coming back home.
An outpour of tears started to show.
Terrorism is a word
that you will never understand
in any visceral way
until you experience it.
I did not know how to come to terms
with a loss of that magnitude,
but I knew that
my life would change forever.
And now I'm trying to make an identity
within a world
without having my father by my side.
[sirens wailing]
[Pachucki] The Pentagon is a private area.
It's a lower building.
And the force of the plane,
the amount of jet fuel,
and the size and structure of the building
creates like an inferno.
[fire roaring and crackling]
And at the same time,
the South Tower was burning
for 56 minutes.
The impact zone was a little bit lower.
So an hour burning
at extremely hot temperatures,
ultimately the building
began to pull into itself.
[tragic music playing]
At some point there was
a deep rumble in the earth.
It felt like an earthquake.
-[people clamoring]
-[sirens wailing]
[car horns honking]
[Ansbro] We saw a whole bunch of cops
lined up like a roll call.
Then they just started running.
We thought something
was falling out of the sky.
Or there was a disturbance
because they all ran north.
What we didn't know was that
the police officers in the helicopter
had radioed down to them.
The top of the South Tower
had started to twist.
And they could see it.
They told them to evacuate.
None of us got that message.
[Pachucki] There was a man
named Sean Rooney
who called his wife, Beverly Eckert.
They connect over the phone,
and he's trapped.
[Beverly Eckert]
It was about 9:30 a.m. when he called.
And he told me he was on the 105th floor.
And he'd been trying to find a way out.
He told me that he hadn't had any success
and now the stairwell was full of smoke.
We stopped talking about escape routes.
And then we just began talking about
all the happiness we shared
during our lives together.
He just kept whispering "I love you"
over and over.
Then I heard a sharp crack,
followed by the sound of an avalanche.
Take two.
Take two and two, one.
This is as close as we can get
to the base of the World Trade Center.
-You see the firemen assembled here
-[bang]
-the police officers, FBI agents.
-[another bang]
-And you can see the two towers.
-[louder bang]
A huge expl*si*n now,
raining debris on all of us.
We better get out of the way!
Come on, Glenn.
Come on, Glenn, you can do it, man.
[Ansbro] There was
this loud crack and a boom.
And you know
Bop-bop-bop-bop-bop-bop-bop-bop.
And that was the floors pancaking
and coming down.
[people screaming]
The street got dark
and went from day to night in seconds.
So, instinctively, myself and whoever
came from the south, we ran south.
[whooshing]
[reporter in Japanese]
Just now with a loud crash
a building has collapsed!
[Ansbro] When the building hit the ground,
it kind of came over us
and the air pressure
from the compressed air
-blew the windows in.
-[whooshing]
[man] Oh sh*t. Oh sh*t.
[Ansbro] We were airborne.
I don't know how far I flew,
but I landed in a pile of people.
And, uh, immediately your next breath
was like sucking in a cup full of sand.
It was just [choking]
And you're getting hit with,
you know, little pieces of debris.
And you just say to yourself,
"This is how it ends."
[man] I hope I live.
I hope I live. It's coming down on me.
[Gopal] I ran just ahead of the front
of the smoke and I got under a car.
There was a subway grate under the car,
and I used the subway grate to breathe
for the next three or four hours.
It was too thick to see outside.
[people clamoring]
[Pachucki] At 10:28 a.m.,
the North Tower collapsed,
k*lling about 1,500 people
who were unable
to make it out of the building.
-[loud bang and rumbling]
-[people screaming and exclaiming]
[sirens wailing]
[woman] Miss, get in here!
Get away from the glass.
[woman 2] All my sh*t is out there!
My sh*t is out there!
[woman] You want your life or your stuff?
[man] Wanna die?
Don't worry about your sh*t.
[woman] The building,
watch the debris come down the street.
-Don't open the door.
-[man] Get away from the windows.
-[woman] Don't open the door!
-[man] Here it comes! Get behind!
[woman 2] Oh my God. Oh my God!
-[man] Look at the shadow of death.
-[woman 2 screams] Oh my God!
[rumbling and whooshing]
You're right!
Oh, my God, you saved my life!
-[man] I told you--
-[woman 2] You saved my life, thank you!
-[sirens blaring]
-[fire truck honking]
[reporter] Words cannot describe it,
except to say that the towers are gone.
Church Street is littered with people
still lingering, uh, looking, watching.
They don't know what to do.
Some people are down
on their knees praying.
[anchor] You're looking at the collapse
of one of those towers right now.
We now have an AP news alert
out of Pittsburgh.
Officials at Somerset County Airport
are confirming
the crash of a large plane
just north of the airport.
[somber music playing]
I'm Laurel Homer.
I was 10 months old on September 11th.
[woman] Is that on his wedding day?
[Homer] Yeah.
I'm the daughter of Leroy Homer.
My dad was the copilot on Flight 93.
[Pachucki] There were
44 people on Flight 93.
And because the flight
is already underway,
a lot of the passengers on the flight
are getting information from the outside
about the attacks unfolding in New York,
and then later the Pentagon.
There were 37 calls
that were exchanged on that flight,
messages that were left.
[Linda Gronlund] Elsa, it's Lin.
Um, I only have a minute.
I'm on United 93 and it's been hijacked
by t*rrorists who say they have a b*mb.
Apparently they've flown a couple of
planes into the World Trade Center,
and it looks like they're going
to take this one down as well.
Mostly I just wanted to say
I love you [crying]
and I'm going to miss you.
And, and
please give my love to Mom and Dad, and
[shuddering breath]
Mostly I just love you,
and I just wanted to tell you that.
I don't know if I'm going to get
a chance to tell you that again or not.
[Pachucki] The assumed target
we now know was the United States Capitol.
They understood that
they were on a suicide mission
and they understood pretty quickly
that it was up to them to do something.
[man] The, uh, remains of an airplane
crash over on, uh, Lambertsville Road.
[Pachucki] And the passengers decide
with the crew to charge the c*ck.
Ultimately, the hijackers made
the decision to down the plane.
[Homer] They diverted the plane from where
the t*rrorists wanted it to crash into,
and they saved a lot of people
in doing that.
It's hard. Like, obviously I'm grateful
that more devastation wasn't caused,
but at the same time, like,
I still lost him, so
it's kind of a struggle,
because it's like, I know he was a hero,
but I wish he didn't have to be.
My mom, she told me at one point
she thought
she was going to die of heartbreak.
She was, like, devastated
and she has this young kid
that she needs to take care of.
