September 11, 2001: Why I Fought

Note: My thinking and beliefs have changed a lot since September 11, 2001, but I wrote this essay from the perspective I had ten years ago and up through the time I enlisted in the Army Reserve.

I look back on my life and realize that it has been a privileged one when compared to the average person throughout the history of the world. My family was never wealthy yet at the same time I never wanted for anything. It’s funny how little one really must have and how even now I have much more than I actually need.

I enjoyed staying at home when I was a child. In fact, I was the one who most liked being at home. I generally disliked traveling and even going as short of a distance as twenty miles was a genuine, significant trip in my eyes. Traveling to see my grandparents in a different state was the trip of a lifetime; possibly the limits of what I ever imagined doing for the rest of my life. Adventure and risk-taking did not seem to be a part of my future.

No one in my immediate family served in the Armed Forces. My father registered for the draft for Vietnam but the U.S. never called him (“too short and too fat” in his words). Yet this isn’t to say that I had no understanding of the Armed Forces while I grew up. My paternal grandfather served during World War II and my father and family always instilled in me a respect for the Armed Forces. My father and family also instilled in me a strong sense of patriotism, and a realization that truth and lies, right and wrong, and good and evil exist.

However, I had never considered military service during childhood or even early adulthood. I don’t exactly know why that was. Sure, it probably had something to do with my tendencies to enjoy staying at home and not traveling. It also probably had something to do with my public schooling. School directed me through the high academic classes during my early years, and then into the college prep curriculum by the time I reached high school; the Armed Forces never came into the picture as a realistic option.

But I can’t blame school or anything else for my choice not to consider the Armed Forces during the earlier parts of my life. In fact, everything that I have ever done with my life came down to me choosing or not choosing to do something. Therefore, any influences on me–despite them being real–were just that: influences and not causes. I have no one to blame but me for the choices I made and continue to make. This statement is true for all my life–including my indecisions and decisions about the Armed Forces.

And so I went through my childhood and graduated from high school, excelling the entire time and even being selected for the National Honors Society. But I had no idea what I wanted to do from there. I had not given life the proper amount of consideration. And so I did what I thought I was supposed to do after high school: I went to college. This would be one of the many, many mistakes that I would continue making during adulthood.

My first year in college was disastrous. It wasn’t a disaster because of my grades (although they weren’t great). My first year in college was a disaster because I had no desire to be there and thus shouldn’t have been there. I had inklings of this from the beginning but the truth became undeniable when, as a first-year computer science major, I took a course that required us to create a video game from scratch.

I had no clue where to begin when we received this assignment. Worse still, I had no clue where to go even after I reached the starting point. The professor of the course assigned us partners and after I explained to my partner the level of my ignorance, my partner told me to do one or two equations (which I wasn’t exactly sure how to do). I’m pretty sure I even had trouble just logging onto the computer in that particular class.

In the end, my partner essentially did the entire project. The best analogy I can come up with to demonstrate just how useless I was is to think of the project as a baseball league and the partners as various teams. I would have been the last guy chosen on all the teams, and once the manager figured out how worthless I was, he would have assigned me to the phony position of “fence fielder,” where my responsibility would have been to chase down and retrieve foul balls and home runs in order to throw them back to the players who were actually doing something. It was a thoroughly humiliating and humbling experience for me.

I should have stopped going to college and saved my money at that point. But like I said, I had it in my head that when you graduate from high school you’re supposed to go on to complete college. And so instead of ending college I first changed majors and then tried a few other different schools . . . and then I changed majors a few other times too.

Once I had blown through my entire, lifetime savings for college I decided to pursue a different course. I went out into the work world . . . with no four-year degree and no technical skills. And thus I began to drift in life.

My professional career was no better than my college career. In fact, it was no career at all. I simply moved from one dead-end job to another. I was aimless and on the fast track to living a wasted and uninspired life.

I was driving home from one of my dead-end jobs on September 11, 2001 and I listened to the radio as I traveled down the highway. I believe it was before noon and as I approached a traffic light I heard a news brief explaining that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. My first thought was something along the lines of, “Huh. Just like a plane hit the Empire State Building in the early twentieth century.” But as I soon would find out, the hit on the WTC was not even remotely close to what had happened to the Empire State Building.

