Five years ago tomorrow morning, I got up to get ready for my day's classes at Scott. My dad had taken the day off and was in front of the TV watching CNN like every morning. That morning he told me to come look, because an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center. I wondered how that could happen in the era of autopilot and computer maps, but then we watched the 2nd plane hit the other tower and I had the terrible realization that this was being done on purpose. The news kept coming in: the attack on the pentagon, the "missing plane," the crash in Pennsylvania...
I kept coming back to two thoughts. One was that the horrible things written about in books by Tom Clancy and Dale Brown were happening for real, and the other was that things would never be the same for our country. If I had known then how true that would turn out to be I would have been even more devastated. I drove over to school, but people were just walking around the halls like zombies, or clustering around the TVs watching. My Literature professor said there was no way we could concentrate on our studies with this happening, and we sat around talking about it until everyone just drifted off to the TVs or their homes. I felt a strange need to watch the TV coverage essentially non-stop, because I felt like doing anything else but paying attention to this was disrespectful to what had happened.
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