 I was already in the military, I was on the USS George Washington. I was a junior in high school. I called in, I was in third grade, we just got called in for recess, from a morning recess. Station on the USS Kitty Hawk over in Yakuza, Japan. When the plane hit the first tower, I still remember exactly where I was and exactly who told me, and birthing cleaners pretty much all shut down and we huddled around the TV. And I was absolutely positive that it was some sort of pilot error or something like that. But when the second plane hit, we were all pretty sure that the suspicions that it was a terrorist attack were true because most of us on board were there on that 2000 deployment where the coal got attacked. That was also the George Washington battle group, so that was fresh in our minds because that wasn't even a year beforehand, so it was pretty intense, especially when the buildings went down. As our parents actually lived and worked in New York, and they all dropped us off to school and then they rolled the train together, and we remembered that the stop that they stopped at was actually underneath the World Train Center. So we all got scared that our parents just got killed. We heard an announcement go over the intercom at school and they were saying there was an attack in New York and parents will be picking up the kids soon. I knew for a fact that my dad had actually been on the train because I had seen him off that morning and say goodbye to him. It wasn't until late that night that he actually walked in from the back door and he was covered in ashes and he had blood on him and everything and he was crying. It was really late that night and we hadn't heard from him since that morning when he left the message from my mom, so the whole day we thought he wasn't coming home. I think as a country we learned that yes we're vulnerable to attack. I know it's something that hasn't happened to us in a very long time, but that it also showed us how much we can come together as a country, that we still have it in us to care for one another, even for strangers, that we have that capacity to be united. It gave me that sense of pride that I could be born in a country like that, that my children would be born in a country like that where as much petty stuff that goes on that when it really comes down to it will be there for each other. All of a sudden being in the military got real and our ship was, the Kitty Hawk was on its own kind of forward rotation, so it was gone pretty frequently. We were just there getting fixed up in a CIA kind of period and we were gone in like three weeks for the Kitty Hawk to get up and deploy that quickly. We knew it was serious and it was the strangest kind of cruise because number one we didn't know how long we were going to be gone. We didn't know exactly where we were going and it didn't matter because there was just a completely different attitude. Again, now I think everything is shut down on the base. People are kind of nervous, but I don't remember anybody feeling scared about what we were going to do. I feel like everybody was ready to go do what we're going to do. I hope that that's the biggest lesson because you can't prevent every bad thing that ever happens but you can maximize the positives and just make sure that you're letting people know how you feel about them every day because they could be gone tomorrow for sure.