9/11 - 8 Years later

Flipping through this photo gallery, I started to tear up.

I remember, 8 years ago today, when it happened. It was senior year of high school, just after 'zero' hour band practice. Luke and I were hanging out in the commons after band, waiting for Paige to get there, since they hadn't let us into the hallways yet. The big screen was on, but we weren't really paying any attention to it, we were hanging out by the pop machines, talking about the football decorations the cheerleaders had made.

Kirk came over to us and asked if we had saw what was going on on the tv, we hadn't, so we went over towards the tv and saw.

I was taking RVC classes my first 2 periods that semester and they didn't meet on certain days of the week, this day being one of them, so I went home for the 2 hour break (all the radio stations were broadcasting newsfeeds - seniors had open campus privileges that year, so we could leave when we had no classes going on) and watched the news with my mom while trying to take a nap. I woke up right before the 2nd tower collapsed.

When I went back to school, all we did in each class was watch the news on the tv's in each classroom.

I remember after school, I got home and my parents had me help them take all the cars over to the nearest gas station to fill up our tanks - right after we started filling up, a ton of other cars showed up, doing the same thing.

I was working for Millward Brown back then and got a call that I had that night off work, obviously. When they did have us go back in, they told us they tried to take out of the system as many of the New York and surrounding area numbers that they could, but if we did happen to get a number or a person who was affected personally, to apologize and not press the call. For all others, we had a new intro, regarding 9-11 that we had to say for the following days/weeks.

Every since that day, my parents started watching Fox News constantly... I recall that was the only thing on the family room tv for months.

I just want to thank all our troops who have been fighting for our country, all the ones that have been over fighting this war on terriorism or will be in the near future.

I personally know a handful of people who have served and enlisted in the different various branches of our military: my cousins in the Army and Navy, my 2nd cousin-in-law in the Army, various friends in the army and Air Force, as well as friend's dad who is also in the Army. I also had many classmates in college who had enlisted in the military, awaiting deployment, or working hard as part of ROTC and later went on to serve our country overseas.

THANK YOU ALL for all you've done for our great nation!