Nineteen years ago today was an ordinary day for me. We lived in Fernley, Nevada, which sits halfway between Reno and Naval Air Station Fallon and is about 30 miles (and minutes) to one or the other. After my first three-year sea tour with an E-2C Hawkeye squadron in southern California, I was assigned to the Carrier Airborne Early Warning Weapon School to teach radar employment for our Advanced Mission Commanders Course; or "how to squeeze an ounce more of performance from a 1960s radar set." The school is the equivalent of the vaunted Navy Fighter Weapons School (popularly known as "TOPGUN") which we shared a training building with in the high desert of northern Nevada.

While we had internet at home and work, there were no smartphones and the computer wasn't an "always on" appliance, so there were no news alerts pinging like we're used to today. Mornings were typically rushed, just getting up, getting ready, and getting on the road for our daily commutes down two lane highways, dodging tumbleweeds through open rangeland, passing by alfalfa and corn fields fed by irrigation canals. We rarely had time for morning news, but for some reason I turned on the TV and saw the startling images of the smoking towers and the black, burning opening in one side of the Pentagon. Those three impacts were already an hour and a half old since we were in the Pacific time zone, but newscasters were overwhelmed and no one knew if there was more to come.

There were no text alerts and no phone calls from the boss. Where no guidance exists, stick with routine, so as a Lieutenant in the Navy the obvious place for me to be was at my post in Fallon. I headed out under a cloudy sky in my new blue Ford F-150 King Ranch; when in Rome, ride like a Roman Centurion who thinks he's a fancy cowboy. I listened to the usually placid NPR personalities struggle to make sense of the morning's horror with updates as the south tower collapsed and another plane was reported down in rural Pennsylvania. I remember how quiet the world felt, as it does under a blanket of clouds. I didn't really speed (more than usual) because I couldn't imagine that there was anything to rush into. We didn't have any academic courses in session so we didn't have any students in town to worry over. A normal day would've been spent tweaking PowerPoint slides, researching new threats, and bullshitting with the other 30-somethings who think they're the 21st Century's Jedi knights.

When I finally pulled onto Union Lane, which leads into the back gate of the base, I joined a long line of cars, which was uncharacteristic but understandable on a morning full of fear and uncertainty. It took nearly an hour before I made it through the gate itself, after having my military ID and the interior of my vehicle closely scrutinized by a security force that wasn't really sure what it was looking for. We only knew that the threat level was maxed out and we didn't know if the attack was over or just beginning.

With its curved and modern, colonnaded facade, the training building resembles in a way the Hall of Justice, where the DC comic's Super Friends gathered on Saturday morning TV in the late 1970s and early 80s. As Naval Aviation's so-called "best of the best," it was hard not to feel a little surge of the heroic walking into that building each day -- however humbling it was to work with a bunch of energetic, intelligent, tactically accomplished perfectionists who also excel at keeping one another's egos in check. That morning had a very different feeling though, one of vulnerability and wondering. Had we failed in our duty to defend the nation? The Navy in particular is supposed to confront our enemies at sea and overseas, never letting another Pearl Harbor event visit our shores again. What happened?

Since we ran a school house, we weren't on the front lines. There wasn't much for us to do but watch events play out on TV like everyone else and account for friends and family by telephone. I know our TOPGUN friends in the building sortied some jets to help clear and patrol the surrounding airspace. I wandered over to their Air Intercept Control offices, where they had a repeater scope displaying all air traffic in the western U.S. It was sobering to see the normally busy scopes -- usually filled with tiny symbols and aircraft IDs -- devoid of all but a few tracks. Of the few that traced routes across the screen, most were military; little aircraft with a mission to stand guard in a massive volume of sky. I was junior enough not to know anyone in the Pentagon and didn't have any direct connection to folks on the airliners or in the WTC. I'm certainly one of the lucky ones.

Nearly everyone of any conscious age at the time has some remembrance of that day. For some it was their worst nightmare; for me it was a faraway event that would start to have an impact weeks later. Once the government and our allies had a fix on where the coordinated September 11th attacks were planned, rehearsed, and directed from, preparation for military action began in earnest. Since it's often the Navy, Marines and Air Force that can bring striking power to bear the quickest in faraway places, our training efforts in the desert were vital to sharpening aircrew through our courses, but also preparing carrier air wings -- the collection of Navy and Marine squadrons that deploy together on ships -- for action in Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. The comfortable rhythms of life in Fallon came to an end as we more than doubled our throughput of students and air wings in order to strike back in Afghanistan and then take on an unrelated, overly ambitious, extreme makeover of Iraq.

The world most certainly changed that day in 2001. While it was a bolt from the blue at the time, nearly twenty years of looking back helps put those events in a context that offers explanations of why. We can see potential causes. We can see the folly of past decisions. We can measure the action, reaction, and over-reactions that were a prelude to challenges we still face today in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. We can look back to that day, though, September 11th, as one that changed everything for a generation and more. I'll always remember.