September 11, 2001; I was fourteen years old. I sat in a classroom on the third floor of building D at Booker T. Washington Magnet High School. I was a freshman in high school, with little to worry about save my boyfriend, Tristan, and whether to go to Looney's or Eastdale on Friday nights. The world changed that day, and that's a pretty well known story by now. We haven't gone one day in over five years without hearing the words 'nine-eleven' on television or radio, the media constantly drilling into our heads the corruptions of terrorism, the Bush Administration, and a war being fought in a place most of us can't point out on a map, for a cause no one can really pin-point. In September of 2001, I was fourteen. This war was a media game, and nothing 'close' to home. I watched two big buildings crash into the ground and abandoned the homework I was scrambling to finish for Mrs. Yeaman's Law I class.. I new the world had changed, but couldn't have known how much. We were children. This war wasn't ours to fight, few thought the pre-teens of '01 would ever load a rifle in Afghanistan for this conflict. This was the start for a whole new decade of our generation. A modern Vietnam, if you will.

Why do I chose to write about this now, five years later? I never wrote about the issue before. Never really said if or how much it might have affected me. It's because now, it is the war being fought by my peers, and perhaps one day, myself. When you watch the people you grew up with, the people you went to kindergarten with, load up and ship off to an oversized sandbox, it hits home. When you find out that a dozen of your former high-school classmates have been injured or killed in this war that you all watched unfold while you were barely even IN high-school, it hits you. We were babies back then. We knew nothing of love, or death, or hate, or war. The anguish in these foreign places we couldn't name any more than we could name the capital cities. We were naive. Now the naive are fighting.

It all kind of hit this week, being an important week in my life. I started ROTC, which has begun the path for my military career, and a few of my friends, some classmates, some college-friends, some newer aqquaintances have left to fight someone else's war. I may never see them again. They may come back, they might not. Their children. They're nineteen years old! At the oldest, they are 23. TWENTY-THREE! Barely old enough to drink... but doing the fighting for sixty-something-year-old senators who won't send THEIR children to kill for their glory, power, and money.

It's real now... as real as it will get before it's my turn. And you know what - I'm not terrified yet. I'm ready... I'm driven. I'm tired of this war, and the fact that it's gone on too long, and killed more people than were necessary.

I just needed to get this out.