At War with Everybody

At War with Everybody 

  I was very young and living in Korea when it happened. I don't remember anything except for what my family told me when I was old enough to understand. My sister said that they let school out early, and it just so happened that my mom turned thirty one the day before. Happy birthday, mom, have some horror. 

  I heard scattered, hodgepodgey things as I got older, and I was very confused. I heard people talking about the Twin Towers, and I wondered why people were talking about Lord of the Rings in that manner. It was one of those things where I didn't really have a eureka moment, nor did some older person have to explain it to me. I just slowly came to understanding and acceptance, and that was probably better for me. That wasn't until at least second or third grade. Even then, I knew what had happened, but not why. And I really didn't know what it had to do with my dad leaving for a year. 

  It was when I lived in Florida.  My parents called me into their room where dad had a suitcase lying open on the bed. They told me that dad had to go away for awhile, and mom was really sad, and I didn't know why. They referred to when he had to go to Bosnia before I was born, and I did recall them talking about that a few times in the past, but then my dad said he was going somewhere I was completely unfamiliar with: Iraq. He showed me a map and talked a bit about it, but I still didn't get it. I thought he was just going on a little trip for a week. I still didn't get it when the weeks, months, and seasons passed. I still didn't get it when he came back and had to go again. I still didn't get it when we moved to Georgia and he left again. But I finally did get it when he left again after leave for Christmas. I don't know what made me finally get the picture that one time, that one moment when I saw him walk through the door into the great yonder so he could leave his family for another eight months. I understood why mom was crying. And I understood why he had to do this. 

  I remember my mom and I sitting in the living room watching a NatGeo special about the September Eleventh attacks. I remember a commentator who was the organizer of some website presenting his theory that the government had staged the attack so we'd have a reason to go to war, and, honestly, this theory intrigued me. But then they spoke to another person, a woman who had family members die in the attack. "Those people," she said, referring to the conspiracy theorists, "Think nothing for the three thousand who died that day. They think nothing for my family." Then I knew. I knew that the attacks were a very real and a very scary thing. I knew that the men in Iraq, my dad, were working to make sure that this could never happen again. My dad was fighting a war against people who didn't want our land or our resources; they simply hated America and wanted it wiped off the map. When my dad came home that summer, I had never been so happy to see him in my life, and I understood. 

  My dad took a job in the Pentagon because it would guarantee that he wouldn't have to go to Iraq again. I loved DC; I loved the green parks, the museums, the monuments and memorials; I loved the history. And I thought it was the coolest thing ever that my dad was a lieutenant colonel who worked in the largest office building in the world for the most powerful army in the world. 

  When my uncle was coming to visit, we got a chance to see where he worked. We had to get a lot of clearance and bring three forms of I.D. on the day we came. We weren't allowed to take pictures and we could only stay for a limited time. It was because they were scared. They couldn't just rely on barbed wire fence anymore. Threats didn't wear army uniforms and march in formation anymore. They were externally ordinary people who had very extraordinary convictions in their hearts. They carried backpacks with bombs and answered only to God. 

  When we finally did get in, I remember being in awe at its... normalcy. Despite the peculiar shape and the people walking around in camo, it was just like a regular headquarters. If anything, it was actually more like a small city. There was a coffee shop, a pharmacy, and a hot dog stand in the courtyard (affectionately dubbed Ground Zero Cafe due to the Soviets thinking it was a bomb shelter for the President during the Cold War.) If it was equatable to a city, though, then there was a wing that could definitely be the slum-turned-sleek. 

  Beautiful wood cases and pictures lined the walls. The cases contained artifacts of military and Pentagon history, and the paintings depicted presidents, generals, and other history-makers. This was the wing the plane crashed into. 

  Strangely enough, there were already plans to renovate this section when it happened. It can be said that the success of rebuilding the wing and the minimal amount of time it took is a testament to the American integrity that the terrorists were trying to defile. I just thought it looked cool. 

  Two years passed and we picked up and left again. Dad went from working at the world's largest office building to the world's largest military base; so I started eighth grade in Texas. 

  We had a substitute in my first period that day. I remember her saying, "We should have an assembly or something after what happened." I had no idea what was going on, and still didn't when I walked into my history class.

  I loved my teacher. He was an ex-military Civil War re-enactor who treated us like we were in college. He was a red blooded patriotic Texan that I had the utmost respect for. And I was just as thrilled as he was that Osama Bin Laden was dead. 

  He gave it to us straight. He was friends with a Navy Seal, one of those who was on the mission, so he got the news even before some of the news outlets. "Don't believe anything else you hear," he said, "We. Killed. Bin Laden. They've buried him in the middle of the Pacific ocean so he can't get dug up, and we've finally gotten justice for 9/11." 

  I remember hearing some conversation in my science class later. "We shouldn't be celebrating so much," someone said, "It's not right to be happy someone died, no matter who they are. I feel like we're fighting fire with fire."

  I stopped to think and I realized that she really did have a point. Is it an eye for an eye or fighting fire with fire? I still don't know the answer. I don't think I ever will. 

  I really wish my story could end here. But when one door closes another opens, and that applies to more than people think. Before we had to fight a war against ordinary people with an uncatchable leader. Now the leader's gone, but the army is still there. And the army is getting more formidable. 

  I was searching for pictures of ponies for drawing references on Google a little over a month ago. Under the search bar was a message that said something like "go here if you have information about Boston Marathon bombing victims." Curious, I searched "boston marathon bombing" and was taken aback. Three people, including a little kid on the sidewalk, died when a bomb detonated at the Boston Marathon finish line. Hundreds more were injured. I couldn't bear to look at the photos. 

  A few days later the Boston police were chasing the suspects when one of them shot himself and the other ran away on foot in the dead of night. Some poor guy notified the police that they thought the suspect was hiding in a covered boat in his neighbor's yard. So began a standoff that lasted what felt like forever. Me and my parents gathered 'round the tv, like a family listening to FDR's Pearl Harbor speech, and watched live coverage of the standoff. I drew and colored a foot-tall Rarity in the time it took for them to coax him out, and I could have drawn many of them in that time. She's still hanging on my wall. 

  I was going to go to my first Thunder Over Louisville a week from then. The kids in my history class were talking about Thunder, and many said that their parents wouldn't let them go because they were afraid that something bad would happen. Some speculated that they'd cancel Thunder. "Absolutely not," the teacher said. "That's exactly what the terrorists want to happen. They did this to scare us. We need to show them that we're not scared." Thunder wasn't cancelled. We did show them that we weren't scared. We might have showed them on the outside, though, but deep in our hearts, we were petrified. It became all too real that the people who hate us were not just gathered in the Middle East. They were everywhere. They were the weird Russian guys that lived next door, they were the paranoid hermit who lived one apartment under you. And the terrorists knew this. They used it to their advantage. They made it so that we couldn't trust anyone anymore. They made us start a war on an impromptu army; we were at war with everybody. And we're still fighting right now.