To Josh, Aaron, Jeremy, Jaeger, Julian and Allison, I wish you were here. Hopefully, the progress report on the war will bring you out of Iraq and back home where you belong.
I was sitting in my high school chemistry class in 10th grade, talking excitedly with my friends about this new movie coming out called “Zoolander.” A fellow classmate ran in, saying that someone had blown up the Pentagon. We quickly jumped for the television, and at 8:59 a.m. CST on Sept. 11, 2001, the collapse of the South Tower of the World Trade Center was broadcast to a worldwide audience. We remained speechless, confused for a moment as to whether we were watching a movie or reality.
After about five minutes, we decided to continue with the day’s lesson, for which our teacher, Dodie Wells, planned a demonstration involving the mixture of pure magnesium and water. For the non-chemistry majors out there, when pure magnesium is mixed with water, it explodes. The bang was audible from the outside, as some classes decided to exit for the day and try to contact loved ones in New York and Washington.
But the phones didn’t work. I couldn’t reach my cousins, Lindsay and Jamey, until a week later. No one at my school, Isidore Newman School, knew what to do. We were all gathered in the auditorium, where Dean of Students Dale Smith confirmed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He said President Bush was on his way to Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, and that senior Will Ensenat, the president’s godson, had been escorted off school grounds by the U.S. Secret Service.
From there, we were allowed to do whatever we wanted to do. Classes were still in session, but we weren’t required to attend them. The school looked like the music video of “Thriller,” with zombies meandering back and forth through the halls. The students are predominately Republican, and as soon as we found out the hijackers were Islamic extremists, the first reaction was to bomb the entire Middle East back to the Stone Age. They weren’t alone in thinking this. According to notes obtained by CBS News a year after the attack, Donald Rumsfeld, at 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, told his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq, even though no evidence ever linked Iraq to Sept. 11. The former Secretary of Defense was quoted as looking for the “best info possible. Judge whether good enough hit Saddam Hussein, at same time, not just Osama Bin Laden … go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
There was no questioning the President after the attacks. In the history of the Gallup Poll, no president has ever had a bigger approval rating than President Bush’s 90 percent, only 10 days after the attacks. At the same time, no president other than Richard Nixon has ever had a lower approval rating than Bush’s abysmal 29 percent, recorded the second week of this past July. We stood by his side when we were vulnerable, and we heard everything we wanted to hear. But it wasn’t the truth.
I was sitting in the my high school chorus room when I first heard about “Shock and Awe.” I didn’t know what it entailed until I turned on the television to see cruise missiles striking and blowing up buildings in Baghdad. Sirens and screams emanated from the street level, as the dark Iraqi sky was illuminated by explosions, gunfire and what in my mind looked like weapons of mass destruction. I could never get around the fact that we were looking for a man with such weapons, but because he never surfaced, we decided to instruct the Iraqi people, again, as to what weapons of mass destruction can actually do. At that point, I didn’t, or I refused, to see a difference between an assault on Baghdad and the tragedies of six years ago today.
Some say that the invasion of Iraq was based on oil. Others claim Sept. 11 was perpetuated by the government. According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted this past week, 33 percent of the country believes Saddam Hussein was directly involved with the attacks. We are in a war on terror. I’m not going to pretend to know how President Bush’s “brain” operates, but I do know that sending American citizens to die is not a way to curb terrorism. Invading a country across the world is terrorism. And Bush gave the command to commence the invasion.
So what does that make him?
—-Contact Eric Freeman at [email protected]