This September, American Legion Post 38 in Floresville, Texas, marks twenty-five years since the morning of September 11, 2001. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The twenty-fifth anniversary is not a closed chapter. It is a living obligation: to honor the dead, to stand with those who served in the wars that followed, and to look after one another in the years still unfolding.
On that Tuesday, nineteen terrorists hijacked four airliners. Two struck the World Trade Center. One struck the Pentagon. Passengers and crew on United Flight 93 fought back; their aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania, short of its intended target. First responders ran toward the fires. In the days that followed, Americans enlisted, donated, and gathered under flags hung from porches and overpasses. A generation of service members — many of them now Legionnaires — deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, and other theaters in the long conflict that began that morning.
Post 38 will not invent a local 9/11 ceremony for this page. What the Post has set is work the community can see. On Saturday, September 12, from 8:00 a.m. to noon, members will turn out for a Day of Service. Members will select neglected cemeteries in Wilson County and perform brush clearing, mowing, and other maintenance as a service back to the community. Remembrance that morning is a rake, a mower, and a few hours among the stones. Meet at the Hall for assignments and tools, then go out to the cemeteries. Members are asked to turn out.
Friday, September 11, is Patriot Day and the National Day of Service and Remembrance. Raise a flag properly. Pause at noon if you can. Look in on a veteran who served after 2001. Then come Saturday morning ready to work. Honor does not require a podium. It requires that we show up.
Children and grandchildren did not live through 2001; they inherit it. Teaching them why we stand for the colors, why we retire worn flags at the collection box at Post 38, and why veterans still carry that day is part of our charge in Floresville and Wilson County. Twenty-five years is long enough for a child to grow up. It is not long enough to forget.
Looking out for one another belongs to that charge as well. The American Legion's Be the One initiative asks every member to notice when a veteran is struggling and to act. A Buddy Check is not a speech. It is a phone call, a chair saved at the Tailgate on the third Thursday, a ride to the second-Thursday meeting.
Twenty-five years on, the wars that followed 9/11 have sent a generation home to Wilson County. Some sit in our Hall. Some do not. Remembrance without care is incomplete. When the cemetery work is done, second-Thursday meetings and third-Thursday Tailgates remain the place a post-2001 veteran can find a chair and a hearing. Bring someone who has not been in. Show up the way this country showed up that week — not with a speech, with a presence.
Wilson County sent people to the wars that followed that morning. Some came home to Post 38. Some have not walked through the door in a long time. A Buddy Check on the week of the eleventh is not extra credit. It is the charge. Raise the colors. Pause at noon. Then pick up a tool on Saturday — and pick up the phone.
Post 38 – We Remember, and We Take Care of One Another.