My entire life was
kind of built around this.
I'm still struggling so much,
[voice breaking]
and it has taken over my whole
my whole life.
[siren wailing in distance]
[George W. Bush] Good evening.
Today our fellow citizens,
our way of life,
our very freedom came under attack
in a series of deliberate
and deadly t*rror1st acts.
-[indistinct dialog]
-[sirens wailing]
[Graff] There are four attacks,
and almost 3,000 people die.
But what that misses is what it was like
to live and experience 9/11.
[woman sobbing]
That we miss the fear, the chaos,
the confusion and the trauma of that day.
[person sobbing]
[man] They say someone needs help.
[Graff] We didn't know
when the attacks began.
[woman] needs some water.
[Graff] We didn't know
when the attacks were over.
We didn't know for much of the day
how many attacks there had been.
We also didn't know whether
there was another wave of attacks coming
in the afternoon of September 11th,
didn't know what was coming
on September 12th.
We didn't know
what was coming in October or in 2002.
If you miss the fear, the chaos,
the confusion and the trauma,
you miss the entire reason that the US
ends up responding in the way that we did.
[protesters shouting]
This was an epochal change
in American life.
The feeling of violation
made it feel like anything could happen.
Like the pit had opened up.
The skies had rained fire,
and who knows what could come next.
[Christian Sanchez]
It felt justified to go.
Like, if we got attacked
and they k*lled a bunch of our people,
obviously we should bring some justice
to those that did it.
[man] It's like a w*r
right now in the world.
-[man 2] This is gonna start a w*r.
-Yeah.
-[man 2] This is gonna start a w*r.
-Yeah.
It's gonna start a w*r. Sure, man. Hey.
[Smoak] I heard grownups talk about it,
so I started to understand more and more
as I got older that what happened,
not really why it happened,
but other than they didn't like Americans.
[Homer] The way that
my mom described what happened
was that there were bad men on his plane.
[Nguyen] I knew that
the t*rrorists were involved.
I know they were coming
from the Middle East,
but I didn't really fully understand,
what was the intention?
Like, what was their goals?
[Bush] Tonight I ask for your prayers
for all those who grieve
for the children whose worlds
have been shattered,
for all whose sense of safety and security
has been threatened
and I pray they will be comforted
by a power greater than any of us.
Spoken through the ages in Psalm 23,
"Even though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil,
for you are with me."
[Dr. Joseph Geraci] It just kind of broke
my heart, seeing the posters and the signs
for people looking
for their family members.
The towers were still smoldering,
the rubble was
still smoldering at that time.
You know, I don't think
that I had ever felt such a calling.
Like what my life was for
is like, you know,
we needed to help be part of the solution
and we needed to help to find
the individuals who had done this.
[Jack Goldsmith] Within days,
I think three days after 9/11,
there was just a lot of panic
and uncertainty and ignorance and fear.
Immediately, the people in the White House
and in the Justice Department realized
that they needed
robust authorities to respond to it.
The one big sticking point tonight
is how much power to give the president
to conduct this w*r
and to respond
to any future acts of terrorism.
And they sought a super broad
authorization to use military force,
as it's called, an AUMF,
from Congress for a very open-ended
authorization to go after all t*rrorists,
essentially, all t*rror1st threats
and to deter all t*rror1st threats.
[reporter] This draft resolution
from the White House
authorizes use of armed forces
against all those who planned,
authorized, harbored, committed,
or aided in the attacks
and to deter and pre-empt
any future acts of terrorism.
[Dennis Hastert]
Yeas are 420, the nays are one.
This resolution,
joint resolution, is passed.
-[applause]
-[gavel bangs]
[Oona Hathaway] The Constitution
was written to really constrain
the president's authority
to use military force.
The idea was
we didn't want to have a king.
We didn't want to have
one person who could
just launch the country into w*r.
And so the Constitution very carefully
separates out the powers.
It's Congress that gets to declare w*r.
The 2001 authorization
for use of military force
was enacted not with a lot of time
for deliberation and careful reflection.
[Wolf Blitzer] Would you be willing
to give up some of your liberties
in this country
in order for the government
to crack down on terrorism?
66% said yes.
[General Stanley McChrystal]
The AUMF, this 2001 statute
passed a few days after 9/11,
turned out to be the foundation stone
on the next 25 years of w*r.
The basis for using force abroad
all over the world,
the basis for the Guantanamo detentions,
and the basis in some sense
for the black sites abroad.
It was really the legal foundation
for everything that would come.
[Osama bin Laden in Arabic] We hold
the American government responsible
for its transgressions
on Muslims as a whole,
and for its support of
the regimes in our countries
against the interests
and well-being of the people.
[McChrystal] The 9/11 attacks
had been orchestrated by Al-Qaeda
and led by Osama bin Laden,
and he was in Afghanistan.
[speaking indistinctly]
[McChrystal] He was there as a guest
of the Taliban-controlled government.
The US went to the government
of Afghanistan, the Taliban,
and said, "Give him up, or push him out."
[British reporter] Under mounting
pressure, Afghanistan's Taliban regime
today replied to charges that
the attacks on New York and Washington
were coordinated from its territory.
And they refused.
And that meant
that the United States said,
"All right, well,
we're gonna come in after him."
[Geraci] We got the call to go forward
and deploy in Afghanistan with my unit.
And being in a unit
that was at the tip of the spear,
that was our job,
to go forth and to accomplish that task.
[firing]
We felt overwhelming support
for our mission during that time.
There was a sense of excitement about it,
a sense of like, fulfilling,
like, what your profession is.
"This is what I'm here for.
This is what we were trained for."
And kind of an aspect of pride
to be in a unit that, you know,
was trained for moments like that.
[people cheering]
[reporter] One by one, the Afghan cities
started to fall
to the US-led opposition forces.
[cheering continues]
[Obaidullah Durani] I was living
in Afghanistan, in Kunar Province.
In Afghanistan,
it was a complete dictatorship.
There was just set-up rules
by the Taliban for the people.
I was like, uh, 10 or 11 years old.
My father was listening
to the radio and the news.
That's how we found out about the 9/11.
-[man on radio] expl*si*n
-[reporter] Oh my God,
another plane just hit
the World Trade Center.
Another plane.
It was a medium-sized plane.
Unbelievable. It looked like Oh my
[indistinct singing]
[Durani] In the time of Taliban,
we were not aware of the w*r,
what's going on outside.
Like, it was just somewhere
something happened.
