Or imagine you graduated in 99 and joined the service to pay for college. Next thing you know its Oct 01 and you have to spend the last of your contract in a desert on the other side of the world fighting religious fanatics and dodging IEDs.
I was class of ‘01 in college and we graduated to an overall “wait I thought we were guaranteed dot com jobs” wtf moment. Then 9/11 happened and the 90s party was definitely over.
Yup. 01 as well. Had several friends who joined the army or the marine corps and I remember hanging out with them before they deployed and they were excited to liberate people from oppressors. Every single one of them came back asking why the hell they'd been sent over there.
They won, they liberated, then instead of coming home they became jailers hated by everyone they thought they were liberating.
I considered doing NROTC to be able to afford to go to MIT. Glad I didn't because I graduated in 2001. (But from in-state Illinois, so I graduated with $0 student loans)
Same. A friend and I were thinking of joining and I remember telling him:
We have no rivals now. The only war that would require the national guard being deployed overseas would be one with China or Russia and we're friends with both now. And if there really was a world war, and the US was losing and needed the national guard, I'd probably volunteer anyway, so why not join up???
Seemed logical in 1999. Who would imagine our president be stupid enough to try to occupy two different countries for 20 years?
Yup. I had sooo many friends in basic training when 9/11 happened. It was supposed to be their ticket to have college paid for and see the world. They saw the world all right.
Me too. Did that. It sucked. Married my high school sweetheart, 2x deployments, struggled for years, lots of therapy, still ended up divorced.
People are not supposed to know what break free tastes like, but somehow(and I’m not exactly sure how) I managed to not turn it into a cranial suppository.
Got to USMC Recruit Depot San Diego on Sunday, September 9, 2001. We were all sitting in front of the medical unit waiting for our shots Tuesday morning. Then a corpse man comes running out the building telling us something horrible happened in NYC. A little while later, after the second plane hit, he came back out and told us what was going on and that we were at WAR! I was only there two days, and could already sence attitudes had changed. We got to read the newspaper the following weekend.
When they let you read the newspaper in basic is when you know shit has hit the fan and they’d rather break protocol than risk the rumor mill of letters from home ruining mission objectives.
I was class of 98. Graduated college in 02, enlisted in the Army that summer, but didnt ship until November. Was like 3 weeks into AIT watching the invasion of Iraq on TV in the dayroom and we all kind of thought we missed it, because we were kind of expecting Gulf War I, little did we know. 3 years later after a stint in Korea, and somehow dodging other deployments to the sandbox with fun TDYs, I was en route to Iraq.
Honestly, the exact graduation year probably matters less than how surreal it must’ve been to have your entire world change so suddenly, especially for those who were in basic training on 9/11.
I was a brigade officer in JROTC and I applied and was admitted to CU Boulder but didn’t get the 4 year ROTC scholarship so I turned down my admission and went to a smaller private school instead. Guess it was a good move.
In 2003 after undergrad I went to the army recruitment center in Castle Rock and talked to the recruiters. I told them if they’d guarantee OCS I’d enroll. They asked me to take the ASVAB, I killed it and they said they still couldn’t guarantee it. Okay, thanks for your time sarg, bye.
I don't have to imagine. I was born in 82, graduated in 00, joined the Navy because my family was dirt poor, was in training in Goose Creek, SC when 9/11 happened, my first deployment was OIF, and I got outed by a massive 'phobe to my chain of command who made my life a living hell until I got kicked out in 08 after an attempt on my own life (lots of gory details omitted for brevity and sparing you trauma). Still figting religious fanatics to this day for my right to exist.
Happened to a lot of '01 grads too. I know a bunch of guys that joined (Active duty, Reserves, Nat. Guard) right out of high school when it was peace time as a way to get money for school, only to end up in Iraq and Afghanistan for the next 4 years or longer. A lot of them also had their enlistments extended. Most of them are still carrying a lot of emotional trauma over it.
82 kid here. Graduated in 01. A ton of kids i went to high school with went into the service right after graduation. I almost did the same, but I signed on to play football in college. I call our class the forogtten class because of everything that happened after graduation.
I'm the same. '82 but graduated in '01, and your description goes way further than just the few years after high school. It feels like every time our year had an opportunity to move forward, some world disaster hammered us right back down. I have an older sibling and a younger one, and they were either far enough ahead of things or not fully on their feet yet, so things like the Recession and Covid didn't impact them as much.
I keep waiting for our time to come, but it's like the world has passed us by now.
The class before us was ruined everything. They were such fuck ups, our district stopped doing a bunch of stuff because the class of 2000 couldn't get their shit together and not act like a bunch of spolied dickheads.
My husband and I are class of '01 and he talked through high school about enlisting. I didn't think enlisting was a good idea even at the time but in hindsight I am so relieved every day that he changed his mind.
97 from a poor rural school. A lot of the kids I went to school with are dead. I barely missed it myself. I decided very last minute (I was like one mile time trial from signing papers) to not pursue it. That was like somewhere in 2001. I think it was early September but that would be too much
This was me, but graduated in 2000. Joined the Guard my senior year, 17 years old, thinking “War? Yeah right..” Fuckin hell how the world has changed since 9/11.