I arrived home, turned on the TV, and watched as the various networks carried live coverage of the WTC. I don’t recall if I picked up the coverage at the time when only one of the buildings was hit (and thus saw the second aircraft hit) or if both the buildings were burning at the time. I do, though, remember that once I knew that two planes had flown into the WTC towers that we were not watching an accident but instead a terrorist attack on America. I also explicitly remember the moment that the buildings came down. I remember those moments because they were so shockingly surreal; watching those two tall towers fall was like watching something out of a movie. The level of shock I felt from watching the attacks on the WTC (and then learning of the attacks on the Pentagon and Flight 93) is something that I cannot properly convey to anyone unless he was alive and aware on September 11. I had nothing else to which to compare it; nothing else at that point in my life was on the scale of what was unfolding in real time before my eyes.

The attacks of September 11 impacted me the way nothing else before or since has. That’s not to say that there haven’t been other events (some more personally tragic) than September 11, but that day is clearly different than anything else for me. All the different things that stemmed from that day affected me and stay with me to this day. The world had changed and I knew it . . . and the first inklings that I needed to join the Armed Forces began crossing my mind.

The synopsis on the back of the book, Home and Away, begins as thus:

David French picked up a newspaper in the comfort of his penthouse in Philadelphia, and read about a soldier–a father–who had been wounded in Iraq. Immediately, he was stricken with a question: why him and not me? . . .

I had a thought similar to that following the terror attacks. My thought was: “Why not me?”

I didn’t immediately join the Armed Forces following September 11. There are various reasons for why I did not but the more time passed, the more I felt wrong for not doing so. I don’t believe that everyone is obligated to join the Armed Forces. Indeed, I think there are people who shouldn’t because they aren’t right for them or because they have legitimate obligations and legitimate reasons for not joining. Serving in the Armed Forces isn’t a requirement for making you a great patriot, a great citizen, or an upstanding person. (For instance, John Adams never served as far as I know. My father never served either, and yet he is the person I most admire.) But at the same time, the Armed Forces are important and if some people don’t join them then the nation wouldn’t exist. So I kept asking myself, what was my reason for not joining? The question wouldn’t leave my mind.

I began working at a call center for a student financial aid organization in 2002. I spent the next few years there hating my job and hating my life. I can come up with any number of reasons for why I hated where I worked . . . but those reasons would all pale in comparison to what the real reason was: me. We each are responsible for our own lives and I was living in a nation where we had the freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If I didn’t like what I was doing or where I was, I should have left and done something else. I had no one to blame for my station in life other than myself.

And the fact that I had the freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness struck me for another reason apart from convicting me as the root of my own unhappiness and wasted life. My freedom forced me to confront the fact that I had it because of other peoples’ sacrifices and willingness to fight. I thought about the attacks, the sacrifices and pain that our nation endured during the three years following September 11, 2001. I thought about the Servicemen who had risked and sacrificed much to act as the response to the terrorists who attacked us. I thought about those who had died–some of who were just kids–in an effort to preserve our freedom. And I thought about what our Founding Fathers went through to win our freedom–the sacrifices they made and all that they risked for something that many of them would never get to enjoy. And, of course, I thought about the wasted life I led; my refusal to take risk or even to do something to pay for the freedom that had been given to me by all those who came before me (and in the many cases of those dying now, those who came after me). And then it all finally came together. The question, “Why not me?” combined with a life fully wasted at that point added up to the answer: “I need to join the Armed Forces.” And so in 2004, as I neared 30-years-old, I enlisted in the Army Reserve.

September 11, 2001 changed America and changed the course of my life. It was the day that forced me to recognize the uniqueness of the United States in world history and it was a day that forced me to say, “It’s time to pay for the freedom and privileged life that I have lived.” Much has changed since then. I no longer look at things the way I did and events haven’t turned out as I thought they would. But one thing remains immutable and that is: regardless of what the final outcome for the United States is, I did at least one good thing in my life to pay for all I have been given; I did at least one good thing to pay for the privilege of being born in the United States of America.