But it’s not just that generation. I’m not of that age. Vietnam ended a decade before I was even born. But I can remember being 17 years old myself. One day in september, it was an ordinary day. Nothing strange at all. I wake up, I turn on the TV, and the pentagon is on fire. Oh shit! What happened? I thought they caught the unibomber. Plus there’s no way he could ever hit THAT target…then the tv changes to another set of images. The world trade center is on fire. Now what the hell is THIS shit! Those are in NYC! The pentagon is in D.C! What the hell is going on today! MOM! TURN THE NEWS ON! I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO CALL THIS! Silence. My mom is not the silent type. MOM!!! TURN THE NEWS ON!!! Silence. MOOOOM!!! Silence. So I go downstairs, and see my mom wrapped in a blanket like a burrito, which I’d never seen before. Crying her eyes out. Which I’d only ever seen at her fathers funeral, and now the TV has images of a plane in a feild in PA. I know if my mom is sitting like that, unresponsive, crying her eyes out, I need to sit down, shut up, and watch the tv until I know what the hell is going on. When I grasped the levity of the situation that was 9/11 happening on live tv, I knew there would be a war. I knew it would be my generations vietnam, with unecissary fighting and death. I thought the draft would have been reinstated. Which to be fair, is a fair thing to think as you’re being told terrorists are blowing up multiple sites within the country all before 9am on a Tuesday.

When the PATRIOT[sic] Act passed, that was when I knew the terrorists had won. That was the moment of their success in destroying America. The subsequent war was just incidental at that point.

(BTW, for those of us in EST, it was after 9AM. I was, appropriately enough, sitting in my civics class when it happened.)