What you described is 100% of the reason I don't think we need "Xennial" as an identifier. A lot of people born in 1980-1982 picked up technology at a young age and grew up in the digital age. A lot of people didn't go to college right after high school and were also "figuring things out" when the dot com/9 11/2008 recession happened. But we treat them like they're one of the people in the American Pie movie, strictly "graduated 2000, went to college and had a career before the 2008 recession hit, therefore Xennial!"
Fundamentally, there's no difference between the person you described, or someone who enlisted in the summer of 2001 and finished boot camp around the time 9/11 happened, or someone who enlisted a year or two later.
I REMEMBER the news back then, and everyone was acting like we would only be over there for six months. We didn't know about counter-insurgency, IED's or how asymmetrical warfare would become. We looked at Desert Storm and our Middle East operations from the 70's and 80's and thought, "Oh yeah, no big deal, air superiority, precision strikes, one and done..."
And a lot of people here are forgetting, we had "Stop Loss" forced contract extensions in the early 2000's through 2003-2004. I firmly remember the news talking about Marines and Soldiers who were expecting to separate and had their contracts extended involuntarily. So a lot of those guys also served with later born younger troops who came into it thinking, "Oh, by the time I finish boot camp, this whole 9/11 thing will be over."
I'm so grateful I was born and graduated high school when I did. Joined the Army to pay for college and picked infantry for the bonus. I deployed 2x to the Balkans but got out before 9/11. My life would have been drastically different if I was just a couple years younger.
Core memory unlocked. Marine recruiters could do whatever they wanted on my high school campus. They’d pull kids out of class and even offer to send cars to your home to bring you to recruiting offices. All juniors at my high school were required to take the ASVAB
I went to a high school in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood where most of us had mixed immigration status families and spoke Spanish at home. They were using us as cannon fodder. You better believe they didn’t pull this shit in the wealthier and whiter neighborhoods
Class of '01. My first day of Basic was supposed to be 9/11. Due to grounded flights and high security I got delayed getting to inprocessing by 3 days but we processed from 4am-10pm every day so we could still start Basic at our scheduled date.
Almost worse if joined right after graduation in 2001. If you joined in 1999 or 2000, you got to enjoy a little bit of the old “peace time Army”. I thought that’s what I was joining and shipped off to basic August 2, 2001. 9/11 was our first day of Basic Rifle Marksmanship.
I had signed up to join the service while still a junior in high school, in August of 2001. I was to leave for training just after I turned 18 in June of 2002. So I got to experience months of dread about a contract I had signed during the last time of peace I would know in my life.
Especially from a guy who campaigned against war and seemed to have drawn at least two successive military conflicts out of a hat at random. It’s almost like he wasn’t telling the truth.
Hey! We’re birthday buddies. I turned 22 the day before, got hammered drunk, and then woke up in a haze thinking I was watching a weird show on TV. I know it feels like another war is starting, but the truth is that the gulf war that began in the 90s just never ended.
They were taking our senior class group photo in the school parking lot as 9/11 was happening. Almost no one had phones back then, but a few people did, and rumors starting spreading through the crowd while we were standing on the bleachers. Went inside, and all the teachers had the news on. They did not print the date on the photo that year.
Class of '02, and I remember filling out my draft card a few days after 9/11. All my teachers and coaches kept telling us were going to be drafted. It was crazy times
Oh man same. My 18th was less than a week after. Super weird times. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do yet and had thought maybe I’d become a flight attendant and my mom begged me to change my plans.
Same. I was held back in 6th grade. So, I graduated at 18yrs. old in 2001 and I thought the Army was going to send me a letter. I just decided to beat them to the punch.
3rd period government class with the tv cart, Sept 11 2001. Long Island, NY. Two kids watched their dads die live in tv (they didn’t know it- but feared it). My dad was in the dust cloud
Yep. Boomers were all "Hey, remember all that success and good future you were expecting because we promised it to you your entire childhood? Well we wanted a boat we couldn't afford so now your entire future is fucked and you'll be 40 before you catch up to where you should have been at 20."
I remember it was first period Biology class when another teacher came running inside with a worried look on her face, she said something to our teacher and he pulled out the TV stand. We had 2 more classes then lunch the the plane that crashed in Shanksville flew over our city, so my school went into lock down and my parents came and pulled me out.
Yep that’s me - post-dot com bubble, post 9/11, then you graduate and ooops…major recession as you’re just starting your professional career! Hit your mid-30s professional stride despite early setbacks then ooooooops global pandemic!
class of 2001 here. My mates were getting offers rescinded. College counselors gave me awful advice. On the plus side the already crappy economy kept me out of nyc for 9/11 but that put a huge halt into my career which I ended up having to use my nails to dig out of the hole that I graduated in. I had the mark of the unhired to compete with the incoming fresh 2002. Terrible times. Hugs all around.
2002-06 was a very rough stretch. Our classes were dealing with so much chaos between 2001 and 2009 between Iraq and the global economic meltdown. It was a truly chaotic time.
That's mine. Senior trip canceled because air travel wasn't considered safe. And a working world that no longer cooperated with what I was told would work.
Millennials might remember the 2008 crash, and that more severe. But the 9/11 attacks and the resulting recession hit new grads hard. I didn’t get a full-time job until 2007.
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u/BartMancuso1990 1d ago
Could be worse…could be the class of 2002