The day of 9/11/01 found me and my technicians and some supplemental manning from my former employer’s Houston office engaged in the middle of maintenance of electrical power equipment during one of my client’s scheduled shutdowns.

One of my guys walked up to me and passed the news: A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. No other details. Just a comment in passing. Somebody’d snatched a bit of news while driving from one side of the plant to the other. I shrugged it off. With no more detail than that, and I recalled history, when a B-25 flew into the side of the Empire State Building. Accidents happen.

Then somebody dropped by and reported a second crash. The world as we know it had changed forever. In a matter of a few more minutes the word had gotten around the whole facility. Every worker out there had questions aplenty, but no answers. At 11:30 in the morning we broke for lunch and went to the nearby home of one of my friends and caught what was now continuous news coverage. And we got as much of the detail as we could and brought it back to work with us. At the end of the day we all ran home to sit and watch and have shock turn to mourning and anger.

What happened shouldn’t have happened. I have a job that has inherent danger. Anyone can get killed going to work. Fires happen. Automobile accidents happen. But what I work with daily kills. Electrocution. Spraying molten metal propelled by the blast of expanding plasma. Burns. But these are hazards I know and train to avoid and I accept them as part of my job. But if I was a paper-pusher for a banking firm, I’d reasonably expect that going to work was not going to expose me to any more hazard than travelling in traffic, paper cuts, or perhaps a top-heavy file cabinet. And the jihadi terrorists took that away from thousands on that day.

I am used to thinking in terms of enemies. I served with plenty of soldiers who carried REAL medals from Viet Nam, and in the case of one particularly memorable first sergeant, Korea. I guess I spent too much time thinking about the Red Hordes in the Cold War. But those were enemies that I could expect to meet on the battlefield, where it was them or us, and if we prevailed, then everybody went home and dealt with the results.

What 9/11 did was show us a different enemy, one who had no idea about losing and going home. This was an enemy without honor as we knew it, who had to be killed to be stopped.

And yet some among us still fail to get the picture. They still think in terms of conferences and compromises, that if we reach consensus we can all retire to a green hillside somewhere and hold hands and sing songs and drink Cokes together.

It’s strange to me how we can come from 60 years ago, when the Allies sought nothing less than UNCONDITIONAL surrender from Japan and Germany, to today,when a significant part of our populace thinks that this is an enemy whom we can placate, appease, and then ignore.

The only way they can accomplish this leap into absurdity is to ascribe hateful motives to honorable and innocent activities. How else can you justify the actions of a movement who desires to kill clerks at work in their offices or schoolchildren waiting for a bus? You have to say that what these people are doing is evil enough in the eyes of the terrorist to warrant death. That reduces the whole of humanity to the level of scuttling vermin.

I said a while back that my own veneer of civilization thins considerably in the presence of dead children. After some thought, I must also announce that my definition of “enemy” broadens considerably to include those who would stand willfully between me and the murders of children.