I suppose 25 years later is a good enough time as any to look back, seeing as everyone else is. Everyone in my generation or older has a story. I can't say it's anything earth-shattering. Anything unique. Anything that stands out in the endless tide of history that we children of the 80s and 90s briefly had thought we'd seen the end of. Like Private Pyle and his M14, there may be many stories like it, but this one is mine.
It was a Tuesday. I remember this without looking at a calendar, because Tuesdays were the day that the entire Penn State Naval ROTC battalion had to haul their carcasses out of bed at an ungodly hour to form up for physical training at 0530. I would have gotten up, gotten dressed, and walked across campus from 59 Hamilton Hall in West Halls to the Shields Building parking lot, though I have no memory of the walk. I do remember PTing there. Nothing memorable about the workout, other than standing in open ranks formation and starting off with the Daily Dozen. Watching the sun begin to rise over Mount Nittany, back in the days before the Pegula Ice Arena would have blocked the view. In State College as in New York just a couple hours down the road, it was a beautiful clear day in early fall.
I had an 8AM class in my major. It was supposed to be an hour and a half, but the only thing we had on the syllabus was work on a group project that my group was already way ahead on. So we split. I went back to Hamilton Hall. Time to catch up on the sleep I'd been robbed of, courtesy of my midshipman status. And that's when it went down. I was fast asleep at the time. But this was also a time before smartphones. Before (thank God) social media. My roommate and I had one landline phone and an answering machine. Our one TV was a PCI card living in my computer with a coax cable connection. You hooked the cable right up to the PC and launched a program in Windows to turn the TV on. We figured it was a great way to save space in a dorm room. But my roommate and I had no reason to turn on the TV. We were 20-year-old college kids. Sleep was more valuable. No one called and left a message. So I woke up and went to my 9:30 class blissfully unaware of what was unfolding.
My 9:30 class. General Education credit. The History of Islam. Maybe one third Middle Easterners who probably were looking for an easy "A," and the rest of us American kids. Taught by a white Canadian prof who I later learned was a Muslim convert himself. He never proselytized, but his love of the faith was obvious, even though he didn't seem blinded by it. I didn't know it at the time, but having taken two courses from him would prove to be a valuable antidote against some flavors of bigoted BS and misinformation that would later fly around the internet. But that would come later. All I knew at the time was that I'd walked into class and sat down, just in time for the prof to mention that a plane had hit the World Trade Center and we were cancelling the day's scheduled syllabus. And even though it wasn't yet clear what had happened or whodunit, we were going to spend the day talking about Islamic just war theory, its basis in the Quran, the ways it'd historically been applied, and the ways it'd been warped and misinterpreted by terrorists. I thought this was interesting. I didn't know just how valuable that knowledge would be to have in my hip pocket. I remember thinking about how a B-25 bomber had crashed into the Empire State Building in World War II. I wondered how the pilot of a bugsmasher had screwed up that badly.
So it wasn't until maybe 10:30 or 11 o'clock that I walked back into my dorm room to find my roommate parked in my chair in front of my machine, with the news on. I said I'd heard that a plane hit the World Trade Center. And he said something to the effect of "yeah, and the towers are down." "Down?" I distinctly remember asking. "DOWN," he emphasized. And that's when I realized it wasn't a light civil that'd hit them. And for me, that's the moment when the world changed. At some point, we got called up to the NROTC spaces on the third floor of Wagner Building for some reason I can't remember. There was a New Yorker from Brooklyn who was a freshman at the time, normally a bit of a cocky obnoxious pain in the neck to the upperclassmen. He was stunned and silent. He didn't yet know if his family was OK. We normally wore our uniforms to class on Thursdays. That went away for a while. No one knew if what had just happened was the end, or only the beginning. We'd hear shortly about anthrax allegedly getting mailed to people.
It's difficult to describe to folks who didn't live through the period just how much in the initial days after, no one really knew what was going on. But conversely, it's difficult to describe how the petty differences between people seemed to drop away for a while, be those race, politics, local issues, or whatever. No, they didn't disappear. But at least for a while, people felt a lot more like they and everyone else around them were on the same team. We were under attack, or at least we feared we were, by some entity external to us as Americans. It had attacked us, seemingly out of nowhere, for simply being Americans. And we didn't yet have the absolute firehose of misinformation getting piped into screens in our pockets that would unfortunately come later.
I'd joined the military out of a goody-two-shoes Eagle Scout desire to do my duty to God and my country, and also because I'd wanted to fly jets since I was in fourth grade. I'd wanted to fly Navy jets because carrier aviators were better [I mean, we are. No dispute there. - Ed.] and because I'd grown up with a mother who was the apple of the eye of her father, a crusty old former submarine Lieutenant Commander who did not suffer fools lightly when 9-year-old me acted up. The simplistic ways we make decisions at 18 years old. I had no plan beyond that. Would I do my time and get out? Would I stay in and retire? Those were decisions for another day.
And then two years later, it seemed that as my grandfather had had Pearl Harbor and the Empire of Japan, my generation now had our war and our adversary. Shortly after, the NROTC unit would get a new Marine Major and Gunnery Sergeant assigned. The Major had transferred in from Kandahar, marking him as squarely "badass" in our young midshipman minds. And soon after, we would commission, and it would be our turn to go out into a world we scarcely could have imagined existing in August of 1999, when we'd been bused home from a weeklong quasi-boot camp at Fort Indiantown Gap and formed up in front of our families on campus wearing the cloth of our nation. Being in "the Fleet" now had a new meaning. I couldn't have realized at the time it'd take me nine years of sweat, frustration, effort, stubbornness, and sheer cussedness to ultimately end up in the skies over Afghanistan. But that's a separate story.
One guy's experience, for what it's worth. One thread in the tapestry of history that's unfolded since.