I hate the sloppy sentimentality around this day. I really loathe it.

The whole 9/11 brouhaha is an intangible mess to me because I was in BASIC training when it happened.

I joined a peacetime military as a combat medic a month before the Two Towers crumbled, and you’d think that suddenly finding myself in a wartime Army would have a profound effect.

You’d think, because that’s the easy assumption, but it didn’t.

On September 11th my training company was on the rifle range learning how to shoot M-16s. It was a nice day. The range was a fucking relaxing vacation compared to the rest of BASIC.

All you had to do was sit there and squeeze the trigger.

No screaming drill sergeants, no endless pushups and situps and jumping jacks and burpies, nothing, really, but squinting at targets and focusing on your breathing while you tried to hit a piece of paper 300 meters away.

We heard the news in the afternoon.

A drill sergeant we didn’t know pulled up in a humvee and walked over to the other drill sergeants. They huddled and then called us off the range and told us to gather in a circle. We knew there was something weird going on when they told us to circle up and kneel down while they talked.

We got our asses kicked if we weren’t standing at attention in perfect formation all the time.

In the first weeks the drill sergeants would pace up and down the platoon formations inspecting our uniforms for loose threads. Even the smallest tiny green thread poking out from the surface of one guy’s uniform would get us all smoked to hell.

We were training to be killers and they made us break the nail files off our nail clippers at the beginning so no one could cut their wrists.

The only thing we had that was sharp enough to get rid of the threads were said nail clippers, so in the mornings before first formation we’d race around inspecting each other’s uniforms going clip-clip-clip to every loose thread we could find. We looked like monkeys grooming each other.

Kneeling on the rifle range. The new drill sergeant told us that America had just been attacked by terrorists. That a few giant planes had piled into the World Trade Center after being hijacked by some dudes hellbent on jihad, and that our training might be accelerated if we went to war immediately.

I couldn’t even picture the buildings clearly. I’d been getting my ass slammed too hard in an environment full of straight lines and long days and sweat to bring up a mental image of the New York skyline.

We weren’t allowed televisions in BASIC. We didn’t hear any radio broadcasts in the immediate aftermath. We didn’t see any pictures or stirring magazine covers.

We didn’t see our family members crying, we didn’t walk around city streets looking at all the other thousand yard stares, we didn’t flip on the tube and watch every single news outlet going ballistic.

The thought of going to war was abstract to the point of insignificance.

We went back to firing our rifles, and that night we did a fuckton of pushups because some asshole platoonmate couldn’t get his shit straight.

When we began bombing Afghanistan soon after that our company commander played the radio broadcast over the PA in our barracks halls, and we all stood around cheering and shaking our metal bunks, thumping our chests, feeling like badasses because we were about to start killing people ourselves.

I went through BASIC at Fort Knox, which was and still is an all-male training facility. None of us had seen a woman in two months. The first thing I did after BASIC was walk up to the most gorgeous girl I could find in the airport while wearing my Class A uniform. She was eating at a McDonalds. I asked her if I could sit next to her. She said yes, and the last few months of training disappeared.

That’s what I cared about. Pussy. A female face. A flirty smile.

I didn’t rush around looking for pictures of the attack. I didn’t frantically dig up archived news broadcasts.

I shrugged.

The first time I did see footage I didn’t feel horror, or shock, or fear or pity. I thought, “Huh, that looks kinda cool. Amazing.”

It’s not complicated.

When our drill sergeant hollered at us on the bayonet training range, “WHAT MAKES THE GREEN GRASS GROW?!” we screamed back in unison, “BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD RED BLOOD DRILL SERGEANT.”

When he barked, “WHAT’D’YOU DO?!” we screamed, “KILL, KILL, KILL.”

So contemplating 3,000 people who kicked the bucket two months earlier didn’t have a profound psychological effect.

The country was being idiotic and overly sentimental about the whole damn thing, I thought. Civilians looked like a bunch of sloppy and undisciplined slugs. Those assholes needed to calm the fuck down and think about shit before we got ourselves into a stupid situation because we were so fired up to use our big missiles.

Which is exactly what we did, so when civilians who’d never fought in a stupid war started one my pessimistic ennui waxed large.

Nine years on small towns and mid-sized cities like the one I live in hold sad little Never Forget ceremonies at the town hall, and some pathetic human dregs turn up wearing sweat pants and XXL t-shirts, and when their kids start shivering because they’re sitting on the dew wet grass and the sun isn’t up yet they wrap them in ratty beach towels, and the whole thing looks broken down and abysmal.

We need to get the fuck over it.

If the people who died on September 11th saw what the whole thing has turned into, I think they’d sneer in disgust. Because that’s what jaded New Yorkers do.

In 50-years our puny cries of defiance denying the brutal reality of our fickle memories will fade like the lasts ghosts in an echo chamber, and we’ll forget.

Because that’s what humans do.