I didn’t initially plan to post anything for 9/11. It’s not that I don’t care, but that our family has left it unscathed. We didn’t have anyone in New York City when it happened. My mother didn’t get sent to Iraq or Afghanistan afterwards. My uncle was stationed there a few years ago, but he came home — with a minor injury, I think, but nothing so devastating that we talked about it. One of our friends also recently returned safely from his tour. Our family has been unbelievably lucky.
The thing is, everyone really does remember what they were doing, where they were when someone told them the news. It’s hard to realize it was ten years ago — and it’s hard not to talk about. It occurred to me that I don’t know that I’ve ever written it down, and I sort of want to. So, you know. Forewarned.
I was 15-years-old and we were living overseas on Misawa Air Force Base in Japan. It was about 5AM when my stepdad banged on our bedroom door and said, “Get up, America is under attack.” He didn’t sound anxious, as I recall, but I laid there in bed and I pictured absolute worst case scenarios — nuclear bombs and armies up the shores and whole towns laid to waste — and panicked. He came back and knocked again, a little louder; he said something along the lines of, “Seriously, get up, you need to watch your siblings, I need to go to work.”
So it’s 5AM and I go downstairs. I don’t remember exactly where my mother is — she probably got called in earlier — and my stepdad leaves for work not long after I get up.1 The news was already on, and I remember seeing the first gist of the reports — that it was just planes crashing into buildings — and having a horrible moment of, “Oh, that’s no so bad.” This feeling did not last.
It’s funny, because I don’t remember anything about the news, just a leaden feeling of, “What’s next?”
The base went on lock-down — Delta, if I remember right. If you weren’t Mission Essential, you were to stay indoors. But school was cancelled, and by 10AM there were kids playing outside like it was just another day. It felt kind of wrong, like the whole town should somehow just stop functioning — but how could they?
After a couple hours I got online and IMed one of my stateside friends; when I told him I’d just heard, he replied, “Oh, I’ve been hearing about it all day; I’m kind of sick of it.” Later that morning I was on the phone with my best friend, just processing. Every time a plane from the Japanese airports off base went overhead, I flinched.
I think it was probably the first time I really understood that countries stand separately. I don’t mean that in a bad way — I had the same weird moment of realization when I finally understood that not all Christians are not Catholic. It was a moment when my world expanded and I understood the width of it. Previously I’d assumed the United States and other countries all kind of worried about the same things, because I was a military kid and being involved with other countries was just how it was. While the Japanese planes flew overhead, I realized that the whole world can’t stop for one country’s tragedy — that the whole world may not even see it as a tragedy.
I think we must’ve gone back to school that Monday. For months certain roads were completely closed off, to divert all traffic through areas that were being watched. There was a Humvee across from the BX (by one of the gates); there was a guy manning a machine gun on top. There were always rumors about being evacuated, and I remember living in abject (teenaged) horror about leaving all my things behind.
Eventually things got back to normal, or some near semblance of it. The roads slowly opened back up. The Humvee stayed, but the machine gun got packed away.
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