Don't stories like this leave you awestruck? What really got me was the 18-year-old kid. He was 10 on Sept. 11, 2001. That would be... 4th grade. I was 14, a freshman in high school. And as I sat in my gym class and the proctor came to our class and read the note that said two hijacked planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers and two more were still in the air, that was the first time in my life that I actually feared for my life. (I had been in high school for all of two weeks. That was a pretty overwhelming welcoming present.) And the very last thing in the world I wanted to do was to join the Marines and go fight the guys who felt justified flying commercial jetliners into skyscrapers. And here is this kid, 10 years old, deciding right then that that was what he was going to do.
I'm not patriotic by any stretch of the imagination, but there is something about a person who volunteers for military service that absolutely blows my mind. Not in an are-you-kidding-me way, but in a that's-not-a-natural-thing-for-human-beings-to-do-and-it's-amazing kind of way.
I'm not patriotic by any stretch of the imagination, but there is something about a person who volunteers for military service that absolutely blows my mind. Not in an are-you-kidding-me way, but in a that's-not-a-natural-thing-for-human-beings-to-do-and-it's-amazing kind of way.
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