I sat in my 3rd period Chinese class, the class had just began. My friend Luke, a lower classman walked in and told Mr. Wills that the World Trade Centers had been hit.

Mr. Wills got upset with Luke. He explained to him how it wasn’t funny to joke around about things like that and made him sit down.

I thought nothing of it, just thought he was joking or someone was joking with him just to get him in trouble by the teacher.

We began practicing our new vocabulary in Chinese. The loud speakers started to crack as our principle came over the PA system in the school, he was sad… you could just tell as his voice cracked when he began to speak.

He told us to turn on the class TV’s to whatever channel would work, or that we could see. The TV in our class room was blurry and it was scattered around by the usual fizz that plagues many schools cable systems.

The look I saw on my teachers face was of concern, he couldn’t believe it. None of us could, right away some of the girls in the class cried, a few tears peaked their way out onto my face.

It was surreal, impossible. Sitting here thinking of what I was going to do the coming weekend, and people are dying.

Most of us moved into the library. Right away I started to think about my father who is in the Navy and at the time was in the DC area.

I tried to relate to the situation and in my mind put him in the pentagon. For some reason I just tried to relate… in my mind I thought he was there but I knew he had left the area a few days earlier to move to Mississippi.

That entire day while in school, ever kept asking if it was a dream. I was for a few weeks unsure if it was a dream.

I couldn’t move that morning, I just watched for hours upon hours thinking to myself “how?”. How could something like that happen to the almighty United States of America.

It looked like a movie, the dream of a director when he envisions his war-time movies.

That dream of anarchy was no dream at all, it was a reality… that none of us were ready to deal with.