Time for the annual deluge of remembrances of 9/11/01 in New York, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon.

Yes, 9/11 was horrific. But that date will be lost to time for most, the same as these other dates of great losses of American life - and even more horrible, Americans killing Americans:

July 1-3, 1863, Gettyburg, PA: 51,112 dead

September 19-20, 1863, Chickamauga, GA: 34,624 dead

May 1-4, 1863, Chancellorsville, VA: 30,099 dead

May 8-19, 1864, Spotsylvania, VA: 27,399 dead

September 17, 1862, Antietam, Maryland: 26,134 dead

How many people really remember these dates?

And one other date, an overnight period, coming on us fast: the night of September 12-13, 1814. Only four American lives lost to an attack on the Mainland US by another country, the attack immortalized in the poem The Defense of Fort M'Henry.

"They shall grow not old....as we that are left grow old
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,we will remember them."
- Laurence Binyon, "For the Fallen", 1914

"we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here."
- Abraham Lincoln, Address at Gettysburg, 1863

"On the shore, dimly seen thro’ the mist of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream..."
-Francis Scott Key, "The Defense of Fort M'Henry", 1814