I had only been in the Navy for 6 months. I was in A-school, where they teach you the job you are going to do after bookcamp. We were supposed to graduate the next day so we had nothing to do in class. We were all sitting at the desk talking when our class leader walked in and told us a plane hit the world trade center and all of the planes are grounded. We had no idea what was actually happening. We thought it was a small, personal plane that had it and and only a few people had probably died. We couldn't understand why they grounded all of the flights. Many of my classmates had plane tickets for the next day and were upset that they weren't going to be able to fly home. I was upset because I wouldn't be able to see my then boyfriend. Now I feel bad at how selfish we were. There were a couple classes that got to watch tv, but we never did.
Finally they told us to leave the building and go straight to our barracks room.
We were not allowed to call home or anything. They inspected our things and looked in our closets. After they left a snuck a phone call in and called my mom, but she doesn't watch much tv and had to turn it on. I called my boyfriend and said to him that I was upset his plane ticket got cancelled. He got mad and hung up on me. But I still had no idea the magnatude of what was going on. Finally they told us we could leave our rooms and we all gathered downstairs to watch the only tv and I finally found out how big of a deal this was and called my boyfriend back and everyone in my family.
The post about a naval base shutting down is right. It rarely happens. There were no cars on the streets. They told us if we weren't walking in groups of 3 or more we would be arrested. We had to leave our uniform on all day. Then we were given our speech the next day. A girl was crying frantically. She had said that she joined the military for the free college and she didn't expect us to actually really ever go to war. When you join the military there is a possiblity that this will happen. Joining for college is joining for the wrong reason. We were the future of the military and this is what we're really here for. I knew from that day forward the United States and it's military would never be the same. |