nmah69.xml

nmah69.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-07-11

I first heard of the September 11th attacks eleven hours after they had happened. I was on Semester at Sea, a program that allows students to take university classes on a ship while circumnavigating the globe. On my way to breakfast, I found a large group of fellow students huddled around the one page of fax that comes in daily, our main source of news. People were crying and my first thought was that we were unable to visit Japan for some reason, the first stop in our voyage. The page had a grainy image of the second hijacked plane about to hit the tower and a time-line of events. "This has to be some kind of joke" I thought. Rumors were not uncommon on the ship. Slowly I realized this was no joke, and I sat with friends to grasp the magnitude of what had happened. The full reality didn't hit me until we arrived in Japan and saw the horrific footage of the attacks. I could not take my eyes off the images of the planes striking the towers, and bodies flying from burning floors. At every turn, compete strangers would express their sympathy to our country's loss. "Are you American?", they would ask. Many were eager to discuss what had happened with us and asked us how we felt. About a month later in Singapore, I was showing my passport to a customs agent. He said, "You are American? Your country is bombing Afghanistan, have a nice day."
When we first sailed on the ship on August 31, I would have never believed anyone if they told me in eleven days our country would be at war. When I got home in December, my friends said they felt sorry for me that I wasn't home to experience the events and the unity that followed. I told them I felt immense unity among the 700 Americans I was sailing with and that I felt sorry for them for not seeing the events from the international perspective with which we experienced.

When I got back to the states, I was amazed. American flags were everywhere! They were on every car and on every home. I immedialy placed a flag sticker on my (Japanese) car and it proudly still there, all be it faded. After the attacks, the flag didn't just stand for our country. Now I realize it honors the thousands of lives that were lost on September 11th, and every other life that had died to preserve it. Whenever I look at the flag now, I remember September 11th.