He relayed the information that everyone else in America and most of the world already knew: Two towers destroyed. The Pentagon bloodied. Another flight fallen out of the sky into a field in Pennsylvania. His silver bars often caught the glint of the North Carolina sun. “Gentlemen,” he concluded, “if ever there were a time to take this training seriously, that time is right [expletive] now.”
We finished our meals and went back to work. It almost felt like a hoax, as if our instructors were playing a game with us to see if we’d crack. Much of your training in the Marines is based on putting you through mental anguish and measuring and analyzing your reaction. A few weeks before, at boot camp, my drill instructors were screaming, “I bet the Chinese are training harder than you!” It felt off-script to suddenly be assigned another enemy, Islamic fundamentalism.
That night, during more navigation training, one of our corpsmen drove his pickup truck to our final rally point at the end of the testing and let his AM radio blast the news. I remembered learning once that when “War of the Worlds” was broadcast on the radio for the first time in 1938, people who heard the transmission freaked out and armed themselves. I listened to the radio for five minutes. The detail was too real to be a hoax. I was already armed.
I was 17 years old, and I knew then that despite having enlisted as a Marine Reservist during peacetime, I would be going to war. If Osama bin Laden had never carried out his attack on American soil, I, as a reservist, would have simply gone to college, cut my hair once a month, graduated at 21 and used the word “Marine” only on my resume.
During my first tour — the invasion of Iraq — the patriotism and resolve we all felt on 9/11 were palpable. Some of the reservists from New York wrote “we will never forget” on their helmets and named their section of the base after 9/11 heroes in their unit who had given their lives that day. I didn’t see the connection between the attacks and our invasion, but I did see this new battle as an effort to prevent future terror and protect the home front.
Bin Laden was still hiding somewhere, but at the time it seemed as though Afghanistan was on its way to becoming a stable democracy. I was eager to be where the new action was, in Iraq.
But the war in Iraq continued even after the president declared “mission accomplished,” and the battle plan and its objectives felt more daunting, overwhelming and confusing during my second tour, a year later.
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