I was an F-15 fighter pilot in the Air National Guard, and I was flying that morning.

It began as the most ordinary kind of day — a clear, blue September morning, a routine training mission. My best friends were on alert. We joked with each other the way pilots do. None of us knew what the day would become.

When the attacks came, everything changed in minutes. My flight was recalled, our jets were loaded with live weapons, and we were sent back into the air. I was one of six pilots airborne over the Northeast that morning. I was vectored west, toward an aircraft that had been hijacked, the airplane later identified as United Flight 93.

I never reached it. The passengers and crew aboard United 93 rose up and took that airplane down themselves, in a field in Pennsylvania, before I or anyone else could. They are the heroes of that morning. I have thought about them every day for twenty-five years, and I believe they were the answer to prayers no one had time to say.

The rest of that day I spent flying over New York City, part of the air defense that closed the skies. I flew through the smoke drifting from Ground Zero, and I felt the weight of the souls we had lost. I saw an empty sky over a wounded country. When we were finally cleared to land, a controller told us we could have any altitude we wanted — we were the only ones flying.

I came home that night to a houseful of messages, and to my young son, who looked up at me and asked what he should do if they came to his school.

I have carried September 11 for a long time, the duty of it, and the cost of it. For years I tried to carry it on my own strength, and I could not. What finally healed me was my family and my faith, the quiet, patient grace of God, who put me in that place in history and, I have come to believe, held me through everything that came after.

Some of the men I served with came home and never fully recovered from what those years asked of them. When we say we will never forget, I believe we owe that promise not only to the ones we lost that morning, but to the ones we kept losing quietly, for years afterward.

I am telling this now because a generation has grown up with no memory of that day. They should know it from the people who were there, while we are still here to tell it. That is why I offer my account. Not to be remembered myself — but so that they are, and so that God is thanked for the courage He gave ordinary people that morning. Soli Deo Gloria.