The captains of the mightiest armies in history were broadsided in their very stronghold. The bravest and finest of New York rushed into their ultimate nightmare, the towering inferno, and were as cruelly destroyed as the soldiers of the Somme.

A small band of Americans, probably without a professional lawman among them, held a referendum in the sky, and took up the enemy's challenge of war. They lost all their lives in a field in Pennsylvania. But they won.

This contrast of scale is no mere coincidence. Any student of military history will tell you why tall towers and mighty castles stopped being a viable deterrent in the late Middle Ages: bigger, explosive weapons brought them down with ease.

But the medieval castle itself was was a slow evolution from the Roman villa. Over the years, following invasions and a constant cycle of internal betrayal, the outer walls of the Romans' gentle gardens grew higher and thicker, the open windows slowly narrowed to slits, and terraces became battlements and moats. The Romans had always had forts. They never noticed when they began to feel the need to live in them.

Rome did not survive the turn of the ages. Its last bastion, Constantinople, adapted to castle walls, only to face the Turkish bombards as the ages turned again.

So the late Romans, huddling behind cold masonry for a thousand years, came to pine for their lost heritage: simple tribes living in a Republic. And America, imagining this as its future, is pining now.

But we should know better. Amid calls for mass invasions, rebuilding a colossal skyline, draconian security, and billions in financing, we should wake up and see where our successes were on Nine-Eleven, and in the days since. Individuals– individual Americans– are who have made the difference this week.

The solidarity of Congress, NATO and the United Nations may bring fire and death upon fanatics and tiny lands. But since the enemy infiltrates among us, we must rely on real, everyday people: volunteers, neighbors, friends. We're the militia. We're the minutemen.

Inspired by the natives, our ancestors invented modern guerilla warfare, on this continent. We shot redcoats from the trees, and vanished. We held destructive tea parties to protest economic oppression. We made a sneak attack on Christmas. And we can still buy a gun today. If we hold together as friends and neighbors, and watch out for one another, without prejudice or bigotry, we cannot be defeated.

We know this. But we can have no illusions. In this century, we live in the world-spanning empire, they are the guerillas. We rule the world trade we wish to protect. They are the ones who regret that they have but one life to give.

Victory lays in our common friendships. This War will not be won by surrendering our liberties, by crawling into forts and bunkers, but by rediscovering and defending our every freedom, and one another. This turn of the ages will test whether we believe and understand what we already know.