Kathryn,
I hope that you don’t mind me sending you a quick story about 9/11..
On that horrible day, my daughter was attending high school. She told us
when she arrived home that evening that all of her friends were melting down
around her. She was consoling them and telling them that America was still
America and we would be fine. That day she pledged to us that when she was
older she would make sure that she made a personal difference in this war
against our enemies.
She graduated from high school intending to study linguistics. She did, but
not in some safe, ivy-covered setting. She chose the US Army. She went to
Basic and then graduated from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Ca
with honors from the Arabic program. First in her class. Then she went to
another school to learn the Iraqi dialect of Arabic.
Today she serves proudly with the 101st Airborne in a facility near Baghdad.
We don’t know much about her actual work because, as a Category 3 linguist,
her work is classified. We do know that she has an 80+ hour work week in
grueling heat.
She is not alone. For many thousands of our men and women in uniform, the
motivation to serve was what happened seven years ago. They are standing up
to our enemies and saying that they will never submit to our enemies. And
they will not fail.