Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, Rep. Matt Van Epps (R-TN) is remembering the morning that reshaped his life and the lives of his West Point classmates — and arguing that the generation shaped by that day still carries a responsibility to keep its promise.
Writing in a personal reflection published Wednesday, Van Epps, who represents Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District and served a decade on active duty, described how the terror attacks turned his first year at the U.S. Military Academy into the starting point for a war that would define his class.
“It was a Tuesday. It was bright and sunny,” Van Epps recalled. “Our professor wheeled a television into our computer science classroom. As soon as we saw another plane crash into the second tower, we knew that America was under attack.”
For Van Epps and his classmates, the attacks were not abstract. He noted that the terrorists used the Hudson River to navigate toward New York — flying, as he put it, essentially over West Point.
“That made it personal,” he wrote.
‘The hand of American justice will be swift’
In the days after 9/11, West Point’s response was unusual. The academy held a Taps vigil — traditionally reserved for a cadet who dies while at the school — but for the first time opened it to the public. Active-duty instructors defied orders to leave after class each day and search for survivors in the rubble, Van Epps said. He couldn’t join them, so he coped by studying.
“I wanted to learn everything I could so that when I finally confronted the terrorists responsible, there would be no question about who would win that fight,” he wrote.
That night, he sent a message to his family over AOL Messenger: “The hand of American justice will be swift — America’s resolve is steadfast.”
Van Epps’ class graduated in 2005 with exactly 911 cadets — a number Time magazine highlighted when it called them the “Class of 9/11.” But Van Epps said the real story only began after graduation, when the class deployed to war.
Instructors who ‘secretly taught Iraq’
While at West Point, many instructors cycled through active combat roles between teaching assignments. The academy also created the Combating Terrorism Center, which gave cadets a preview of what they would face. One instructor who had just returned from the battlefield told Time, “What these cadets don’t know is that I’m secretly teaching Iraq every second of every day.”
That real-world instruction proved invaluable, Van Epps said, when he and his classmates reached Iraq and Afghanistan.
Five years into his service, Van Epps joined the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers. He recalled one mission in northeastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, when his flight of MH-47s came under fire while extracting a ground force. An RPG struck the aircraft’s refueling probe but did not explode.
“By the grace of God, it didn’t go off,” Van Epps said. His crew responded as trained, engaged the enemy, and chose an alternate route out of the valley. The experience taught him the value of trust in a team — a lesson, he said, that West Point teaches but that only becomes real in combat.
Was the war worth it?
Van Epps acknowledged the painful imagery of the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in 2021, including the sight of Taliban fighters parading with U.S. military equipment. But he said the war was worth it.
“After watching those towers fall, none of us could rest until Osama bin Laden was found and his network destroyed — and that’s exactly what we did in Afghanistan,” he wrote.
He also cited the human cost. His West Point class held more than 20 moments of silence in its mess hall between September 11 and graduation, each time marking the death of a fallen graduate. Some of the men and women he trained with did not survive the war; many who did carry lasting scars.
One classmate told Time that he majored in economics because it was marketable, adding: “Hopefully, I’ll be alive to use them.”
A motto for the next generation
Van Epps, whose father was a Vietnam veteran who died from Agent Orange exposure, said that for ten years, the only thing that mattered was finding and disrupting terrorist networks. His class motto — chosen before 9/11 — was “Class of 2005, Keeping Freedom Alive.”
That motto, he said, remains a “solemn responsibility for every American” and must be passed to the next generation, especially as the threats of terrorism remain global.
“September 11 taught us that terrorism is not contained to one country or one region,” he wrote. “We need that resolve now more than ever.”
Van Epps serves on the House Homeland Security and Science, Space, and Technology committees. He continues to serve in the Tennessee Army National Guard.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/twenty-five-years-later-my-9-11-west-point-class-still-keeps-freedom-alive