On that day, just like this one, “severe clear” as pilots say, I had been sitting in an office, “flex space” the real estate people call, working on a proposal and the owner of the company had the television on.

The only thing I had to say and said was, “They got through.”

I looked out the low second story window toward the north from Laurel, Maryland: not a plane in sight, unusual for the location close by Baltimore-Washington International Airport and Tipton Field, Fort Meade.

The Pin Del Motel where “the terrorists” stayed was over a bridge (from SR 197) and a jog right on U.S. Route 1.

The National Security Agency (NSA), whose mission it was to forestall such ugly business, was about two miles away on the Meade campus.

New York City: four hours north on I-95.

Should I have quit my contract, grabbed a camera, gone north?

Didn’t.

I picked up where I had left off on the proposal, the television footage playing, replaying, all day with more coming from a field in Pennsylvania and a face of the Pentagon.

Could I have then imagined having “Facebook buddies” from Islamabad to Riyadh?

No way.

The whole life has been a “long, strange trip”, let me tell you, but of the detours or channels, this engagement with The Islamic Small Wars, the collection of civil conflicts within Muslim-majority states and their interfaces with every other world on earth, has become the longest and strangest of them all.