Remembering 5 Years Ago

I remember where I was when I heard the news. I was still in college at the time and staying in the dorms. It was about 11:00 (CST, so it had already been about 2-3 hours) when I woke up as my roommate, Corey, was coming into the room. He said something along the lines of "There’s been a terrorist attack. The World Trade Center is GONE, and they’re declaring martial law." (Of course, they never did declare martial law, but who khat was really going to happen then?) Our school was in the middle of rural Minnesota, way out of the way of anything, but my mind immediately brought up images of army troops stationed on our campus. I didn’t know what to think. Who did?

My mind flitted back to a discussion several of my friends and I had had in our dorm, I think sometime the previous year. Being keen on stuff like history and politics, we often had discussions centering around those topics. So we talked about the Cold War and how that had been our country’s focus of threat for so long. Now that the Cold War had been over for about 10 years, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, what was the biggest danger to the US? We had concluded that international terrorism was what we had to fear most. We also concluded that it was only a matter of time before there would be some kind of major attack.

Of course, I don’t think any of us imagined, even in our wildest dreams (or nightmares), that it would, or even could, happen then. It was just one of those things, we had thought about only in a detached, intellectual sort of way. One of those things, where even though you "thought" about it, you never really believed it (or at least wanted to believe it). We had never considered the ramifications, the horror, the fear, the utter shock of such an event. We never discussed what it would actual mean. Watching the news reports, I could only think "It wasn’t supposed to happen this soon."

I called my parents to see what they knew. I have relatives on my dad’s side who live in New York, so I wanted to know if they had heard from them. They hadn’t been able to get through as the phone lines were all tied up. I imagine everyone who knew anyone in New York was trying to call into the state. I found out later my dad’s sister actually worked in a building right across the street from the Trade Center. Thankfully, they had been evacuated after the planes hit and she reached safety. No one else I knew was anywhere close to Manhattan at that time.

I went to my 2 classes that day, even though administration said we were free to stay home, if for no other reason than to try and maintain some sense of normalcy. Of course, that was impossible. I remember watching CNN and other news on and off throughout the day, grasping for every new tidbit, looking for any sign of hope, any sign that things weren’t really as bad they looked. Of course, they were.

Our world changed that day. I knew even then that things would never be the same again, though it was impossible to know what would come next. I think that was the scariest part of all.