November 22, 1963
I was six years old when John F Kennedy was shot in Dallas. My memories of the time are clear: released from school, something awful happened in Dallas. The teachers wouldn’t tell us, so second graders were talking about monsters attacking the state. The staff wanted our parents to handle it. I fought on the way home, some boy said they shot the President, and I didn’t believe him. Words turned to fists, a second grader versus a third grader. I think I won.
When I got home, Mom met me at the door, tears in her eyes. I wish I hadn’t punched that kid; for the next few days it was grainy black and white television, first from Dallas, and then the funeral from Washington. The caisson carrying the flag covered casket, the rider less horse behind with the boots strapped backwards in the stirrups; the President’s family stoic and brave.
So I guess if you were six on September 11th, 2001, you would have some pretty clear images of what happened, even if, you didn’t have much understanding. To put that in perspective, you’d be twenty-four today.
It is amazing how quickly “events” become history. What feels like just a couple of years ago, is now in an eighth grade textbook.
Tuesday Morning
Tuesday morning, September 11th, 2001, I was in “recovery” mode. We had just completed our big home cross country invitational the previous weekend, I was looking forward to getting my team ready for the next competition, and to concentrating on my classroom. I taught senior American government class, and we were reaching the end of the first unit, trudging through the US Constitution and the Amendments.
At Watkins Memorial High School we started the day early, the first bell rang at 7:19. The school was under construction; all of the in-class TV’s were off line. So it was on a restroom run between second and third period that a fellow staff member told me of a plane, crashing into the World Trade Center in New York.
A tragedy, a horrible accident; I talked briefly to my class about it as we started. When another staff member came to the door, and told us of the second plane, we all knew it was something more than an accident.
The Planes
I wanted to know what was going on, and I wanted my classes to know too. We moved outside and sat in the band bleachers of the football field, facing north, and turned up the radio from my jeep. The class sat and listened as the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, and heard the rumors of other planes “out of contact” with air traffic control. We heard reports of a fourth plane down in Pennsylvania.
And as we sat in the bleachers, we watched the final approach leg into the Columbus Airport, (then Port Columbus, now John Glenn International.) We listened as the World Trade Centers collapsed, and watched as plane after plane, maybe forty of them, lined up to land right in front of us.
Later that day the football coach and I rigged up a television with an outdoor antenna in our school’s wrestling room. Hundreds of kids came in, watching, wondering, and looking for answers: who did this, why, and how could it have happened? I spent any breaks on the phone, trying to reach my sister and her husband in New York. All the lines were down, crashed by the volume of calls. When I finally did talk to them that evening, my sister was at home when it happened, my brother-in-law had to walk home from the City. He had passed under the World Trade Center only a few minutes before the first plane hit.
My Mission
We released the kids from school, finally. I went home that night with a mission, to find out everything available, so I could teach my kids what this was all about. The Amendments to the Constitution would have to wait (it would end up being two weeks,) American Government at Watkins Memorial was going to be about what happened to our country, and our lives, on September 11th.
Out in the front yard that evening, the sky was almost completely empty of planes. Only one crossed, Air Force One, taking President Bush back from Nebraska to the White House. It looked odd and lonely; the escort fighters must have been high above.
The next weeks were filled with questions and information. We learned about Al Qaeda and Wahhabism, the puritanical version of Islam they practiced. The Class studied the difference between that and the Islam worshipped by the Taliban, the group that controlled Afghanistan and allowed Al Qaeda to set up bases there. We learned history: of Afghanistan, of the Middle East, and that Islam didn’t attack the United States, Al Qaeda did.
The class asked questions about how we should respond. These were seventeen and eighteen year olds (now thirty-six) and the question of war had tremendous immediacy to them. Several of the students in that class would end up in the armed forces, fighting in the mountains and villages of Afghanistan. They all came back, but many suffered injuries, both physical and mental, that they are still struggling to overcome today.
Eighteen Years
It doesn’t seem that long ago. On Friday of that week, I was in a car crash. My Suburban was totaled, my fault, but fortunately no one was hurt. On Saturday my cross country team went to the Galion Invitational, and since I had to find a ride to school I got there early. That gave me the opportunity to have a long talk with our bus driver, the sweetest older man ever, Lester Kahrig (here’s a link to his story.) We talked about war, about what would happen to these kids on the bus. He talked about “his 9-11” when he was seventeen, Pearl Harbor, and about the war he fought in the Pacific.
Those weeks were the best teaching I’ve ever done. They were also the best learning my classes ever did. There were no tests, no matching “Osama bin Laden” to “leader of Al Qaeda;” there was no need. The kids wanted to know, needed to know. I don’t remember any principal saying that I could take my class this direction, but they knew it was the right thing to do.
Eighteen years since 9-11, it’s time to let Afghanistan go. One of the things were learned in those weeks is that controlling Afghanistan is like holding desert sand in your hands, you might think you’ve got it, but slowly, inexorably, it slips between your fingers. The harder you clench, the more slips away. Every conqueror from Alexander the Great, to the British, to the Soviets figured it out. America needs to learn the lesson too.
Kids who weren’t born on 9-11, shouldn’t be fighting there.
