Jason Crow and Troy Downing rushed to serve in the weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Crow “was angry” and wanted to “fight back.” Downing felt “the sense of violation” and wanted to be the “tip of the spear” in the country’s military response.
Both men were changed by the attack. Downing said it caused him to “wake up” to the nation’s greatness, while Crow said the terrorist attack altered “the entire trajectory of my life.”
And after multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, these two men from different political parties — Crow is a Colorado Democrat, Downing is a Montana Republican — found their way to Congress, inspired by their service and the lessons they took from it.
It’s their distinct takeaways, however, where their similarities end, highlighting how the terrorist attacks that sparked wars in Iraq and Afghanistan changed the nation’s politics but did not leave its leaders with monolithic views of their meaning. Crow and Downing emerged from the conflict with disparate views on war and service, and have since, like the rest of the country, had to make sense of the 25 years that have passed since the Sept. 11 attacks.
“People do take different lessons,” Crow said. “And I think the lessons that I took out … are a different lesson than some of my comrades and my brothers and sisters in arms.”
The politics of the post-9/11 wars have changed dramatically in the last 25 years. Under President George W. Bush (R), Democrats and Republicans in Congress authorized military force in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Only one Democrat — Rep. Barbara T. Lee (California) — voted against authorizing action in Afghanistan. And while far more voted against authorizing military action in Iraq, 81 House Democrats and 29 Senate Democrats authorized military force.
But as the wars dragged on and the intelligence underpinning the conflict in Iraq proved untrue, Democrats began to sour on the prolonged entanglements, sparking a fervent anti-war, anti-intervention movement. That upended the 2006 midterms, seeing Democrats sweep into control of the House and Senate, and helped elect Sen. Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008. That sentiment later began to creep into the Republican Party, culminating in 2016 when Donald Trump won the presidency by pledging to end foreign entanglements and lambasting Bush and Obama for their handling of the conflicts. Trump, however, has overseen multiple new foreign interventions, most notably the ongoing war with Iran, a conflict that has undercut his pledge of “no new wars” and created tension with the Republican Party’s more anti-war factions.
Neither Crow, now 47, nor Downing, now 59, is an avatar for their party’s views on war. According to the Military Times, more than 30 veterans in Congress began their military careers after January 2000, bringing diverse experiences to the legislative body.
But Crow’s and Downing’s disparate perspectives on the current Iran conflict echo the diverse opinions of those who served: Downing calls it a just conflict where Iran has been “at war with us” for nearly 50 years, while Crow labels it a “war of choice” pushed by a president who is “cavalier with other people’s lives.”
Downing was deep in the Alaskan bush on a moose-hunting trip on Sept. 11, 2001, and didn’t learn of the attack until the pilot who picked up his group recounted it five days after the towers fell. “I was one of the last people on the planet to find out about it,” he observed. Welling up with anger, Downing, who had been professionally successful with a web-based calendar company that eventually merged with Yahoo in the late 1990s, asked himself what he did to deserve his life of privilege.
“It really bugged me, because I didn’t have a good answer,” he recalled, so at 34 and with no military experience, he enlisted at a recruiter’s office in Montana and was sworn into a combat search-and-rescue squadron because he had a pilot’s license.
Downing, under the call sign “Yahoo,” served eight years in the Air Force and the Air National Guard, including two tours in Afghanistan, where he and his crew rescued soldiers injured in battle. “There are guys that made it home to their families because we were there to get them and I’m incredibly proud of that service,” he said.
Crow, unlike Downing, was on a path toward military service before Sept. 11, 2001. The senior at the University of Wisconsin was headed to classes when he heard on the radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He remembers sitting in shock as people jumped out of the twin towers and wrestling with the “decision those people faced and the number of people that were killed on that day.” As a member of the university’s ROTC program, Crow already had a National Guard contract to be commissioned as an officer, but he asked to transition to active duty once the nation went to war.
“I wanted to do my part,” he said. “That was the mentality at the time.”
Crow went on to serve three tours with the Army — one in Iraq leading a platoon of paratroopers in the March 2003 invasion and two in Afghanistan — earning the Bronze Star.
While Crow entered the war angry and eager to “defend this country,” he said the invasion of Iraq and his role in it “drastically changed my worldview about what this conflict and conflicts like it really mean.”
He realized early on that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that the nation “had been led into this war based on lies and manipulated intelligence and that what we had been told we were fighting for was not really what we were fighting for.” People in his unit then began dying, he said, including a noncitizen Filipino soldier who was posthumously granted citizenship.
“It was a time of massive change and evolution in terms of what I saw and the impact that it had on me and now how I legislate,” he said, specifically citing that noncitizen soldier’s death as a reason for his views on immigration.
The war changed Downing, too, but in different ways. He called the invasion of Afghanistan “justified” as a way to “hit back” for 9/11 and recalled the work he and his team did to help advance the rights of women and children. That service led him to Congress, where he said his goal was to “protect all of those things that make America great” and “make that American Dream possible.” And his work in Afghanistan made him “incredibly disappointed and somewhat angered” by the chaotic end to the conflict under President Joe Biden, a withdrawal he labeled “a huge miscalculation that is a stain on America.”
Downing took issue with those, like Crow, who refer to the Iran conflict as a “war of choice,” defending the Trump administration’s position that the war is needed to defend the U.S. and Israel from a nation that has been “fighting us for almost 50 years.”
“Anybody saying that this is something new is not looking at that whole history,” he said. “We did not pick this war.”
Downing’s steadfast support stands in contrast to how many of his Republican colleagues, including those who served in wars, spoke about foreign entanglements before Trump began the Iran war earlier this year.
Vice President JD Vance, who spent four years in the Marines and deployed to Iraq for six months as a public affairs specialist, is a clear example. Vance was an outspoken Republican critic of foreign wars long before he ran for Senate in 2022. In 2024, before Vance became Trump’s running mate, he reflected on how he deployed to Iraq and learned that “I had been lied to” about the reasons for the war.
“Have we learned nothing?” he asked during a debate in the Senate over funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia.
Since then, however, Vance has defended the war in Iran, despite remaining a “skeptic of foreign military interventions.”
That kind of thinking has led Downing to believe that the Republican Party is not as anti-interventionist as Trump promised during his 2016 campaign.
“I don’t see that as a firm plank in the party right now because I definitely know colleagues that have differences of opinion,” Downing said.
Crow said he sometimes speaks with Republican veterans in Congress who privately oppose the U.S. getting involved in another conflict in the Middle East, a position, he said, he has little time for.
“I struggle mightily with this dissonance between what some of my colleagues say publicly and what they’ll tell me privately,” Crow said. “I tell them that: ‘Don’t tell me. I don’t care what you think. I want you to say it publicly because the country needs to hear it, and we need courageous leadership right now.’”
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