Dedicated to all the men and women who were lost or lost someone that day, and to all the brave men and women who serve or have served in our military since then.

Never Forget

September 11, 2001. The day that my life changed forever. I had it all planned out, before then. Get through med school, be a doctor, marry Alex and settle down. Have a couple of kids. Stay in the neighborhood with all my friends and family.

Family. I come from a family of firefighters. They saved lives, protected people. I wanted to do that, too, but I wanted to do it as a doctor. Two of my brothers… were in the Towers. I can still remember watching the buildings fall, and looking, hoping, praying that my brothers weren't in there, that they'd be brought in to the hospital where I was doing my residency, but… no. They were gone. They died like they'd lived, running into danger, trying to get other people out. Saving lives, protecting people.

I was so angry, so *lost* that I just walked out from my life. Left everything I'd been planning, and enlisted in the army. I was the right age, in good shape. They took me, and sent me to Afghanistan after training.

It was a dirty war. The other guys said wars are all like that, brutal. So there I was, trying still to save lives and protect civilians, but it was a lot harder. I guess that's why I signed up for the experimental group – Project Muirfield; they said I could be part of something special. They injected us with steroids, antivirals, all kinds of things. Especially the things they didn't tell us about. The things that changed our DNA, mutated us. They wanted super soldiers. They got super-strong animals, any time our adrenaline kicked in. Considering where we were, that happened a lot. They couldn't control us. We couldn't control us.

Doctor Vanessa Chandler tried her best to help. She was part of their research group, and she was studying us, working on ways to help us control ourselves – to fix her mistakes, yeah, but you could tell she cared about us as people, too. Unlike the Muirfield guys, who declared us animals, and set out to slaughter us all.

I escaped, somehow, but I knew they'd never stop hunting me. They told the world that I'd been killed in action, and in a lot of ways, I had been. I got back to New York, and my best friend agreed to help me hide out.

Every year, I hated that whole second week of September. The whole world mourned, and I did too. For my brothers, for me, for my parents, for my ex-fiance, for… everything I'd lost. It got a little better as the years went by.

It will always be a dark day for me, for our country. But this year, it's different. I've realized that because of that day, as terrible as it was, I had the chance to meet Catherine, to be with her. To save her life. To protect her. Just like I'd always wanted.

I lost everything on 9/11/01. But I gained everything, too.