Xenophon Strategies

September 11 Remembrances: Dartmouth, MA

Erica Lawton

Editors Note: As our nation commemorates the 10^th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on The World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Flight 93 in Shanksville, PA, our staff will share their memories of that fateful day.  Whether they were in New York, near the Pentagon, at an aviation conference in Seattle, conducting business in London or sitting in high school classes around the country, each of us took time to reflect on the moments of that day which changed the way we live in the United States.

In the fall of 2001, I was just a few weeks into my freshman year of high school in Dartmouth, MA. Already a tangled mess of nerves and anxiety, my biggest concerns were focused on joining the right clubs and wearing the right outfits – exactly the sort of problems a 14-year-old girl should have.

On the morning of September 11, a roomful of students and I were practicing our prepositions in Mr. Elias’ Spanish 2 Honors class when a teacher from another classroom entered. Mr. Elias asked her if everything was okay while she wordlessly walked over to his desk, grabbed a remote and turned on the television set in the corner of the room. We gasped at the footage of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, murmuring “Oh my God” and “What’s going on?” to each other, and couldn’t believe our eyes as we watched another plane hit the second tower. One of the boys in the room proclaimed, “You know what this means? This is war!” A few of his friends began to eagerly discuss the possibility of a country at war, debating how long a war might last and whether they’d be old enough to serve in the military when the time came, but the rest of the room remained silently glued to the footage.

I don’t remember much of the rest of the day at school. After the principal went on the intercom and offered use of the main office phone line to anyone who needed it, classes resumed as usual with muted televisions turned onto the news coverage in every room. It wasn’t until I returned home and tightly hugged my mom before I truly considered what might happen next. I was scared and confused by what the attacks meant, and I could tell by the look on Mom’s face that they might have been just the beginning.

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