I didn't know the World Trade Towers had been destroyed until later that evening of Septemer 11, 2001. The moment the towers were hit, I was in bed still fast asleep. It was still 6 in the morning my time. I lived in Boise, Idaho; thousands of miles away. By the time my classmates and I got to school, the last plane had crashed in Pennsllyvania. We didn't see any live shots of the planes hitting the towers. Everything was old news by the time we got it. Even when we did watch the news, what was happening didn't really hit home. No one really took the events seriously. We didn't understand that the planes weren't just accidents.
We had class as usual. The teachers didn't play the news for more than 10 minutes each class period. There wasn't much discussion about the crashes. Boise is a very isolated moutain city and news takes a little longer to travel there. Our conversations were also restricted by our conservative government and school system. We didn't really express our feelings about it. I can remember being horrified, however, when I heard two girls discussing the New York/Washington DC trip that was supposed to take place that spring. They said "I suppose this means that everyone is going to freak out and cancel the trip. It's all just going to go back to normal by then but adults always ruin things." I knew that this was much bigger than a school trip. I had seen the people jumping out the windows trying to escape a slow death. That was also when I heard a girl say "Wow! Look at those people! That's so cool that they're jumping!" It was so surreal that my classmates didn't understand that thousands of people were about to die. It was just all too far away.
After awhile the teachers had discussions with us and encouraged us to share our feelings. As the waves of information began flooding the news sources it became more confusing to understand where the rumours lay. We started the typical high school fundraiser of collecting coins, holding bake sales and the like, thinking we were such heroes to raise money for a cause we didn't even understand fully.
Obviously today Boise better understands what happened. The biggest air force base in the west is an hour south of Boise and many airmen left their families within the next few months. The impact 9/11 had on my town wasn't huge; things are pretty much the same as they were 5 years ago. But little reminders are still there: the first military death in the war was from Mt. Home Air Force Base in Idaho. It's amazing how mountains can still isolate people from the world even in this modern day age.
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