But after American arrival in Afghanistan,
then we realized, like,
that something bad happened.
[speaking Afghan language]
[Gopal] When the US invaded in 2001,
the Taliban were viewed by most Afghans
as an extraordinarily repressive regime.
[joyful music playing in background]
And people viewed
the Americans as liberators.
And there was a lot of hope,
there was a groundswell of hope
that the US would come
and bring development and peace.
By December 2001,
the Taliban had collapsed.
[Durani] One day is Taliban rule.
Another day, there is no rules of Taliban.
Like, everything is brightened up.
Everybody is, like,
"We are liberated right now
and we can live our life as we want."
[instructor speaking indistinctly]
[reporter] Sources tell ABC News there is
evidence Osama bin Laden is still alive,
still on the run, and still in control.
That is why we are there.
That is why we are chasing them.
That is why we are bombing.
That is why we are working
with Afghan forces.
[pilot speaking indistinctly]
It was my dream from childhood
to become a pilot.
And I follow up with my dream
and I became a pilot.
I came to the United States
to become a fighter pilot.
And I moved back to my country
and served in the military
against the Taliban.
Our main goal is to keep our people safe
from the Taliban and the Taliban rules.
[glass breaking]
[liquid hissing]
Because I have seen them before
[indistinct dialog over radio]
and I didn't want them
to come back in the power.
[expl*si*n]
Americans Like, we were counterparts.
We were, like, allies.
[indistinct speaker on computer]
[Mohammad Razvi] In 1978,
I was about seven years old.
I came here, and the first thing
I ate was pizza. [laughs]
I was like, "Oh my God."
The place I grew up
is known as Little Pakistan.
It's right in Brooklyn, New York.
My dad opened up the first store,
and then there was a mosque,
and then things started to grow.
You know, immigrants, what do they do?
They work, they work, they work.
And I had a grocery store
across the street, a 99-cent store.
I also had a restaurant.
[laughing]
I was living the American dream.
[indistinct chatter]
Everybody, we all were immigrants
but we are, like, Americans.
I never felt my identity
was negative.
[woman] The whole second tower collapsed.
The whole building is gone.
The whole building.
[sirens blaring]
[Razvi] And the attacks happened.
No, I was just in tears.
I just couldn't believe it at that time.
[exhales]
And these people, what they've just did,
it's just unbelievable.
[woman] Oh, those poor people. Oh God.
[Razvi] After the buildings fell,
the ashes floated
towards right in front of my doorstep.
[crying] When the ashes came,
that was the devastating part
because that was a moment like,
"Oh my God."
[indistinct dialog]
I was working
actually in this fabric store,
and my Italian paisans
who were next to me,
they're like,
"How could you people do this?"
And I'm like, "These are not my people."
We have three daughters and two boys.
At that time it was just two and two.
I went home and just sat.
I just told them,
we have nothing to do with this.
And when the country's going to w*r
with this particular group,
what do you think
the local people are going to do?
They're going to go to w*r on us.
[woman] I hope they send all of you back.
I hope they k*ll your people,
innocent people also.
Go back to your country.
We don't want you here.
-There's another one.
-[machine] To delete, press one.
[beeps]
[man] Hello, Muslims.
Why'd you k*ll at least 5,000 people
at the World Trade Center today?
You just woke up
a sleeping giant with the Americans.
We're gonna kick your ing a*s now.
[indistinct dialog]
We are also Americans
and we are just as much involved
in this tragedy as everybody else.
I'm saying the man
that was the leader of your people
is the man that makes
all the threats against America.
It's very important for us
to not point fingers at a religion.
There are 1.6 billion Muslims
on the face of the earth.
We are being blamed for something that
we have no control or nothing to do with.
Muslims are not t*rrorists.
Muslims are not t*rrorists.
All of a sudden, I'm a foreigner.
I'd never felt that.
[reporter] He's felt
under constant surveillance
and is convinced
he's been closely monitored.
[Razvi] Maybe a week after 9/11,
I get a knock on the door, FBI.
"Do you have gatherings
in your basement?" I said yes.
"I have a large family.
We go downstairs and we pray."
Asked further questions.
He goes, "Where do you work?"
I said, "I run the grocery store
and the 99-cent store."
"All right, so maybe we'll stop by
and just see you later then."
If it can happen to me,
could you just imagine if it's happening
to a person who barely speaks English
or who is here
and does not understand the system?
He's going to be terrified.
My oldest daughter,
she was pushed down the steps,
her scarf was pulled off,
and she was cursed at.
I was like, "My God, why'd you"
She goes, "Dad,
that's exactly why I didn't tell you."
"Because I know you would have
done a huge thing."
It just broke my heart
that she didn't tell me.
But I understood why she didn't tell me
because then she would become
center of attention.
[applause]
[Bush] The Homeland Security Act of 2002
takes the next critical steps
in defending our country.
[Ackerman] There was never something
called Homeland Security
in the United States before 9/11.
[woman] most dynamic
federal government organization.
[Ackerman] It sounds off.
It sounds like something that's
a relic of European nationalisms,
as opposed to what had been
a conception of the American way of life,
which is that you can come from anywhere,
and provided that you believe
in these sorts of things
and are willing to work
to live in harmony with one another,
great, we've got another American here.
[applause]
The Department of Homeland Security
was a harbinger
of how all of that was about to change.
Very quickly, it seemed
the focus of the w*r on Terror
was something much larger,
much more difficult to define.
Now, all of a sudden, the elements of
American immigration policy
had a counterterrorism mandate
behind them.
That was the beginnings
of the agencies that would become ICE.
[protesters chanting] f*ck ICE!
[Ackerman] The Department of Homeland
Security established conceptually, firmly,
that the w*r on Terror
was not just happening overseas,
it was happening at home.
[train horn blowing]
[woman] You look so happy.
-[Homer] I like that one.
-[woman] That's a great one.
[Homer] I have a copy
of that in my wallet.
My dad became a pilot at 16 years old.
He got his license and then
he went on to the Air Force Academy.
I've kind of stopped myself
from learning a lot of things about him.
It's still really difficult
for me to know anything
because the more that I do know,
the more that I think about
what I didn't have
and the life I missed out on.
You do look like him.
I know. [laughs sadly]
[sniffles]
I'm not good at looking through photos.
[woman] I know, it's very emotional.
-[Homer] Yeah.
-It's okay.
[Homer] My generation learned about 9/11
through social media,
so Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.
I'm, in a way, like,
some sort of slightly public figure
because you can look me up.
