Canter Bridge

Dear Christopher and Johnny,

These Pennsylvania mountains mean nothing to you. How could they? You’ve grown up in places we Pennsylvanians consider much more exotic, though they seem perfectly natural to you. Places like Costa Rica and England.

Still, this Pennsylvania landscape that continues to evoke feelings of home in me on my infrequent visits is exquisite in its own way. To my eye on this windy, blue-skied January morning, the intermingling of woodland and cultivated fields—though these lie fallow on this Winter’s day—occurs in perfect proportion.

Yet this place brings a tear and more sobering thoughts than physical beauty can explain. As I write you these words, my sons, I look out over the place where Flight 93 plowed its way forty-five feet into the Pennsylvania soil on September 11, 2001.

You were in school that morning at the British School of Costa Rica, learning physics and history and French in an adoptive language that soon became your second one. I was the lone American among seven Costa Rica friends out in the province of Guanacaste. Our world could never be the same after that morning. Your world will be different in ways I cannot imagine.

But that was six years ago. Within the chronological parameters of your young lives, it must seem almost ancient history. Today, on my birthday, I look at that field where fifty-four people perished instantly in an act of self-immolation that was, ironically, driven by both hatred and heroism. It seems almost incomprehensible to be here in this humble, unadorned place, coached through the sequence of events by the minister of a nearby Lutheran church who with his fellow volunteers helps to preserve the site in a way that hallows the memories of passengers who perhaps wanted nothing more that morning than to be back home by evening.

Strong as it is, the sentiment of this moment does not displace knowledge and the reasonable calculus that helps to produce it.

Here is what I know this day: You will have enemies.

Your father grew up in what looks in retrospect to have been a charmed hiatus between global conflicts. I was taught to hide under my desk when a blinding flash appeared on the horizon. The gesture is now derided as a notoriously ineffective posture against the storm. We might have been annihilated by a nuclear first strike. But probably not. We knew nothing of the too real facts on the ground of your world, data that include office towers crumbling on live television as people hurl themselves out of windows, airliners crashing into the Pentagon at the hands of men whose last words are ‘Allahu Akbar’, and young fathers on their third tour of Iraq.

We also did not reckon, as you now must, with shadowy enemies who hated us and everything about us and would lay hold of all means—including the destruction of their own lives—merely to dishonor us. This may seem quite normal to you now. For me, it has not yet become normal. As a father, I watch you lean into life with gusto and determination, knowing that you will have enemies in a way I never did.

The field that lays before me is evidence of that.

One of you attends a college where the student lounge is named after Todd Beamer, the young graduate, husband, and father whose famous words on Flight 93, ‘Let’s Roll’, are now a part of our dialect. His name is on a memorial bench before me, his photo and biography in a plastic binder behind me in the shed that serves as the temporary headquarters of local volunteers who tell his story and that of his 49 fellow victims. I learned moments ago that one of his fellow travelers glimpsed Pittsburgh’s three rivers and told his fellow conspirers in the fight back on that aircraft that they’d better wait until they were out over rural ground. Indeed they did wait. Shanksville, the collection of picturesque Pennsylvania houses nearest to this windy hillside, is only twenty minutes’ flying time from Washington, where a joint session of congress was meeting in the Capitol building that was the apparent target of the men who wrested control of Flight 93 from its crew.

Last night as I drove through the darkness and rain across Ohio and West Virginia, I listened to presidential candidates doing their best to help us reckon with the world as it is, the world into which each one of them wishes to lead our nation. Because both of you are Army ROTC cadets in your respective universities, I realize that one of those voices on the radio will be your commander in chief. His decisions may dictate whether you go to war and—if so—into which theater and for what purpose. A decision he makes may end your life. I did not live in a world like that.

You will have enemies as I never did.

Here on this hillside, moved by the moment, touched by the care with which a team of volunteers is moving mountains to create a suitably somber memorial on this place, this is what I wish for you:

Do not fear. The enemies who hate you and others who will do so know nothing of your wit, your determination, your gentle way with people. They believe you are something evil, that your ways fly in the face of all that is holy. They do not know how you walk from room to room to find our cat before you lie down for a well-earned nap, how you grew to like Plato’s Republic in the hands of a capable university professor, how you gathered a dozen of your friends from Costa Rica for a joy-filled Christmas reunion in our Indianapolis home. They do not know how steadily you showed up at your pre-college night job at UPS, how you were never late, how you quickly made yourself indispensable there as you will become necessary at other places in your future that we cannot know. They will never understand how you overcame disappointment and made yourself a fixture on the soccer field, how we all screamed in innocent euphoria when your team won the state championship with a well-placed goal as the clock ran down.

They don’t know how you sought out Spanish-speaking immigrants and tutored them in math in the language they grew up speaking, one you worked so hard to master.

Do not fear them. They can kill your body, but they can never touch your soul. They are too misled, too twisted, too tragically misshapen to deserve your fear.

But I have another father’s wish for you. Do not level them into mere sociological phenomena, as though every glimpse of danger can be explained by paying attention to what made it happen, as though evil is as unreal as two generations of university professors, literary critics, and too-comfortable pundits learned to tell us, as though the whole, wide earth is one huge level playing field upon which all projections of morality, of truth and error, are a bare, self-interested act of power. As though there are no good men, no noble women, no honorable sacrifice, no enduring meaning, only plain vanilla self-interest.

Evil is not unreal. The bereaved families of fifty passengers whose lives were extinguished in an instant right there, on the field before me, remind us of that.

You will face the subtle fact of evil in a million ways as its illogic and self-destructive dynamic try to mold you into something mediocre, attempt to shape your heart and mind into the blandest possible texture, strive to persuade you that things don’t matter all that much, that getting by is the main thing.

Only rarely will evil find the courage to stand up and grasp for your very life, for evil’s cowardice runs deep. Only rarely will it fly an airliner into an office building. Your paths may require you to act forcibly if evil ever finds its legs close to you. You will have been taught to kill, alas, and you will do so if it becomes necessary, if it becomes what centuries of pained thinkers have learned to call a ‘necessary evil’, a ‘just war’, a ‘defensible act of violence’. If that becomes your destiny, I pray God will be merciful to you as you embrace life after your hands have done what is almost unthinkable in a cause you have considered just.

Yet most of the time, your life will remain unpunctuated by things like Flight 93, mercifully removed from this field near Shanksville, where the Pennsylvania hills in all their textured splendor stand as unlikely companions to the terrible hold in the ground that lies before me this morning.

You will have enemies. Do not fear them.

Fight them when you must, knowing that most of the time evil lays its hand to more subtle tools like the close-to-home, all-American, mindless, pop-culture, nihilistic spewing of word and sound that grates on my ears and breaks my heart as I flip the radio channels on a rainy highway in search of something true, something enduring, something that sustains.

You know where to find that something. You have been taught that truth exists, that it makes itself available to those who seek it. You have been taught to mold your lives around it, to find there a core that is strong as steel and sweet as honey.

Your enemies know nothing about that. They do not know love. Truth has become alien to them and so they have become desperate, wily, and hopeless. You need not fear them.