{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://crow.house.gov/media/in-the-news/the-washington-post-these-congressmen-went-to-war-after-911-it-changed-them-in-different-ways", "The Washington Post: These congressmen went to war after 9/11. It changed them in different ways.", "2026-09-11", "2026", "2026-09", "Democrat", "House", "CO", "Jason Crow", "C001121", "crow.house.gov", "crow", "https://crow.house.gov/news", "scraper", "Jason Crow and Troy Downing rushed to serve in the weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Crow \u201cwas angry\u201d and wanted to \u201cfight back.\u201d Downing felt \u201cthe sense of violation\u201d and wanted to be the \u201ctip of the spear\u201d in the country\u2019s military response.\n\nBoth men were changed by the attack. Downing said it caused him to \u201cwake up\u201d to the nation\u2019s greatness, while Crow said the terrorist attack altered \u201cthe entire trajectory of my life.\u201d\n\nAnd after multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, these two men from different political parties \u2014 Crow is a Colorado Democrat, Downing is a Montana Republican \u2014 found their way to Congress, inspired by their service and the lessons they took from it.\n\nIt\u2019s their distinct takeaways, however, where their similarities end, highlighting how the terrorist attacks that sparked wars in Iraq and Afghanistan changed the nation\u2019s 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.\n\n\u201cPeople do take different lessons,\u201d Crow said. \u201cAnd I think the lessons that I took out ... are a different lesson than some of my comrades and my brothers and sisters in arms.\u201d\n\nThe 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 \u2014 Rep. Barbara T. Lee (California) \u2014 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.\n\nBut 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 \u201cno new wars\u201d and created tension with the Republican Party\u2019s more anti-war factions.\n\nNeither Crow, now 47, nor Downing, now 59, is an avatar for their party\u2019s 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.\n\nBut Crow\u2019s and Downing\u2019s 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 \u201cat war with us\u201d for nearly 50 years, while Crow labels it a \u201cwar of choice\u201d pushed by a president who is \u201ccavalier with other people\u2019s lives.\u201d\n\nDowning was deep in the Alaskan bush on a moose-hunting trip on Sept. 11, 2001, and didn\u2019t learn of the attack until the pilot who picked up his group recounted it five days after the towers fell. \u201cI was one of the last people on the planet to find out about it,\u201d 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.\n\n\u201cIt really bugged me, because I didn\u2019t have a good answer,\u201d he recalled, so at 34 and with no military experience, he enlisted at a recruiter\u2019s office in Montana and was sworn into a combat search-and-rescue squadron because he had a pilot\u2019s license.\n\nDowning, under the call sign \u201cYahoo,\u201d 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. \u201cThere are guys that made it home to their families because we were there to get them and I\u2019m incredibly proud of that service,\u201d he said.\n\nCrow, 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 \u201cdecision those people faced and the number of people that were killed on that day.\u201d As a member of the university\u2019s 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.\n\n\u201cI wanted to do my part,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was the mentality at the time.\u201d\n\nCrow went on to serve three tours with the Army \u2014 one in Iraq leading a platoon of paratroopers in the March 2003 invasion and two in Afghanistan \u2014 earning the Bronze Star.\n\nWhile Crow entered the war angry and eager to \u201cdefend this country,\u201d he said the invasion of Iraq and his role in it \u201cdrastically changed my worldview about what this conflict and conflicts like it really mean.\u201d\n\nHe realized early on that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that the nation \u201chad 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.\u201d People in his unit then began dying, he said, including a noncitizen Filipino soldier who was posthumously granted citizenship.\n\n\u201cIt 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,\u201d he said, specifically citing that noncitizen soldier\u2019s death as a reason for his views on immigration.\n\nThe war changed Downing, too, but in different ways. He called the invasion of Afghanistan \u201cjustified\u201d as a way to \u201chit back\u201d 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 \u201cprotect all of those things that make America great\u201d and \u201cmake that American Dream possible.\u201d And his work in Afghanistan made him \u201cincredibly disappointed and somewhat angered\u201d by the chaotic end to the conflict under President Joe Biden, a withdrawal he labeled \u201ca huge miscalculation that is a stain on America.\u201d\n\nDowning took issue with those, like Crow, who refer to the Iran conflict as a \u201cwar of choice,\u201d defending the Trump administration\u2019s position that the war is needed to defend the U.S. and Israel from a nation that has been \u201cfighting us for almost 50 years.\u201d\n\n\u201cAnybody saying that this is something new is not looking at that whole history,\u201d he said. \u201cWe did not pick this war.\u201d\n\nDowning\u2019s 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.\n\nVice 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\u2019s running mate, he reflected on how he deployed to Iraq and learned that \u201cI had been lied to\u201d about the reasons for the war.\n\n\u201cHave we learned nothing?\u201d he asked during a debate in the Senate over funding for Ukraine\u2019s war against Russia.\n\nSince then, however, Vance has defended the war in Iran, despite remaining a \u201cskeptic of foreign military interventions.\u201d\n\nThat kind of thinking has led Downing to believe that the Republican Party is not as anti-interventionist as Trump promised during his 2016 campaign.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t see that as a firm plank in the party right now because I definitely know colleagues that have differences of opinion,\u201d Downing said.\n\nCrow 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.\n\n\u201cI struggle mightily with this dissonance between what some of my colleagues say publicly and what they\u2019ll tell me privately,\u201d Crow said. \u201cI tell them that: \u2018Don\u2019t tell me. I don\u2019t 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.\u2019\u201d", 1, "2026-09-15T09:50:21Z", "2026-09-15T09:52:05Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://crow.house.gov/media/in-the-news/the-washington-post-these-congressmen-went-to-war-after-911-it-changed-them-in-different-ways"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.641864888370037, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}