As I write this, it's 2:20 AM, September 11th, here. I don't know if this will make sense, but I want to share some "scenes" that I associate with this date.

Three years ago, this time, I was a soldier in the 77th Army Band, at Fort Sill, OK. I was in charge of what we did in support of the Army's Recruiting Command. Our rock band had a week long tour of northwestern Texas that I was preparing. It was the first tour with this particular line up that I was arranging, and it was going to be a tough one.

I got in my little Nissan truck that morning to go to work at 7:45 AM. My radio was set to the local rock station, as it always was. I didn't care for the DJ's (they did some of the most inane things, and thought they were hilarious), but the music was good. I was thinking about hotels, schools, renting vehicles, etc. Anything but what they were saying. I half heard them say something about a plane crashing into a building, and figured it was another one of their stupid stunts.

I got to work and found out it wasn't a stunt. As soon as morning formation was over, the entire band crowded into the breakroom and was glued to CNN. After watching for a while, I figured out that I had to get to work on that tour. It was more important than ever. I wouldn't have a problem convincing any school to let us in, now. And, in a few short hours I would not be able to get any work done.

It wasn't like I could do anyone any good sitting glued to a TV. As I worked, I listened to the radio. I heard the second plane hit the towers. I heard the plane hit the Pentagon. And, finally, I heard the fourth plane crash in Pennsylvania.

They sent us home, later that day. Said stay near a phone. Don't come on base. We will call you when to come into work next.

My wife and I spent the better part of a week glued to the TV.

One of my first few days back to work, the band had to perform at a basic training graduation. It was my turn to conduct the band. The conductor was allowed to pick out three tunes to play before the ceremony, then you conducted the National Anthem, and the Army song during the ceremony. I had selected the music a few weeks earlier ... but I changed it all. The band sat at the back of the theater. We played a Sousa march for the first piece. I don't remember which one. The band was playing like never before. God Bless America was next. They played even better, and we received the first of our standing ovations that day (we rarely even received applause for pre-music, normally). Stars and Stripes Forever was next, and the applause went on so long that I thought we were going to have to start the ceremony late. Then, we did the anthem.

I've been a musician for 28 years. I have played the national anthem on, at least 4 different instruments, sang it, and conducted it more times than I can count. I have NEVER heard the Anthem played the way it was that day. Every bit of hurt, anger, frustration, pride of country, and of service that those 18 musicians had in them came pouring out of their instruments.

Exactly a year later I was in Korea. I had been tasked, with another NCO, to plan a September 11th Memorial Concert. In the first half of the concert, through music, spoken word, and video, we took the audience through all of the emotion of the previous September 11th. And when it became almost unbearable, we knew we had to turn it into something else. At the end of Taps, and then a moment of silence, the band began to play Ashokan Farewell. After it was going, I stepped to the microphone, and read these words over the music:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Those words seemed as, if not more, appropriate than when they were first spoken.

So, now it is three years after the fact, and I sit, wearing my country's uniform, in a palace that used to belong to a tyrant, in the middle of a country that for the first time in it's history is struggling to figure out what it means to be free. I can't explain why but, I feel like the following, more than ever is my picture: