American Heroes of 9/11: Lt. General Patricia D. Horoho

There's something to this "Never Forget" project that's easy to nod along with and then forget to actually do. Townhall's series on Lt. General Patricia D. Horoho is a good reminder of why these day-by-day profiles matter more than another anniversary segment on cable news. She was the chief nurse at Walter Reed's DiLorenzo clinic on 9/11, close enough to the Pentagon attack to be pulled into triage within minutes, and she went on to become the Army's first female Surgeon General. That's not a footnote. That's a career built on the exact instinct the day demanded: run toward it, not away.

We say this every year and mean it every year, but the anniversary is starting to slip into the same category as a lot of American history for people under thirty. It's a date on a calendar, not a memory. The people who lived it are getting older, and the people who didn't are getting further away from understanding what it actually felt like to watch the towers fall or hear that the Pentagon had been hit. A series like this does something a moment of silence can't. It puts a name and a face and a specific choice in front of readers instead of an abstraction.

What's worth noting about Horoho's story specifically is that heroism that day didn't always look like running into fire, though plenty of people did that too. Sometimes it looked like a nurse organizing a response inside a building that had just been attacked, and then spending the next two decades in uniform because of it. That's the kind of American character this country used to talk about constantly and now mostly doesn't. Good on Townhall for making the effort. We hope other outlets steal the idea, honestly, because 25 years out is exactly when this stuff starts to fade if nobody insists on telling it.