Nine years ago today I was taking a calculus test in a classroom at James I. O’Neill High School in Highland Falls, NY, about 2 miles from the campus of the United States Military Academy at West Point. My teacher stopped us all to tell us that something terrible had happened, but that he wasn’t going to elaborate and we should finish our tests. Bullshit. You can’t drop news like that and assume everything will go on as planned. I was doing pretty bad in that class though, so I probably wouldn’t have finished the test under normal circumstances anyway.
When the bell rang, I left my classroom only to hear my classmates on the phone with their parents, many of whom worked on West Point, or were officers in the Army. A friend of mine, on the phone with his father, a colonel, handed me the phone, because his dad was with my mom. I still hadn’t been told exactly what happened. “Mom? What’s going on?” And the line went dead. It was at that moment the Pentagon had been hit. The Towers would fall a little while later.
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