Twenty-five years ago this morning, America woke up to a world that had changed. It is difficult for me to write those words and reconcile them with how clearly I can still remember September 11, 2001.

At the time, I was 35 years old and a relatively young airline pilot. I had also recently retired from the Georgia Air National Guard, where I had flown B-1 bombers, and I wrote a part-time editorial column for our local newspaper, The Northeast Georgian. In the days following September 11, I did what writers sometimes do when they are trying to make sense of something they don’t completely understand yet. I wrote about it.

This week, 25 years later, I went back and read some of those words and the newspaper coverage from those first few days. There is something humbling about looking back at your own thoughts from a quarter-century ago. There was so much we didn’t know then. We didn’t know about the wars that would follow, the lives that would be lost, the changes coming to aviation, or how that single morning would shape an entire generation. We certainly didn’t know that 25 years could pass so quickly.

The attacks felt particularly close to me because I had flown out of Boston just 24 hours earlier. The next morning, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 departed that same city and were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center. Only a short time before, I had been flying B-1s as part of our nation’s military. Now I was flying passengers for a living, and civilian airliners had been turned into weapons against the United States. Those two worlds—military aviation and commercial aviation—had always seemed very different. On September 11, they suddenly collided.

Pilots probably remember that day from a slightly different perspective. I think about the crews who reported for work expecting nothing more extraordinary than weather, maintenance, air traffic and the normal challenges of getting an airplane safely from one city to another. I think about the flight attendants who welcomed passengers aboard and began another routine workday, only to find themselves confronting something for which no airline training program of that era could truly have prepared them.

And, of course, I think about the passengers. They were people going to work, headed home, traveling for business or vacation. They were husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. They woke up that morning expecting an ordinary Tuesday. Nearly 3,000 people would not come home.

Those of us who flew before September 11 also remember an aviation world that younger pilots have never known. Cockpit doors were different. Airport security was different. Our training was different, and perhaps most importantly, our assumptions were different. The conventional thinking surrounding a hijacking had generally been to cooperate, avoid escalating the situation and get the airplane safely on the ground. September 11 changed that forever.

Cockpit doors were reinforced, security procedures changed, and crews began training differently. For those of us entrusted with an airplane full of people, September 11 permanently changed our understanding of that responsibility. I have now spent another quarter-century in airline cockpits since that morning—thousands of flights, thousands of hours and millions of miles. An entire generation of airline pilots has entered the profession having never known anything different.

There is another part of September 11 that becomes more meaningful to me as the years pass. We remember the horror of that morning, but I also remember what followed. Firefighters climbed stairwells while everyone else was trying to get out. Police officers and paramedics ran toward danger. Strangers helped strangers. Americans stood in lines to give blood. In the years that followed, thousands of young Americans served overseas, many never returning home, while first responders and others exposed at Ground Zero continued to suffer illnesses long after the smoke disappeared from Lower Manhattan.

When I wrote about September 11 in 2001, I was 35. I am 60 today. Somewhere during those intervening years, September 11 changed from something that had just happened into something we now call history. For those of us who remember that morning, though, it doesn’t feel much like history.

In those first days after the attacks, I wrote about what terrorism was intended to accomplish. Its purpose wasn’t simply destruction; it was fear. It was intended to make Americans afraid to board an airplane, afraid to go to work and afraid of what might happen next. At the time, I put it very simply: “The way they win is to make you scared.”

At 35, I believed refusing to be afraid was part of the answer. At 60, I still believe that, but I think I understand remembrance a little differently now. We honor those we lost by remembering who they were, by appreciating the ordinary freedoms of our lives, and by remembering that on one terrible September morning, ordinary people were suddenly asked to do extraordinary things.

This morning gives that remembrance a little more meaning for me personally. Twenty-five years after September 11, I will climb into the cockpit of a Boeing 767 in Las Vegas and fly it home to Atlanta. We’ll do what airline crews do every day: check the weather, review the flight plan, welcome our passengers aboard and prepare to carry them safely across the country.

At some point before departure, the last passenger will board and the flight attendant will close the reinforced cockpit door behind us. I’ve watched that door close thousands of times over the past 25 years, usually without giving the simple act much thought.

Today I will.

I will intentionally pause for a moment and remember the pilots who watched their cockpit doors close 25 years ago this morning, expecting nothing more than another ordinary day of flying. I’ll remember their flight attendants and their passengers. I’ll remember the firefighters and first responders, the passengers and crew of Flight 93, and all those whose lives were forever changed that morning.

Then we’ll push back, start the engines and fly home to Atlanta.

An ordinary flight on an ordinary September morning.

Twenty-five years later, there is something profoundly meaningful about that.

May God continue to Bless these great United States of America.

And-

May we never forget.