There have been multiple times
where I've been messaged, DM'd about him.
If they're just trying
to get a rise out of me, I don't know.
People will make jokes
about Bush doing 9/11,
jokes about Osama bin Laden,
and it's just become such a meme.
And there's so many conspiracies.
I've seen so many YouTube channels
posting whole videos about conspiracies.
Do you think it was possible
that 9/11 was an inside job?
Well, I think it's not only possible, but
confirmed that they lied to us about it.
[Homer] Comments that this is all a hoax
or an inside job.
Comments are very insensitive.
And I've had people comment
just, like, disgusting things.
[crying] It just made me realize
how vulnerable I felt
because there's so much
information about this event,
which is something that somebody
could attack me about, basically.
It is kind of just
a historical moment now.
We have a whole new generation
of people who weren't even, like, alive,
or they were young when this happened.
But it's inescapable.
In recent years, I've really been
reflecting on my childhood
and what should have been, kind of.
[cat meows]
I've been trying to find a word for it,
feeling like you were
supposed to have this life
and then, like,
something destroys that entire future.
[disturbing music playing]
[Graff] The shifting
technological landscape
of, you know, the web and social media
supercharges the pre-existing
conspiratorial nature
that has long existed
in corners of the United States.
You see 9/11 really collide with
the turbocharging
of conspiracies in America
to launch this entire, you know,
incredibly dark movement
that we now call 9/11 Truthers.
Hello, I'm Alex Jones.
[Graff] And this poison spreads out across
all of the sort of far right and far left
conspiratorial circles in America
and infects our politics.
It affects our national culture
and debate.
And what companies realize very quickly is
that the thing that drives engagement
is content that enrages.
[woman] We know that open air fires
cannot burn hot enough to melt steel,
but metal had melted
at the base of the towers.
[Graff] And so you see
these conspiracies spread,
you see political polarization spread.
We are facing the rise of
Islamo-Nazism rising all around the world.
[Graff] Other countries figure this out,
like Russia,
begin to sort of use
some of these tools against us
to spread disinformation
and polarizing content online.
There is a very clear through line
that takes us from
the darkest corners of 9/11
to the darkest corners
of our politics today.
[Wendell Clyne]
I guess that went off automatically.
They've evacuated everyone in the hotel.
They've evacuated all employees.
-[Bryant Gumbel] They evacuated the hotel?
-Yes.
-[Gumbel] Immediately?
-Yes.
[Gumbel] Are you
hearing anything, Wendell,
-about what kind of a plane it was?
-No.
-[Gumbel] Or how many were on board?
-No.
[Gumbel] All right. Mr. Clyne,
thank you very much, sir.
I understand Teresa
[Gopal] Immediately during the attack,
I remember the types of rumors
that we were hearing,
there was just
extraordinary levels of confusion.
We ended up,
meaning undergrads at NYU
who were living near the towers,
ended up being put into a hotel.
And I lived in a hotel
for a couple of months.
At that time, I was studying physics,
but I began to pay attention to
the rest of the world for the first time.
I was young. I was 20.
And I began to follow the w*r on Terror.
The reason I went
to Afghanistan is because
I'd been following all the news
and felt really dissatisfied with the way
the news was being portrayed,
because I didn't really understand
what was happening.
When I got there,
pretty quickly I began to report,
and I began to see
a different side of the conflict
in Afghanistan.
You had this weird situation
where you had thousands
of American troops on Afghan soil,
and there was no enemy to fight.
So the way this contradiction was resolved
is that the US began to ally
with warlords around the country.
And they said,
"We're here to fight a w*r on Terror."
"We're here to fight bad guys,
and you need to produce us bad guys."
"Give us intelligence.
Where are the bad guys?"
-[man] Talib! Talib!
-[man 2 shouting]
[Gopal] They paid these warlords to do so.
So these warlords are now incentivized
to produce intelligence.
So, for example, you have a plot of land,
and I want that land,
I'm going to go tell the Americans
you're a member of Al-Qaeda.
The US troops would
take this intelligence,
they would raid the household,
take the people away.
[in Afghan language] No, I'm not
a member of Al-Qaeda. I'm a student.
[Gopal] This happened
again and again and again.
And the consequence of this was that
whereas there had been only
a groundswell of support for the US,
gradually villagers started
to turn against the Americans,
and no longer saw them as liberators,
but began to see them as occupiers.
[man] Woohoo!
[Gopal] This laid the seeds
for the reconstitution of the Taliban.
9/11 and the w*r on Terror
set in motion a process
where trust and faith
in government leaders
was systematically undermined.
We were told that we had to invade Iraq,
for example,
because S*ddam Hussein possessed
weapons of mass destruction.
[Bush] We owe it to our children,
our children's children,
to free the world from
weapons of mass destruction.
Weapons of mass destruction.
Weapons of mass destruction?
It turned out not to be true.
And that set in motion
a crisis of confidence
and a divisiveness that has never really
been healed, much less repaired.
[protesters shouting]
We stand for liberation and democracy,
gentlemen!
The k*lling of Osama bin Laden
really, to many people,
signified an end to the w*r on Terror.
It was over. It was just mopping up.
[all singing]
[chanting] USA!
[Hoffman] But meanwhile, in Iraq,
a new t*rror1st group is arising.
[rapid g*nf*re]
[Gopal] In the chaos
of the US occupation of Iraq,
all sorts of groups start to pop up
to resist the occupiers.
One of those groups is Al-Qaeda.
Eventually,
through the course of that w*r,
Al-Qaeda radicalizes,
and a section splits off
and becomes what we know as !sis.
!sis becomes one of the most formidable
t*rror1st organizations in history.
[Khan] On 9/11, I was in English class,
and somebody came into our classroom
and said, "Turn on the TV."
And we did.
And not long after that, the principal
called me and my sister and said,
"You guys can go home."
I think we were
the only Muslims at school,
and they, out of a desire
to be proactive about taking care of us,
let our parents come pick us up.
And as I came of age,
the United States started wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And you saw the real spread
of the cycle of violence.
[Barack Obama]
Happy you're here. Thank you.
[Hoffman] Obama began to rely much more
heavily on targeted assassinations,
using unmanned aircraft, drones,
Predator and Reaper drones
that fired a Hellfire m*ssile.
And would target
not just identified t*rror1st leaders,
but also undertake
what were called signature strikes.
In other words, even if there wasn't
actual intelligence identifying
the specific individuals,
we would still launch the attack.
