Latham Saddler was a freshman at the University of Georgia on Sept. 11, 2001, when he watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center.
His roommate’s mother had called after the first plane struck the first tower to say something terrible had happened in New York City.
The attacks that day not only set the country on a path to war, they also sent an entire generation of young Americans from their dorm rooms to battlefields, looking for a way to fight back against what they had seen.
One of those was Latham Saddler.
“I was military age. I was a good athlete growing up, and I thought, ‘I should serve,’” Saddler said in an interview in his Atlanta office.
That decision eventually led to a commission as a Navy SEAL, deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, an assignment in the Trump White House to the National Security Council, and now, a run for United States Senate.
He’s one of four Republicans running for the nomination to challenge U.S. Raphael Warnock, including Air Force Academy graduate Kelvin King.
Like many veterans today, Saddler still points to 9/11 as the beginning of the path he’s on now. But it wasn’t a direct route.
Already enrolled at UGA, he says he looked to transfer to West Point or the Naval Academy, but was told he’d have to start over as a freshman the following year.
He researched other options and decided to become a Navy SEAL. But the elite special forces unit would require a serious resume, so Saddler ran for student body president as a sophomore and won.
He moved to New York after graduation to get professional experience and met a former SEAL who helped young recruits prepare to apply for admission.
“He said, ‘You don’t have a ‘blank’-ing chance of getting selected,” Saddler remembered. “It really was like having a humble pie just smashed in the face.”
So he went on to spend the next seven years working to have a better-than-blank’ing chance of getting in.
Saddler moved back to Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn school for a master’s degree in international affairs. He studied the Iranian language of Farsi, as well as Dari, which is spoken in Afghanistan. He moved to Tajikistan for 10 months for language training and spent two more traveling through “all of the other ‘Stans’ except Pakistan,” before applying.
By then, the United States had invaded not just Afghanistan, but Iraq, too. The wars that began with a flurry of patriotic intensity had started to drag on as more and more Americans lost their lives.
“But I wanted to be in the fight and I knew that the SEALS were in the fight,” he said. By the time he made it through SEAL training, he was 29-years-old.
He deployed to Afghanistan, where his team conducted night-time “capture missions.” Since he spoke Dari, it was Saddler’s job to get information from Taliban fighters.
“I would question the guys that we would roll up and ask them, ‘Where are the weapons?”
His later deployments to Iraq focused on training Iraqi Special Forces for the sorts of missions against ISIS that the SEALS conducted around the world.
Even as the wars dragged on, especially in Afghanistan, he said his team continued to focus on the events of Sept. 11.
“Part of the mindset too was, ‘We haven’t had another 9/11. And we’re gonna keep it that way.”
His final assignment in the Navy was as the director for intelligence programs to the National Security Council, just after Donald Trump was sworn into office.
He calls deploying for the Special Forces and then working the other end of the missions from the White House “a blessing, because I experienced both so that’s really shaped the way I view things as a national security leader.”
It was also a significant part of his decision to run for the Senate.
He’d already moved back to Georgia to be closer to his family, but the events of 2020, including the deep divisions between Americans themselves, pushed him into the race.
“As a national security guy, I was already concerned about our external threats,” he said. “But to watch just the way we started dysfunctioning last year, it was a feeling very similar to the conviction that I felt after 9/11 to do something.”
Looking back on the 20 years since the attacks on the World Trade Center, the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been impossibly high.
More than 4,000 American service members were killed in Afghanistan, including 13 in the final days of American operations there. More than 2,000 died in Iraq.
I think frequently about the ones who died and the lives they left behind. I wonder if the political leaders who sent them to war then would do the same thing again.
But some of the same young people who watched the planes hit the Trade Center are veterans now, intimately familiar with the costs of war and how to fight them. And, like Saddler, they’re running for office to be on the other end of the decisions the next time around.
“This is going to be a really hard anniversary for a lot of Americans, given what’s just transpired,” Saddler said of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he called a debacle.
But he tells his fellow veterans they did their jobs. And the United States military could topple the Taliban in less than the two months it took in 2001 if necessary.
“I wish I could get on the loudspeaker and tell the Taliban, ”Don’t forget how quickly we can come and knock you right back out of there again.”
