I was in 7th grade that fateful Tuesday morning. My dad was at work with the sheriff’s department at the time so he knew pretty much all the details as he called my mom who then woke up my sister and I to turn on the news, saying something terrible has happened. And there it was, one of the Towers ablaze with black smoke pouring into the sky. A couple hours passed and I was at school, nobody was talking about anything else and even our teachers were trying to find the simplest terms to explain to us what was going on but nothing made sense until days later when my folks and grandparents had the sitdown with my sister and I to go into details not so much the ‘what’, but ‘why’.

That fateful day had me flashing back to a memory of some two and a half years earlier when I was vacationing in NYC with my folks, sister and grandparents and we ascended to the top floor of the World Trade Center and gazed at the most spectacular view we had ever seen. The city and harbor looked so peaceful, so brilliant, little did I know that I would go on to be a lucky person to have experienced such a perspective. It wasn’t until a year and a half after the attacks when I returned to New York once more and got the chance to pay respects to those who lost their lives that fateful day.

Now, 14 years later, I am beyond proud to be within the ranks of those men and women in uniform who keep up the never-ending fight for freedom and doing my part to uphold our ideals.