Stephen Green pretty much describes what I awoke to a year ago today. Except I don't have a girlfriend, I used the word "fuck" a lot more, and I got very, very drunk that night.

I was waken by my alarm at around 8:00 AM. By this point the first tower had fallen, the Pentagon had been hit, and the second tower was in the process of collapsing. My radio was tuned to an obscure AM oldies station, that keeps its morning DJ stupidity to a minimum. Usually they make a corny joke, tell the name of a song, and start playing it. Not on this day.

Normally I'd hit snooze and sleep in for another hour (I'm not a morning person), but the DJ was crying, and announcing the details of the morning's events. I swear to god, my first groggy, half conscious thought was, "what kind of a sick fucking April fools day joke is this?"

I listened for about 30 seconds, trying to figure out what they were talking about. Suddenly I realized, this ain't April, it's the middle of freaking September. I shot out of bed at that exact moment, and turned on the TV. I don't know what I was expecting at that point, I guess a repeat of the 1993 carbombing. What I saw was Aaron Brown standing infront of the ruins of lower Manhatten. Smoke was everywhere, America's greatest city was being evacuated. The Pentagon was in flames, we couldn't tell how bad. Initial casualty estimates ranged as high as 20,000. We were under attack.

All state and local government facilities were under lock-down. The air traffic system had vanished. The president was in a secret location. Would there be more attacks? Who had attacked us? Where would the first nuke go off? On my way into work, still in shock, I saw something in the sky both horrifying and reassuring at the same time: an F-15 flying a combat air patrol (CAP) over Seattle. It was something I never imagined I’d see in my life. We were flying CAP over our own capital! We were at war, and we were on the defensive.

Me and Cornflake (he was still up here in Sea-town at the time) met for dinner and beers at the local hot-wing joint, as was our Tuesday custom, attempting to attain some kind of normalcy. Of course, the conversation was on a single topic. We had discussed at length in the years before the inevitability of a day like this, we had realized the threats that existed. But in our previous thought experiments, we had only considered two possibilities: a) that we would have many more of the USS Cole or Khobar towers style attacks, deadly, but small scale b) we would have a NBC (Nuclear, Chemical, or Biological) attack on one of our cities. We did not imagine that terrorists would be able to pull off such a large-scale conventional attack.

An even bigger surprise, to me at least, was the response of the general public. After four years of listening to the whining stupidity found on a college campus, I had long feared that in the face of a true attack, the American people would huddle in a fetal position and start sucking their collective thumbs. Patriotism was dead, at least according to the sniveling professors and media types. Aside from me, I thought they were right.

But then something happened. A flag was flown, then another, and, within an hour or two, they were cropping up everywhere. By the time we were at the wing-joint, flags were not only waving on car antennas, but out of the back pocket of the hot waitress who I was in love with. And there was no longer any fear. There was shock, anger, rage, confusion, and sadness, but no fear among any of us.

It’s what I remember most about that day. That when dealing with the greatest disaster to face our nation in 50 years, my degenerate generation did not flee and hide under the covers, but stood up, like generations of Americans before us, and began to look towards our inevitable victory over our new enemies.