And of course, inevitably,
tragedy ensued in the sense that
in some attacks,
innocent civilians were mistakenly k*lled.
[McChrystal]
When you watch these from afar,
it's almost like
drone strikes on anything.
They look like a computer game,
and it's an expl*si*n.
On the ground, it's very different.
It's a gruesome activity.
People are blown up.
People are burned badly.
[Hathaway]
The Obama administration decided that
they could use
military force against !sis,
even though it didn't exist on 9/11,
using authority granted in the 2001
Authorization for Use of Military Force.
It set the stage
for the continued use of military force
under that authority for another decade.
[pilot] I took my first flight
when I was 14 years old.
And I had my private pilot's license
when I was 16.
And I always wanted to be a fighter pilot.
When I was a kid, I burned through
two VHS copies of Top g*n.
After 9/11,
I went to the Marine Corps recruiter,
and he said,
"How many pull-ups can you do?"
The mission we were supporting
was Operation Inherent Resolve.
It encompassed Iraq and Syria.
Our job was to provide air support
either through reconnaissance
or direct action,
dropping bombs, strikes, things like that,
against !sis.
I would like my identity
to remain anonymous just because
I'm sure that there's people out there
that would want to seek retribution.
I wish we didn't have to do it.
I loved my job.
I loved k*lling !sis.
But it's not lost on me
of the gravity of what we were doing.
I'd rather be back in San Diego
eating fish tacos on the beach.
But this is what I signed up for.
This is what they're paying me to do.
This is what they're trusting me to do.
So I'm going to do it.
[Khan] I remember so well these
really impossible statistics coming out.
The United States saying that they'd
k*lled as many as 25,000 !sis fighters.
And at the same time,
only admitting 21 or 24 civilian deaths.
That's just not possible.
I began trying to get on the ground and
investigate civilian casualties myself.
You know, if you take
the government's data
about what percentage that they admitted
civilian deaths were occurring,
it would be less than
1% of all these strikes
were resulting in a civilian death.
But I spent a lot of time
going on the ground,
going to a sample of these airstrikes,
and what I found was that
one in five strikes
was resulting in a civilian death.
That's not two times higher, three times
higher than what the government thought.
That was 31 times higher.
And people were so inviting.
They were so welcoming.
I can't remember anyone
who said no to talking to me.
For so many of these civilians,
there had been a belief
that the Americans can be precise.
They can be surgical.
I remember one man pointing at a teacup,
holding his teacup, and saying,
"The Americans could just hit
this teacup if they wanted."
That was his belief.
"And look at what they did to my family."
Over and over,
I heard from parents
who would tell me about
the way their daughter laughed,
or would show me a photo
of her holding, like, a firework,
the night before she was k*lled.
Like her vibrancy, her youth,
that particular loss
of outliving your child.
That always stays with me.
Like I don't know how
people move on after that.
[Stephen Wertheim]
By the time Obama left office,
the United States was
fighting terrorism in some form
in approximately 13 countries.
The phrase "endless w*r"
and "forever w*r,"
become more widely used.
[siren wailing]
Obama, even as he is the drone president,
conducting these drone strikes
on a routine basis
over more and more of the Earth,
is saying out loud, you know,
how do we know if we're not creating
more t*rrorists than we're k*lling?
[man] We have a problem in this country.
It's called Muslims.
We know our current president is one.
-Right.
-You know he's not even an American.
-We need this question.
-[man] Birth certificate, man.
But anyway, we have training camps
growing where they want to k*ll us.
That's my question.
When can we get rid of 'em?
We're gonna be looking at a lot of things.
And you know,
a lot of people are saying that
and a lot of people are saying
that bad things are happening out there.
[Ackerman]
Donald Trump is not a subtle man
but understands subtext extremely well.
[crowd chanting] Trump! Trump!
[Ackerman] What he saw very early on
was that the w*r on Terror
was a pathway to power
for inflamed nativist elements
that felt the country was further
and further slipping away from them.
Donald J. Trump is calling for
a total and complete shutdown
of Muslims entering
the United States. Until
[Ackerman] Trump's movement
recognized that there was
still a tremendous amount
of political potency to be had
from the w*r on Terror.
I think Islam hates us.
Build the wall! Build the wall!
I want surveillance of certain mosques.
[siren blips]
[Graff] The border becomes
this dominant topic of conversation
all out of proportion
to the actual problems at the border
in the 2016 campaign.
Folks, brick by brick,
that wall is going to get built.
We're gonna have a situation on our border
that isn't mired in violence and chaos.
-The left. Who is on your list?
-Will you shut up, man?
[Hoffman] Four years later,
in the 2020 presidential campaign,
I think arguably there was only one issue
that President Trump and
presidential candidate Biden agreed on,
and that was ending the endless wars.
[Trump] Afghanistan, how about that?
Where, by the way, I started the process,
all the troops are coming back home,
they couldn't stop the process.
[cheering]
[reporter] Militants captured
the pilot in December
when his F-16 crashed in Syria.
This video may be
[Wilson] I had just
turned three years old on 9/11.
My birthday was nine days
before everything went down.
At least for me personally,
joining the Marine Corps
was to fight !sis
because that is kind of what I saw.
[reporter] by the Islamic State
extremist group.
A video posted online today shows
the captors burning the man alive, while
[Wilson] It was like, I'm pissed
and I want to go do something about it.
It wasn't 9/11.
I think that's a big shift
between the early GWOT w*r
compared to mostly my generation.
And I remember being like,
I want to be a part of that,
of trying to stop that.
[indistinct shouting in background]
[Sanchez] I shipped to boot camp
August 26 of 2017.
And then graduated boot camp
in October or early November.
I had always heard that
Marines were the K*llers.
I wanted to go to Afghanistan
or Iraq and k*ll t*rrorists.
That was my dream as a kid.
So that was the same unit
as Smoak and Wyatt.
Wyatt, he was a very serious guy. [laughs]
He would always look annoyed.
[exhales]
I remember always seeing him
and he would always
look annoyed or pissed or something.
But he was a good guy.
I mean, I liked him a lot.
[Hoffman] In April 2021,
President Biden announced that
the United States would be withdrawing
from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021.
We went to Afghanistan
because of a horrific attack
that happened 20 years ago.
[reporter] President essentially defending
a position he has held for a while now,
which is that there was
no military option left in Afghanistan.
And he said he didn't want
to send another generation, essentially,
of young men and women to go fight
an unwinnable w*r, in his view.
[reporter 2] From the moment
US troops started pulling back,
the Taliban went on the offensive.
