I was in my last semester of college when 9/11 happened. I remember that morning well, all these years later. I was sleeping because I was on the West Coast. I remember waking up and wondering why President George W. Bush was talking about a plane crash on the radio. Doing so seemed like an odd thing to do. I got up, turned on the TV and was in shock.
How do you choose to remember 9/11?
9/11 was when the world changed although we didn’t really know how at that moment.
I didn’t know how that morning would change the rest of my life. I had no idea.
At the time I was dating my husband. We were not engaged yet but knew we would get married. He was in the IRR (Individual Ready Reserve) at the time. That meant that he could be called up if something big happened. I think 9/11 would count as “something big.”
That was the first time I ever thought of myself as being a military spouse. A war bride. Someone who waited at home while her spouse was off at war. I thought he could get called up. That was in the back of my mind the whole day.
In the end he did not get called up but in 2005 he did join the Army and I became a military spouse. He has been deployed 4 times, to either Iraq or Afghanistan. The wars that started on that day in September.
The day that changed everything. 9/11/01, a day we will never forget.
As a military spouse I have deep and emotional feelings about 9/11. We found out that people could hurt Americans on that day. That we were not safe just because we were on the other side of the world from people who wanted to do us harm. The terrorists spent a lot of time, money and manpower to pull what happened on 9/11 off. They surprised us. They shocked us in a way we never could have imagined.
Because of what happened that day, our country fought back. We went to Afghanistan and Iraq and my husband was apart of that. It is weird to think about an event like this changing your own life in a personal way. When the tragedy first happened, I knew life would change things but I didn’t know how.
On that morning, I went to my classes at my college and that is all we talked about. Because it was so early and social media was not around back then, some students didn’t know about what had happened until they got to class. That morning was very strange. I don’t remember the words that were said in my classes but I do know we needed to talk about what happened.
That early we didn’t even know who was responsible or what the U.S. was going to do because of what happened. All we knew was that terrorists had come over to our country and killed a lot of people.
On that day in September, everything changed. From the way we get on an airplane to the way our U.S. military is handed. You hear people talk about the “Pre- 9/11” years in the Army and they are very different then what we experience now.
New York was never going to be the same. America was never going to be the same and military families were never going to be the same.
Every year we think about 9/11.
We think about the people who didn’t make it. The heroes. We think about the babies born around that time who are now teenagers and have only heard stories about what happened in their birth year.
We think about the soldiers, the airmen, the Marines and the other military members who fought for us after 9/11 who were lost in battle. We think about all of them because now, in 2015, what happened that day is something we can’t ever forget. It is something that will always be with us.
