> This day should mean something, but I don't think it does anymore.
>
> The first 9/11 - THE 9/11 - I was on leave in between duty stations. I was staying with my parents, having just left Naples, Italy, with orders to report to USS Theodore Roosevelt by Sept. 14. Rob Kerns, the guy who would become my best friend on that ship, was still just a voice on a telephone to me. I asked him what to expect, because even though I'd been in the Navy five years and gotten promoted to Petty Officer Second Class (E-5), I'd never served on board ship before. He told me what he knew - what everybody knew - at the time: They'd already done their operational deployment the last time, so this time, it'd be jewelry shopping in Israel and nightclubs in France. Low-key, lots of shore leave, and just a good chance for me to get my sea-legs under me.
>
> Yeah.
>
> The morning of, I was maintaining my rigorous vacation schedule of waking up at the crack of noon when a family friend called, asking where I was. It was 11 a.m. Seattle time, so my dad laughed and told her I was still sleeping, when she told him to turn on the fucking TV. All of this got relayed to me secondhand after the fact, because my day began with my dad opening the door to the guest bedroom and saying, "You need to wake up NOW."
>
> And they were gone.
>
> The Twin Towers were gone, and it was after the fact by the time I turned on the TV, so all that was left were the clouds of smoke, bigger than the buildings themselves had been, and I struggled to make out what I was actually seeing, until they replayed the plane crashes, which allowed me to put it into scope.
>
> My schedule got a lot more complicated, since I'd booked a commercial flight to Norfolk, but all commercial flights were grounded, so I had to go to Whidbey Island and hitch a ride with the Rooks, the air squadron that would be deploying with the ship that time around. I actually wound up getting there around the same time I would have anyway, and the ship likewise deployed around the same time it would have anyway, even though they called in everyone early, because you're talking about a ship's crew and attached squadrons adding up to about 6,000 people. That's a small town of sailors, from all across the country.
>
> I didn't really think much about what had actually happened. Everything was reactive; revise my plans, get to the ship, adjust to shipboard life, learn my new job at my new duty station, let everybody I knew in the civilian world know what was going on, and when I got time to myself, I mostly spent it trying to sleep my way that many more hours closer to the end of our deployment. The last films I saw, on DVD, before I left were Transformers: The Movie and Memento, in that order, which was a mistake, since the reassuring nostalgia factor from the first film was canceled out by the final act of the second film, whose closing lines became my mantra during the months I was stuck on board ship.
>
> I have to believe in a world outside my mind.
> I have to believe that, when I close my eyes, the world is still there.
> Is it still there?
> ...
> Yeah, still there.
>
> We did 159 days at sea without a port call. That's ... what, nearly half a year, without setting foot on dry land? Granted, you do that in an aircraft carrier, it's the best possible ship to do it in, because you're basically in a four-and-a-half-acre city at sea, with a surprising number of amenities that you wouldn't expect to have on board a ship of war. Still, in spite of the size of the place, and its host of conveniences, ranging from vending machines and a small store for junk food to (extremely infrequent) Internet access and e-mail, the reality is that you're sleeping during the day and working at night, since that's when the birds fly off your bow and almost all of your operations are either directly or indirectly in support of those pilots (it's called an "aircraft carrier" for a reason), and you're doing it in a large gray metal windowless box that's surrounded by nothing but water as far as the eye can see.
>
> You do a LOT of living in your head in a place like that, because if you don't, you start to understand what prison might feel like.
>
> And yet, we were doing it for a good cause. We believed it - I still believe it - and everyone said so. And I mean EVERYONE. I got e-mails out of the blue from folks I hadn't heard from in years, who had wondered, years before, what the fuck I was doing joining the military, telling me to give 'em hell. I conned half a dozen comic book publishers into shipping thousands of books out to our ship and crew to pass the time, and I got news sites to post stories about it online (hey, I was working in the ship's Public Affairs Office, so that was my JOB). I got to meet everyone from Ann Curry and Matt Lauer of the Today show to actor David Keith and Sen. Joe Lieberman. Of the press corps alone, I sat down and spent half an hour trading alcohol recommendations with Peter Arnett (he remembered every place he'd reported from by what he was drinking at the time, and I told him to try himself some Mad Dog 20/20, to represent my own socioeconomic demographic), I bitched out Fox News' David Lee Miller for acting like a spoiled prick, and I befriended a non-stop stream of Associated Press correspondents, including photographer and Vietnam veteran J.P. Carter, who once gave me the following sage advice:
>
> "I didn't get shit like this when I came home from my war. People didn't think we were heroes. But don't you feel bad about people telling you that you're heroes. Somebody should get that praise, so it might as well be you. And as long as it lasts, take advantage of it, and don't you feel bad about it. Use that shit to score you all the money, and experience, and pussy that you can, because you've earned it."
>
> Looking back on it, I still harbor my doubts about how much I actually earned, but coming from a guy who went through what he did, those words always meant a lot.
>
> All of those words meant a lot, from everyone, because in a very real sense, they were all that kept me connected to the world that still existed when I closed my eyes, the world outside of our gray metal box, the world I didn't see again for half a year. And those words meant just as much because, for the first time since I'd studied World War II, I could actually conceive of such a thing as a "good war," and more importantly, I was fighting it. It sounds sick, even when I say it to myself, but as much of a tragedy as 9/11 was, I don't think I can even describe how ... AWESOME it felt, to be taking the fight to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Both my liberal politics and my gut-level desire to kick ass were fully engaged by this fight, against a pack of fundamentalist douchebags who killed my countrymen and oppressed the shit out of their own women, and everyone was backing us up. I understood, more fully than I ever had before, why Superman should exist in a world so similar to our own - it's so that we can read his adventures and vicariously feel the crowds of his city cheering him on. I felt my entire country cheering me on, even inside my gray metal box, and it gave me a sense of purpose, even as the contrast between that broader world and the painfully confined world of my ship sent me into mental whiplash.
>
> That was seven years ago.
>
> Tonight, I'll be covering the local American Legion's 9/11 ceremonies for the newspaper. Last year, all of half a dozen people showed up. This year, if the turnout isn't better, the Legion will cancel it next year, because as they told me privately, it won't be worth their time anymore. Nobody cares anymore, and the reason they don't care is because our leaders stripped 9/11 of any meaning it had when, as Keith Olbermann pointed out on MSNBC, they turned it into a goddamn seal-of-approval logo for all of their bullshit. And now, we're coming dangerously close to losing Afghanistan to the same sort of extremist fuckwipes who started shit with us seven years ago, all because we've wasted so much fucking time on fighting the dynastic war of Bush & Son, and if we do lose Afghanistan, then what the fuck did I waste half a year of my life out there for anyway?
>
> So, what do I feel today?
>
> I feel nothing, because while the outside world still exists when I close my eyes, the personal connection I had to this date no longer exists in the world that exists behind my eyes, inside my head and heart.
>
> I went through an honest-to-God war over this shit, and now, it's been rendered as incapable of provoking an emotional reaction in me as reading a series of turn-of-the-century baseball scores would be.
>
> I guess this is what I get for believing in things.
|
|