[reporter 3] In a matter of days,
the Taliban has
blitzed across Afghanistan,
taken over city after city.
[Smoak] We were sitting in the chow hall
eating probably lunch or dinner,
and I was watching it on TV,
and all the provinces were falling.
They were changing them red on the TV
when the Taliban would take them.
And it was all just surrounding,
headed towards Kabul.
My thoughts were,
what the hell
have we been doing for 20 years?
Why were all the lives wasted,
pretty much,
if we're just going to turn around
and they're just going to
take it right back over?
[siren blaring]
[man speaking Afghan language]
You see all the Talibans on the road.
This is scary.
Think about it.
They're in the control.
Someone with my history,
through all the records,
like, the place where we have bombed,
it's still in the computers with them.
My biometric data is with them.
Everybody's biometric data is with them.
There is no government, nothing.
It's like if you are living
in a bright place
and suddenly the light goes out
[man] Allahu Akbar!
you're just in the middle of chaos.
[Hoffman] Hamid Karzai
International Airport was just thronged
with Afghans desperate to flee.
[people clamoring]
People who had worked with
the United States military,
with the United States government,
office clerks, translators,
mechanics, cleaning personnel,
or who worked for any United States
organization, even for US NGOs.
[person screaming]
They feared that
they'd be singled out for vengeance.
[reporter] Evacuations are proceeding
slowly with thousands of Americans still
wanting and waiting to get out.
[reporter 2] It could be
the largest evacuation
since the fall of Saigon 46 years ago.
[Nguyen] Seeing the fall of Kabul,
it was striking but also painful
from a family perspective.
My mom told me about when
the South Vietnamese government fell
to the communist north.
You know, the similarity is just like
the Taliban taking over the capital city.
And just people trying to escape
from what they know that would be
a catastrophic situation.
It has very similar emotion,
but also just the imagery itself.
[people clamoring]
History somehow repeats itself.
Sometimes there's no words.
[people shouting and clamoring]
[reporter] Many of them,
of course, have legitimate claims
they are eligible for flights,
but the Taliban
aren't letting them through,
and their response on the ground
is brutal.
[rapid g*nf*re]
They're firing automatic weapons
over the heads of the crowd repeatedly.
[g*nf*re]
[people shouting and clamoring]
They're using sticks to beat people.
They're pointing g*ns in people's faces.
[Wilson] That's when
we started to hear rumors.
It's like, "Oh sh*t, what's happening?
What's gonna happen?"
And then it comes down that,
"Hey, you're going."
And we're like, "Oh sh*t, here we go.
This is what we want."
Just feeling like,
finally a real world mission.
[reporter] US President Joe Biden
authorized the deployment
of roughly 5,000 troops
to support the drawdown.
[Wilson] And it's like,
all right, gear check.
Are the guys ready to go?
Who's going? Who's not going?
[Sanchez] You start loading a*mo.
Everybody's loading a*mo, getting ready.
[soldier] Everyone up! Target g*n!
-[Sanchez] Everybody's excited.
-[rapid fire]
This was, like, the dream.
The dream place to go for a Marine Corps
infantryman is Afghanistan, Iraq.
[rapid fire continues]
[Smoak] I was kind of talking
to my guys about before we go, you know,
whatever God you believe in,
you need to get right with him
because anything can happen.
We got told that we were going in
for a noncombative evacuation.
We were going to go get US citizens,
Afghans with the proper credentials.
We were gonna get them out of the country.
Operation Allies Refuge.
We flew out of Jordan,
landed in Kuwait.
We were in Kuwait 36 hours maybe.
[Smoak] And then we flew
from Kuwait into Afghanistan
and landed at night at Kabul Airport.
You could hear g*nshots in the distance
and then you'd see tracers fly.
[g*nf*re]
Made sure all my guys had all
their stuff on, everything was good.
We get told we're going to Abbey Gate.
I'm like, "Hell yeah, okay,
so we're going to Abbey Gate."
Nobody knew what Abbey Gate was.
I'm like, "Here we f*cking go, dudes."
[indistinct chatter]
[dog barks]
[speaking indistinctly]
[Wilson] And we get there.
I remember looking around like,
"What the f*ck is this?"
[all clamoring]
[shouting]
[Sanchez] I remember seeing, like,
so many people in front of this gate.
[shouting]
[Wilson] It's just a wall of humans.
[Hoffman] We deployed these young Marines
who were trained, of course, in combat,
every Marine is a rifleman,
but they're doing things they've
never been prepared or trained for.
Crowd control, for example.
Interpreting official pieces of paper
that may be written in
one of the Afghan dialects,
not necessarily in English.
[soldier] Hey, hey!
[Hoffman] This is a highly unstable,
highly volatile situation.
[Smoak] This was
nearly 20 years after 9/11.
And what started on 9/11
ended right here at Abbey Gate.
We were told we were to treat the Taliban
like they were our allies.
We're there to work together
to get these people out of Afghanistan.
That is
crazy to hear.
[men yelling]
Especially for, like,
our platoon sergeants
who had been in for almost 20 years
and had been at the height of the w*r
and been there, done that.
The people who k*lled my friends
10 years ago, they're my ally now.
It was very, very surreal to hear that.
[pilot] Abbey Gate was a microcosm of
the 20-plus year w*r in the Middle East.
Watching Afghanistan crumble,
I don't know how any person
can see Afghanistan, Iraq,
anything other than a failure.
A lot of these people did not have
a US passport, a green card, a visa.
They didn't have anything.
They just wanted to leave.
They were just scared.
[horns honking]
There was chaos inside
and outside of the city.
And going into the airport,
the gates are closed,
and they're not letting people
go inside because there were,
like, thousands of people.
I was holding the kids.
My daughter was three months old,
and my son was two and a half.
[people clamoring]
[Wilson] We didn't have anywhere to
send them back out if they were rejected.
So we made a hole in a chain-link fence,
and we called it the Freedom Gate.
And if you couldn't make it,
I'm sorry, but through there you go.
-[shot firing]
-[people screaming]
[Smoak] The Taliban would be
on the other side of this,
and if they did not get through,
they would beat 'em,
sh**t 'em, and then
it just kind of sucked because,
you know, I'm the one sitting there,
and I know what's going to happen to 'em,
but I-I can't do nothing
if they didn't have the right paperwork,
which is a pretty crazy responsibility
for a 23-year-old.
I would like to think that
I didn't lose compassion for people,
but you definitely become numb.
