How Should "We" Have Responded to 9/11

I was on the road yesterday, so I didn't have an opportunity to comment on Jon Wayne Taylor's article, "9/11 and the Importance of Being Armed." But I will do so now. Taylor wrote:

      Over the course of that day, the nature of those attacks became evident, and over the next days I would hear so many people talk about what “we” were going to do.

      Friends, co-workers, everyone, was talking about how “we” were going to get the people who did this. “We” were going to go over there and kick the hell out of them. “We” were going to make them pay. “We” were going to keep our nation, and her people, safe.

      I came to realize that everyone I was talking to didn’t think “we” meant the same thing I thought it did. Those people meant “we” in the same sense they talked about “we” on the football field. They knew damn well they weren’t playing in that game, and had no intention of ever doing so.

      To me, “we” meant you and me. A short time later I got that it was really just me. So I signed up, as an enlisted man, and became a medic. No one, and I mean not one of the people I worked with — family, friends — no one did the same. Those people actually meant “they” every time they said “we.”

I can't judge other people's decision whether or not to enlist following 9/11. I assume that when most people said "we" they meant as a nation-state, including all that brings with it: a consensus of the polity, incurring costs or debts resulting in higher taxes, portions of the economy re-tasked toward supporting a war, as well as actual troops. And perhaps many Americans foresaw or believed that there would be a different response than what was made. I know that I thought the appropriate response would include nuking one or more appropriate locations, and didn't imagine that we (as a nation) would get bogged down in long drawn out counter-insurgencies because we were too afraid to identify our enemies, let alone kill them.