11 SEPTEMBER, 2021

Dear Harry,

This is a bleak and solemn day in American history. Had you survived a few years longer than you did, it would have been late afternoon, early evening in Wales when it began to happen. News time. I’m sure you would have been watching; you always did. You would perhaps have missed the first terrible event, as I did, here in Los Angeles. But your news sources would have switched to New York in time for you to watch in horror as that second jet airliner, filled with passengers, slammed into the second of the two World Trade Center towers at the southern end of Manhattan. And the third, into the Pentagon in Washington, DC; and the fourth, crashing into an open field in Pennsylvania.

I’m sure the hijackers of those planes were praising their god as they met their fate, along with the nearly three thousand innocent human beings whose lives they took with them that day. Among them was the brilliant young son of one or our oldest, closest friends.

You would have been appalled as I was, Harry, as was every other sane person on the planet, that fanatical belief in any god could have inspired men to commit such a hateful, devastating act. It seems sometimes that religion, unhappily, paradoxically, has engendered as much evil in the world across the centuries as the good it claims to foster.

Unhappily, too, there was nothing but vengeance on the mind of the American President, the American Congress, the American people. I have to say that it was on my mind too. It became the national obsession to kill—to kill the man deemed responsible, to kill his followers, and to kill all those who helped them.

Twenty years have passed since that terrible day. Twenty years of killing, of misguided warfare, leaving many thousands of our own as well as many thousands of our purported enemies dead. We have finally come to a recognition of the futility of the effort and abandoned it. Our achievement, after twenty years of slaughter? Ironically, we have left the chief intended target of our wrath, the Afghan Taliban, even stronger than the day we first attacked them.

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, your God, Harry. We would have left done better to leave it to him. My own religious inspiration is the Buddha. He would, I’m sure, have counseled otherwise.

In grief, today, your son,

Peter