[somber music playing]
Word was getting out that
we were going to close all the gates.
There was a lot of desperation,
people giving their kids up.
[Sanchez] Some of those people
had babies on them,
so they thought the best option
was probably, like, throw the babies over.
[soldier speaking indistinctly]
It was very surreal to see,
like, because I have kids,
and it was hard to think about
giving one of them up like that.
[laughs sadly] Yeah.
[children crying]
[Wilson] I had a picture of my daughter
in my Kevlar.
Four days after I deployed
on my first deployment
is when my oldest was born.
My platoon sergeant also has kids,
and I don't know what it was,
but we kind of just bumped
into each other in passing,
and I ended up just breaking down.
I lost it right then and there.
The new generation.
My wife was sick at the time.
She was weak.
She was not able to walk properly.
My daughter was so small,
and the American Marine, he said,
"Give me your daughter,
I will get her inside,
and you guys can come through the gate."
My wife was left behind
[shouting in Afghan language]
and they shut the gate after her.
And she's still back in Afghanistan.
That's terrible.
I was told that we will evacuate her.
I have not seen anything.
I was happy.
Suddenly you lose everything.
You have a happy life,
and you lose it in one day.
[Hoffman] To compound matters,
intelligence was received that !sis-K
So in other words,
the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,
had a branch in Afghanistan
called !sis-Khorasan.
Khorasan is the ancient name
for that part of the region.
!sis-K was planning an attack.
[Sanchez] We got told that
it was going to be a suicide b*mber
that would be probably clean shaved
with a black bag with an arrow on it.
We were searching for this guy.
We didn't know when he was going to come.
[Smoak] And everybody was
just kind of like,
"All right, how do you want me
to pick that out of here?"
You know, there's thousands of people
in front of me.
We were kind of at a standstill
just holding everybody back,
waiting to get the final word
if we're pulling out or not.
And somebody screamed, "IED."
[expl*si*n]
The b*mb went off.
I saw a big cloud of smoke,
and an arm flying through the air.
[people clamoring]
[Sanchez] My ears are ringing.
I can't hear anything.
And I start seeing a face in front of me.
Like, it didn't look alive.
And I was just like,
I couldn't process who that face was.
[Smoak] I jumped up and started to run
towards the hole in the fence
that we had cut through the Abbey Gate.
An officer grabbed me
and tried to stop me.
I told him to get
his f*cking hands off of me,
that those were
all of my friends in there.
And I turned around
and started running towards
Now I could see
pretty much just a pile of bodies.
And the first person that I came to,
um, was one of my best friends,
uh, Corporal Daegan Page.
I just knew as soon as I saw him
that he was dead.
Somebody grabbed one side
of his chest rig, and I grabbed the other
and started dragging him back to the hole
that we had in the fence.
My captain told me that he had Page
and told me to go back
and get more people.
So I left him
and, uh
[sniffles]
Sorry.
[sniffles]
[clears throat]
[indistinct clamoring
and dialog in Afghan language]
-[yelling]
-[sharp snapping sounds]
And I start hearing screaming
and, like, snaps coming.
[snapping sounds]
I thought I was seeing stars or something,
but they looked like flashes.
My mind immediately went to,
"I'm getting f*cking shot at."
I had gotten shot in my left shoulder.
I was about 10 yards from the blast.
The canal wall was right here,
and then he was
just on the other side of it.
My right lung had collapsed.
A bearing hit me in the jaw, in my lat,
and then stitched up on my right side,
and I was shot
down in the bottom of my right leg.
And I'm walking out, stumbling out.
It feels like I'm breathing
through a straw.
Daegan Page and Max Soviak,
those two were inseparable.
They were just good dudes.
Everywhere Max went, Page went.
Everywhere Page went, Max went.
[people clamoring]
Max and Page were behind me
by a little bit, and then we got hit,
and when I turned around,
I crawled over somebody.
And to this day, I'm still convinced
that who I crawled over was Page.
But yeah, they didn't make it.
[people clamoring in Afghan language]
That's when I tried to grab Kelsee.
Kelsee Lainhart was part
of the female engagement team.
I grabbed her,
I drug her as far as I could.
I've kind of come to the realization,
"This is where I die."
"f*ck it."
I just rolled over.
"This is where it's going to happen."
Got as comfortable as I could
and laid back.
[people clamoring]
[Sanchez] And then I looked to my right,
and there's all this screaming going on,
and there's, uh
I see Wyatt coming in on a stretcher.
[Wilson] They sent me down in
a dimly lit hallway, while this JSOC doc
finds me pulseless.
He takes a shot in the dark
and performs a emergency thoracotomy
last-ditch effort.
They cut through your sternum
and then they hand-pump your heart.
He got me going again and then,
I'm not sure how many units of blood
your body holds,
but whatever they gave me is
the equivalent of an entire body's worth.
[Smoak] Wilson, he's got a tattoo
on his, I think his shoulder or his arm,
and it sums up his entire life.
It says, "I'm too stubborn to die."
And it's the truth,
because he is a stubborn son of a b*tch.
[Wilson] I did not know he was !sis,
but through the investigation
and everything,
like, when I got back to California,
I kind of found out it was !sis.
And the guy had actually been in jail,
but he was freed
when the Taliban came through.
Yeah.
[Sanchez] We had, uh,
13 service members KIA.
Seeing Wyatt is like a gift. [laughs]
Uh, it really is.
Like, when I saw him on that stretcher
[sniffles]
and, like, when I see him now,
like, I don't know,
I just get filled with joy. [laughs]
Like, I don't know how to explain that.
Like [sniffles]
Like, I'm just
so happy he's here. [laughs]
[Wilson] Two or three days after
I woke up, they wheeled me over there,
and I got to meet Kelsee.
Your brain's scrambled,
so you don't really realize
the significance of everything.
Thankfully, those guys
actually pulled her out.
She came to my retirement.
She was paralyzed.
[Sanchez] Like, every night
or every other night,
we would get, like, an intel brief
of how many people we saved,
like, throughout that week.
[indistinct chatter over radio]
Towards the end, it was
like 120,000 people. Like, damn.
[Smoak] It feels good
to have done something,
to have been a part of it,
and to help people's lives.
It feels good.
But at the same time,
what was it worth?
This might not be the politically
correct answer, but in my opinion,
I would not have traded a single
Afghan life for any of my friends.
[somber music playing]
I noticed it pretty quick that I was like,
I should not have come home.
I should've been in the hospital
for two more months.
