When I was young, I lived in a town called Placerville in the Sierra Nevada area.  One morning all the teachers were talking about a tragedy that had just occurred.  When I got home that day, my parents explained everything.  Everybody was in panic and very sad.  I was scared also when I saw it on TV.  I believe that everybody was scared not just because of the people who had died, but the people of America finally saw that our country was vulnerable.  At the time, everyone was so happy because the United States seemed like such a perfect place, like nobody could ever hurt us, then we were hit. 

When we went to see our friend Jeff Holmes in Lake Tahoe just 10 miles away, we passed the Lake Tahoe airstrip.  It was closed.  It took a long time until we could recover from this tragedy, yet still we suffer tremendously when the sad day of 9-11 comes.  My generation remembers this tragedy fully and completely.   Even though we were all young and naïve, we understood that something terrible had happened.  A few years later my dad and I went to New York to see my dad’s doctor.  We passed ground zero.  There were flowers all over the place and pictures of the people who had died.  Near the center of the plot of blank land, there was a flag, our flag.  I believe that the flag stood for we had been hit, but there is hope.