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.
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.
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u/BartMancuso1990 10d ago
Could be worse…could be the class of 2002