This month marks 25 years since the attack on Sept. 11, which started the Global War on Terrorism. A quarter century. I have three kids who weren’t even alive for any of it. To them, it’s just a chapter in a history book. For many, a war that shaped my life has faded into the background. 

I went on three deployments to Iraq with 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. The initial invasion in 2003, the first Battle of Fallujah in 2004, and Ramadi in 2005. So when I say it’s faded from the national consciousness, I’m not talking about something I read about. I’ve lived it on both sides: the war itself and its aftermath. 

On May 2, 2011, I watched news reports of crowds outside the White House chanting “USA! USA!” Osama bin Laden was dead, and for most of the country, that was it. The goal to avenge 9/11 was finally closed. 

Except it wasn’t. Not really. 

Combat troops didn’t leave Iraq until December of that year. And a decade would pass after the bin Laden raid before we left Afghanistan in August 2021—20 years after the twin towers fell. Even then, there was no formal end. 

On Aug. 30, 2022, the secretary of defense signed a memo ending the National Defense Service Medal, an award most of us earned just by serving during this era. 

That’s how it ended. There was no surrender. No treaty signed on a battleship. A pullout. A memo. The Global War on Terrorism kind of just ran out of momentum. 

A Slow Fade

When I first got home, people wanted to know everything. “Tell me about Iraq,” they asked. “What was it like?” Yellow ribbons were stuck on cars and tied around trees. My mom had ribbons on her trees through all my deployments. On Veterans Day, restaurants gave us whatever we wanted on their menu—not some shortened list, the actual menu. People meant it when they said, “Thank you for your service.”

I felt it start to fade around 2009. Slowly at first. The questions stopped coming. The ribbons peeled off cars or just weren’t replaced. Veterans Day deals shrank down to a couple of preselected meals. Small things. But you notice small things when they used to mean something and then they don’t. 

It wasn’t just the ribbons. The war was baked into the culture back then. Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” dominated the radio. War movies and documentaries about Iraq and Afghanistan came out year after year. It wasn’t a niche subject; it was pop culture.

And it wasn’t just music and movies. A booming private contractor economy in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan was built around those wars, with civilians flying over for high-paying jobs in a war zone. My stepdad, who retired from the Army, went to Kuwait and later Iraq as a logistics and supply contractor. My high school friend’s mom went to Iraq for the same kind of work. The wars touched people who’d never worn a uniform. That’s how ingrained it all was.

Support from students changed too. When I was deployed, my mom’s church class, a bunch of middle schoolers, sent me cards and care packages. That was normal back then. Teachers built it into lesson plans. Kids supported the war by mailing something to troops overseas. 

My own kids’ schools don’t even do that anymore. There are no campaigns or lessons built around it. 

There were spikes of attention along the way—bin Laden’s death, the surge in Afghanistan, soldiers and Marines killed overseas. Then it kept fading. There was a flare-up when the Islamic State group rose, but that didn’t last long either. It was never mainstream again. 

Somewhere in the last decade, the conversation shifted. I hear it on veteran podcasts, from politicians and military leaders who once supported the war and now call it a mistake. Some now question whether the whole thing should’ve happened. 

Hearing it called a mistake, when people I served with bled and died for it, is a gut punch. 

I don’t agree with them. I don’t regret it. I still stand by it. Saddam Hussein is gone, and that’s a good thing. People in Iraq and Afghanistan can’t threaten us the way they used to. A whole generation of terrorists have been killed or captured. Al-Qaida has been decimated. People forget that Abu Musab Zarqawi was already building a terrorist network inside Iraq back in 2002, a year before we even invaded. The threat was already there. I still believe going in was justified. It was necessary.

Sure, there’s a new generation now, but they’re too busy fighting to hold their own countries together: the Taliban buried in regional problems, Iraq the same. Neither turned into a democracy. So what. We took out a lot of bad people, and that made America safer. 

Still Here 

Here’s what doesn’t make the news anymore: the people who fought. The veterans. We didn’t go away. We’re still here. 

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are sitting in Congress right now. They’re running companies. They started nonprofits. They’re cops. They’re your neighbor mowing the lawn on Saturday, coaching a kid’s baseball team, and going to church on Sunday. We’re not gone. We’ve integrated. 

But integration doesn’t mean it’s over. The memories don’t fade just because the news cycle did. Some of us still deal with what we brought home—physically, mentally, spiritually—even after America moved on. We’re hidden in plain sight: successful, functioning, present, but not everybody sees what we carry underneath. The dreams. The restless nights. The trauma. The loss of purpose and identity.

There’s a nostalgia in all this, too, for the culture, the relevance, the recognition, the support. For a time when it felt like the whole country was wrapped up in the war on terror, in patriotism.

I didn’t realize that feeling would change. The wars went on so long after 9/11 that it just felt like that’s how it would always be. But I get it now. This happens to every generation of veterans. The war ends. Society moves on. It happened to those before us. Now it’s happening to us. 

The Old Guys 

A memory hit me a few months ago. I was a young veteran, freshly back from Iraq and out of the Marine Corps, sitting at VA. Across from me were Vietnam and World War II vets. Old men. I looked at them the way you look at history: respectfully, a little distantly, as relics of a bygone era.

That’s us now. We’re the old guys. Not in age, but in the generation of veterans. We’ve already started sliding into the “before” generation, the ones who get a nod, a “thank you for your service” before the conversation moves on to something current. 

It happened faster than I expected. I still feel like I’m on that bus coming home from Iraq. Yet somehow I’m the old-timer at the VA whom the next kid glances at on his way in. 

Watching the country move on doesn’t make me angry. It’s more grief, mixed with nostalgia for when people still cared about the mission that dominated my life and, I thought, our world.

I don’t hold it against anyone for forgetting. Time moves people forward, and I get that. The anger only shows up when someone disrespects it, disrespects Memorial Day, disrespects Veterans Day, disrespects the sacrifices, disrespects the troops and the country that fought those wars, or just writes off those days like they don’t mean anything. 

Looking Forward 

Perhaps one thing will bring closure and recognition. Congress recently authorized a National Global War on Terrorism Memorial that will be on the National Mall, between the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial. Construction should start in 2027 with completion expected as early as 2028.

We’re going to be cemented into history—literally, in steel and stone, right there on the National Mall next to every war that came before us. 

Still, the war will never really be over for those of us who fought it. It lives inside of us. In our minds, in our dreams, in our memories, in who we became. And as long as we’re still here, that war is still here too.

This Reflection from The War Horse was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.