InnerTeub

“There are people out there who hate us, and they want us to die. If I can go over there, and in some way make sure they don’t come over here, that’s worth it to me”

That’s what my husband said to me just before his deployment to Northern Iraq in 2008. I was asking him how he felt about going, if he was resentful or anxious or feeling like he shouldn’t. With most people I know in the military, there is a feeling of “if my friends are going then I should be going too” but I think I was glad to hear that there was conviction in him that went beyond that.

I mention this not just because today is September 11th, but because there’s been discussions on my little corner of the Internet recently about young soliders and other recruits that enlisted after September 11th, and how sad it was that most of the recruits came from places very far from New York and D.C., the implication being, I think, that it was perhaps less their responsibility to fight than people who were more personally impacted by the attacks.

I think I understand the point — there could be, perhaps, closer examination about recruiting techniques and the reality that for all the opportunities the military offers, it perhaps unfairly targets the poorest among us for a more dangerous job than more fortunate people would need to consider, but mostly I just think… who cares if someone in the military comes from Texas or New York, isn’t the danger of the attacks coming here the same for all of us?

I lived a few blocks away from the White House in 2001, and the night of September 11th, I went to bed more scared than I have ever been in my life. I remember thinking how weird that was, that I was frightened to fall asleep; I kept my contacts in and my shoes nearby, because I honestly didn’t know if I’d get to sleep through the night. My stepdaughter has never, ever felt that way. And that’s why my husband went over, and his friends, and many, many other men and women who would likely rather be doing something else with their time, and I don’t think their sense of responsibility or duty is limited to how closely that specific day touched them.

Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking about today — how that day ten years ago changed the way I view the work of our military, certainly how it altered the cadence of my life in terms of being married to someone in the military, (and not to mention my career, which has included many years of work in the defense industry and side work with wounded veterans as part of the U.S. Paralympic program – areas that prior to September 11th were niche markets at best) and how ten years is such a long time, how my stepdaughter, if she remembers that day at all, perhaps only remembers it in the most theoretical of ways. And how I hope that is as close as she will ever have to think about a day like that — something very bad that happened, a very long time ago, with no idea that it could be her reality, too.