Thankfully, they forced me in
to go see a psychiatrist,
because I never
would have done it by myself.
And still to this day,
I see that same psychiatrist.
I didn't want to talk about it.
I refused to talk about it. I hated it.
Then once I realized, like, talking
about it, it's okay to talk about it,
It's okay to be
vulnerable for five seconds
And trust me, I have a huge f*cking ego.
And when I finally do drop it
and realize it's okay,
things start getting better really fast.
-[child] Dada?
-[Wilson] What's up?
[child] How do you get on this rock?
-Huh?
-I want to get on that big rock.
-You're scared on the big rock?
-Hey!
-Let me down.
-Let you down?
Dad, stop!
Stop holding my butt!
[Wilson] So I had Pops
on my first deployment.
[indistinct toddler chatter in background]
And then Pagie Pagie was born in 2022.
She's about to be four.
And then she's named after
Daegan Page and Max Soviak.
But I shortened Soviak to Sovi, so
it kind of fits her a little bit better.
[indistinct family chatter]
Pops lived it.
Yeah, she saw me in the hospital.
She was two and a half at that point.
Yeah, she's my little trauma baby.
We're going through this thing.
We're going through it together.
She's raising me
as much as I'm raising her.
[reporter] Scenes of desperation
and chaos in Afghanistan
are being seen around the world.
[Wilson] I don't even know
how to explain it.
I can barely explain it to you guys
in a way that makes sense,
let alone to an 8- and 9-year-old
when they get to that age.
-[Poppy] Oh!
-Huh?
[Page] Daddy, I have these lemons!
Look!
[Sanchez] My kids, they've seen me
shirtless with my b*llet scar,
and they've asked me what it is.
I don't like to sugarcoat it,
because I got shot.
There are bad people in this world,
and some of them try to hurt you.
My wife hates it because they're already
saying they want to be Marines
and put her through that trauma.
And now we got to see our kids
go through it? That would probably suck.
[reporter] Since the Taliban regained
control of Afghanistan in 2021,
some 200,000 Afghans,
many who supported the US w*r effort,
have found refuge in the United States.
I got on the plane
like it was a charter flight
from Kabul to Bahrain
and from Bahrain to New Jersey.
In New Jersey,
I've been in a camp for like a month.
Then I left the camp to come to Arizona.
Right now, I'm doing Amazon Flex,
like just an hour and two hours,
three hours a day,
because I can't work properly because
I have my kids all the time on me.
I'm waiting on my wife until she joins me.
She is the wife of a former pilot.
Since 2021,
she's living under the hijab all the time.
It's the Taliban rules.
She do not feel good at all.
You lose your husband, you lose your son,
you lose your daughter.
What's going to happen to you?
[Graff] The irony is the existential
threat to American freedom and liberty
came not from
these t*rrorists in Afghanistan,
and not from the threat of terrorism,
but from our nation's response
to terrorism.
Bin Laden really believed that he could
never destroy the United States,
but by attacking the United States,
by sort of pricking
the edges of the US empire,
he could cause
the United States to destroy itself.
If you start to scratch at
almost any aspect of our daily lives
in the United States today,
I can show you how 9/11 changed
that part of our country.
-[CBP agents yelling]
-[protesters yelling]
[people screaming]
[Hathaway] We see the harm that this does
to our own sense of legal constraints
on the president's authority.
We see these military tactics
coming back home.
[man screaming] What the hell?
[Hathaway] We see
some of the treatment of Americans
that looks awfully familiar for people
who've seen the w*r on Terror abroad.
-Bro--
-[woman] Get the f*ck off him!
[people yelling]
And now realize,
"Oh, it's a terrible thing
when a single person
can order a use of military force
or order a use of force that's lethal,
and there's nothing I can do about it."
[reporter] The Trump administration
now confirms
it hit an alleged drug boat
not once, but twice,
the second strike ordered after the first
failed to k*ll everyone on board.
[Trump] This military operation,
I won't use the word "w*r,"
they don't like the word "w*r,"
because you're supposed to get approval,
so I'll use the word "military operation."
[Pete Hegseth] We will finish this
on America-first conditions
of President Trump's choosing.
Death and destruction from the sky.
[expl*si*n]
[Ackerman] People generally think
the w*r on Terror is over.
Their political leadership
has told them of that.
Well, the authorities, the institutions,
and many of the operations persist.
They just find new targets.
We should not fool ourselves into thinking
that we have seen its final form.
It will come for more and more of us.
[Goldsmith] We really are
at an inflection point in terms of
there has to be soon a large turnover
among the very aged politicians
who've been in power for a long time.
And it is true, just read the polls,
the younger generation
thinks differently about these things.
My students literally weren't born then.
9/11 to them is like,
uh, World w*r II to me.
Or even less so,
it's an even dimmer memory.
They've kind of inherited
the current situation.
[young woman] We don't know
what it's like to not have
police officers in the subways
or on every corner.
It's a lot more scary for us to think that
if we're in the wrong place
at the wrong time,
our lives could be affected immensely
or even just our lives taken away from us.
[young man] Events like that happen,
things that are so catastrophic,
they change the world,
but there's nothing we can do about that.
So we just kind of live
in the different world.
What did we get
from the w*r in Afghanistan?
[Gopal] This is the longest w*r
in American history,
and it's also the longest w*r
in Afghan history.
So it's this intergenerational trauma.
I've spoken to a lot
of American soldiers over the years,
and it's unclear if you talk to somebody
who landed in 2021,
what they're doing at that moment
has to do with the 9/11 attacks.
[Wilson] I mean,
we got the guy in charge of it.
You can say that's a plus,
but it wasn't until
10 years f*cking later.
[man] At 25 years since 9/11, how do you
make sense of the global w*r on Terror?
That's the million-dollar question, right?
Was it worth it?
[Homer] I feel like
I went through so much,
and my family went through so much,
when I was so young.
The fact that I've made it out of it,
like, shocks me a lot.
I wish I knew what I would have been like
or what my life
would have been like before,
but I didn't really get a "before."
I'm kind of just trying to catch up
with, like, a life that I lost.
I'm just going to keep
trying to do my best. [laughs]
Since the 25 years,
our American society has become divisive
and just not willing
to listen to each other.
So it is critically important
to have dialogue
and a constructive way
of resolving differences.
History will judge
based on what we do right now.
[solemn music playing]
[music ends]
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Turning Point: Generation 9/11 (2026)
Moderators: Maskath3, sidolanters, GabrielAlejo2341