On a Tuesday morning twenty-five years ago, I got the phone call that our country was under attack.

I was an incoming junior at Oregon State University on the beautiful, tree-lined campus in Corvallis. At the time, I was an enlisted soldier assigned to the 364th Civil Affairs Brigade (Airborne), with at least six months of reserve drilling there under my belt.

Life would never be the same after September 11, 2001.

Within about a week, my enlisted career took a different direction. I signed a new contract to become an Army ROTC cadet through the Simultaneous Membership Program. It also meant changing my academic plans. I had been planning to study wine engineering and beer fermentation, but I didn’t have the chemistry and engineering coursework in my transcripts to make that a quick path to graduation. Adding those prerequisites would have added years, and ROTC wanted me progressing toward graduation and commissioning. I needed a more direct route. I chose political science. That fall I enrolled in Army ROTC while continuing to serve in the Army Reserve.

I also moved from living off campus with a friend to Sigma Nu Fraternity. Ben Culver came over to ROTC, walked me over to the house, and showed me the place where I would eventually sleep, study, eat, and live alongside my fraternity brothers. Several were also in ROTC—not only Army, but Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force programs.

My weekends changed, too. Before transferring from the 364th Civil Affairs Brigade to the 104th Division, I was reassigned to the Special Functions Team under Lt. Col. Lopey, where I took on a variety of planning and training assignments supporting officers preparing for deployment. Not long afterward, I transferred to the 104th to align more closely with my own junior officer development and began filling leadership positions in a drill sergeant company while developing as a cadet. On campus, mornings were no longer simply the gym, coffee, or studying early. They became early formations, physical training, 5K and 10K runs, and getting smoked alongside other cadets.

Meanwhile, people I knew in the enlisted ranks were deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq, including my own little brother, Victor Molina, who deployed with the 1st Marine Division as part of the initial invasion of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

For those of us in ROTC, the immediate mission was different: graduate from college, complete our training, and commission.

During one of those training periods at Fort Lewis, now Joint Base Lewis-McChord, I spent several nighttime watch hours talking with a sergeant major. He asked about my background. I told him about growing up in Mount Vernon, Washington, working in the fields, taking on student leadership roles, and being the oldest male—the patriarch—in my immediate family.

He encouraged me to put Infantry at the top of my list.

His argument was simple. Infantry would force me to learn leadership at its most fundamental level: leading people.

I took his advice and I’m forever grateful.

After graduating from Oregon State and completing a six-month internship in San José, Costa Rica, I returned to the 104th Division. Not long afterward, I was selected from a group of second lieutenants to serve as aide-de-camp to Brig. Gen. Eldon Regua. I would also serve as an aide to the commanding general, Maj. Gen. T.K. Moffett.

An aide-de-camp occupies an unusual position. You’re a junior officer operating alongside senior leaders, exposed to executive-level decisions and information without possessing anything close to their rank. The work moves quickly. It requires discretion, preparation, writing, judgment, and the ability to anticipate what comes next. Our travels took us from Huntington Beach, Calif. to Fort Hunter Liggett, and from Fort Knox to the Sierra Nevada visiting and promoting soldiers across the command’s area of operation.

Within a few years of commissioning, I was mobilized for active-duty service overseas.

That mission changed while I was at Fort Riley, Kansas.

Instead of deploying overseas, hundreds of us were reassigned across the eastern United States. Medical professionals in our formation went to Walter Reed and Bethesda. Field-grade officers were assigned to places including the Pentagon, Army Human Resources Command (HRC), and Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Command (CMAOC).

Several junior officers and enlisted soldiers, myself included, were sent to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to support the Joint Personal Effects Depot.

The JPED itself was a product of September 11.

It had been established after the attack on the Pentagon to process personal effects and would eventually assume the mission of processing the belongings of fallen, wounded, and missing service members and others supporting military operations.

I helped stand up the night shift alongside Capt. Ruiz and Capt. Thacker, joining Mortuary Affairs soldiers originally from Puerto Rico. Many had volunteered to return to active duty and came from the 311th and 246th Quartermaster Companies.

It was there that another part of my career began to emerge.

I had an ability to take complicated processes, memos, regulations, and operating requirements and turn them into instructions people could actually use. Halfway through my eighteen-month assignment, I moved from serving as a Summary Court-Martial Officer into work involving the JPED’s Standard Operating Procedures and technical documentation, including work associated with a Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) Handbook.

For eighteen months, much of my work became about improving systems and documentation in support of a much larger mission. I shared a tiny office space with Maj. Wolf. I interviewed him, along with other NCO leaders, to ensure the tactical how-tos were properly captured in the SOP.

I returned from active duty and briefly served as Committee Administrator for the Oregon House Committee on Veterans’ and Emergency Services. A few years later, the Army called again.

It was JPED.

This time, I asked for a more challenging assignment. I returned, was promoted to captain upon arrival, brought my wife and three small children, lived on base alongside other officers, and went back to work on the systems behind the mission.

The JPED was moving from aging World War II-era facilities at Aberdeen Proving Ground into a new, state-of-the-art facility at Dover Air Force Base, co-located with other organizations supporting the families of the fallen mission. I focused on bringing its operating documentation into a more modern environment. Instead of treating the Standard Operating Procedure as something that should live primarily inside a binder, I built the master document in HTML so personnel throughout the facility could pull it up on smart screens, move through linked sections, and quickly find the procedure or reference they needed.

Looking back, I can see a pattern that wasn’t obvious to me at the time.

Leadership. Systems. Writing. Technology. Service.

After leaving active duty in 2013, I eventually shifted much of my attention from military service to veterans service.

I saw another system I believed needed fixing.

Veterans and military spouses trying to enter technology were running into barriers. At the same time, emerging coding bootcamps and other hands-on technical programs didn’t fit neatly into the traditional educational structures available to veterans using their GI Bill benefits.

So I approached it the way the Army had taught me to approach other problems: define the mission, understand the system, organize people, and start moving.

Operation Code was born.

What began as an idea grew into a national community. Veterans connected remotely through Slack. We helped people learn to code, provided used laptops, connected veterans with scholarships and technical training, and advocated for better pathways into technology.

Different mission. Different organization.

Same underlying lesson.

Build the system around the mission.

But of all the things I carried away from those years, one conversation has stayed with me more than most.

During my time at Dover Air Force Base, I participated in a dignified transfer. I remember expressing my sadness to the wife and mother of a fallen service member.

His mother pulled me close.

What she said felt almost like a prayer.

She told me that her son had been born kicking and moving. He was born to do this. Knowing him, she said, there was nowhere else he would rather have been than with his brothers on that helicopter.

Then she told me not to cry for him.

Live your life. Give it everything you’ve got in his honor. Live for him and for all his brothers. Twenty-five years after September 11, those words still come back to me.

A quarter century is long enough to see that our lives are rarely shaped by one decision alone. They are shaped by moments, people, assignments, conversations, opportunities, failures, responsibilities, and sometimes events completely outside our control.

September 11 changed the trajectory of my life.

It led, directly and indirectly, to ROTC, Sigma Nu, Infantry School, aide-de-camp assignments, active-duty service, JPED, veterans advocacy, Operation Code, entrepreneurship, and much of the systems thinking that still shapes my work today.

There are now adults beginning careers who weren’t alive on September 11, 2001.

For those of us who remember that Tuesday morning, remembrance should be about more than remembering where we were. It should also cause us to ask what we did with the years that followed. I still think about that mother at Dover.

Live your life. Give it everything you’ve got.

Twenty-five years later, I can’t think of a better way to honor them.