10 YEARS

Ten years ago today I made the following entry in my journal:

"They are saying that this day will live in infamy, just like Pearl Harbor. It's hard to think of it in those terms but with everything that's happened today it must be true."

(Justin Lane/Pool/AP Photo)

I was a freshman at BYU just a few months out of high school and living on my own for the first time. That morning I had Mass Communications 101 with my roommate Sage. We were walking to our 8AM class up the long hill onto campus from Helaman Halls when we started overhearing people say, "A plane hit the twin towers." And from there the comments we overheard kept getting stranger, "The White house is on fire!" We couldn't make sense of it, in fact I remember thinking that this must be some kind of prank. I was able to process the thought of a plane accidentally hitting a building, but I couldn't begin to understand a terrorist attack. Or what that would mean. We arrived at our class where our teacher tried to connect our state of the art classroom up to a television feed, but couldn't get it to work. Welcome to higher education. Wasn't this supposed to be a class on mass communication? Eventually our professor started asking everyone to volunteer the general information they had heard. She started writing each comment on the board, each more awful than the last. Most of the rumors ended up not being true. That just goes to show the confusion every was experiencing at the time. After about fifteen minutes we were dismissed to go find the closest television possible. We heard that the Wilkinson Center had televisions on but we happened to be one of the few people with a TV in our room. We thought our roommates might still be asleep so we rushed back to the dorms and started watching CNN just in time to watch the first tower fall. From there the day is a blur but it wasn't until the special devotional that President Bateman held that I first cried. I don't remember much of what he said, except that they were words of comfort, but at the end he asked everyone to sing Come Come Ye Saints. And to this day I still can't sing the phrase, "And should we die before our journey's through, Happy day! All is well!" without remembering the Marriott Center filled with all those students overcome with so many emotions.

I don't personally know anyone who died. But thinking how some one who did lose a loved one on 9/11 must feel, then multiply that by 3,000 plus all the resulting military deaths and injuries and it becomes truly overwhelming. There is no other way to express it but to say it's tragic.

One of the saddest aspects for me is that a day will come when I'll have to explain 9/11 to Finley. She'll live quite a few years before she even knows terrorism exists and then she'll learn that evil things can happen. Even in our country. I'm not looking forward to that day. It used to be hard to think that a Pearl Harbor could happen in my lifetime, but not anymore. 9/11 does live in infamy, it's a day I'll never forget.