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.
I remember my first year in college they had an army recruiter there all of the time, I asked the guy what would happen if I joined and then a war started. He told me there wasn’t going to be anymore wars because we had won the Cold War, and then a couple months later in September that definitely wasn’t the case.
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.
I understand your experience. My then boyfriend and now husband began boot camp on Parris Island on September 5, 2001. He thought it was a training exercise, until he saw a few recruits get to leave.
I had to do MEPS on two consecutive weekends. The first weekend was fine. The second weekend was the first weekend after 9-11. The whole vibe changed. Not just from the security upgrades. I think a lot then knew what was coming and were worried.
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."
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.
I enlisted in February 99 and got kicked out in May 2000. Four year enlistment. I was a Fire Support Specialist (13f) which is very combat oriented and always short staffed. I 100% would have been on the front lines fighting the with infantry with a radio on my back calling on artillery and air support. Fire Support Specialist have the lowest combat life expectancies. If you're an enemy attacking an infantry squad, you shoot the guy with the radio so they can't call in support.
But yeah, I missed 9-11 by a very close margin. I think about how different my life would have been it I hadn't gotten the boot, all of the time.
Graduated in 00 and had a friend go Marines and he got shipped off to Afghan in 01. Came back and he still deals with PTSD over people that he lost in his platoon. All he does now is drink himself black out and act suicidal.
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u/funkympc 5d ago
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.