Three Years Ago...

...I was in Seattle, Washington. On vacation from my job in Saudi Arabia, I was almost literally half a world away from my life in Arabia as I looked back on my tour of the Experience Music Project next to the Space Needle and my ducking of fish tossed into the crowd by not-so-accomplished fish tossers in Pikes Place Market. I boarded the plane to Spokane to visit my best friend Ron, my neck so stiff I hadn't been able to sleep well the night before and I had a throbbing headache. It was the worst neck pain of my life at that point, perhaps from the more than 24 hours I'd flown across the Atlantic in the recent days...or maybe it was because my body knew what my mind didn't yet: that the next day was going to become infamous.

I arrived in Spokane and arrived at Ron's house before he or his wife were home from work. Ron had left me a key so I parked the rental vehicle and went inside. The house was eerily quiet. Ron and his family are quite religious and have numerous bibles on their bookshelves. The house was spotless. Ron had come a long way from our early days as school kids so many years before. Ron and his wife Cheryl came home and their kids too. The house sprang to life. Ron and I hadn't seen each other in a long while so we had a good visit, reminiscing as old best friends do. That evening, Ron invited an old schoolmate of ours, David, to join us for dinner. David apparently is quite apocalyptic in his Christian beliefs and spoke a lot about the end of the world. I began hoping just for the end of the dinner and the uncomfortable sermon.

After David left and Cheryl and the kids went to bed, Ron and I stayed up late as we invariably do, discussing life, the universe, and everything. Our conversation moved into comparisons of generations, similarities and differences, and so forth. I then told Ron I felt that ours and younger generations had little understanding or ability to comprehend what an attack on the USA was like since the last time it happened was in late 1941 at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii...and even longer since any real attacks other than the drifting balloon bombs the Japanese got to shore during that same war had occurred on our North American states. We discussed this at length, then we decided we best get to bed and get some sleep.

I stayed in their son's room as he was sleeping over elsewhere. I slept well until I was awakened by Ron excitedly telling me to get up, get up! Now, Ron and his family rarely watch television but the TV was on. Ron told me to hurry and come in and watch the news with him, that the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. Knowing Ron's propensity to "pull my leg", I figured this was a practical joke of some sort but I got up and went into the living room.

As you know, a plane, in fact two, hit the World Trade Center in New York City that morning, another the Pentagon, and finally another into a field in Pennsylvania. We watched as the very topic of the very night before unfolded in horrifying reality.

The following days saw me drive to visit my family in Montana, rent a cabin on the shore of Flathead Lake, and deal with the fact that I was soon due to fly back to Saudi Arabia to continue training Saudi troops in Riyadh! I wrestled with the decision for days and days, looking for jobs in my home county, considering moving back to Arizona, and other options. Delta flights were suspended and I ended up missing six days of work before I got a flight back to Saudi Arabia. The company paid me for only three of those days. Life in Saudi Arabia is another story, or perhaps a book, but I did opt to return to my job there. Little did I know that a year and a half later, I would get to learn exactly what it's like to be attacked without warning by terrorists using explosives to wreak havoc.

But I will certainly never forget standing under the Space Needle two days before it became identified as a likely target and definitely never forget talking about young generations naive to strikes against them on their own turf.

We are no longer naive.