11 September 2010

Every year I reflect on the tragic events of that day nine years ago. What I was doing that day, where I was living, my personal relationships and my thoughts during that day. I also think how much I have changed in the years since. I was newly divorced form my first wife (anniversary 11 Sep 1999) and had been thinking about what went wrong and where I was to go from there. I was happy to be dating a couple women casually and one seriously, my now wife Chanda. I was sitting at work which was at the time as a mechanical designer for Comau-Pico in Plymouth, Michigan near Detroit. My job used to be to design automated tooling that welding car bodies together. I'd be given a task (weld these two parts to the body here) and some parameters (don't go over here or here you'll run into your neighbor) and told to design a machine to do the task. It was practical, artistic at the same time. I enjoyed it but hated working in an office, indoors all day. They ran the place like a sweatshop. If I took too long in the latrine then they'd be looking for me. The job I had on that day was a little different than what I was doing and I hated it. My task was to take all the other tools that everyone else had designed and fit them all into whatever building they where supposed to build this car at. It involved basically placing furniture around a plant. You couldn't change anything really because it was already drawn and completed and in most cases already built. It was boring and full of meetings with fat-asses FoMoCo engineers. I spent most of my day moving shit around the plant on some manager's whim and making copy after copy for the endless meetings. My board was in front of a small television that we used to play tapes (remember those?) of robotics and systems we where working on as a reference. I listened to the radio all day with headphones to drown out the horrible easy listening piped in and the disgusting noises made by 30+ middle-aged men with horrible diets. The news reported the first plane's impact and almost at the same time everyone turned and looked at each other. The TV soon went on and with the help of some tinfoil and stereo wire we had a picture. Suddenly my bad personal day became a national tragedy. They closed the building and I spent the rest of my day with my girlfriend and roommate watching the reports on TV. I knew my life would never be the same. I almost enlisted the next day but decided against it after I told my parents and brother. My brother got upset and thought I was going off to my death. Several years later I did enlist, mostly for the job but there was some patriotism there as well. Now I'm deployed and wondering all these years later where have we gone and where are we going? Our President has pledged to pull us out of both conflicts in 2011. Sounds good but why now? It seems politically motivated to me. Is either place better now than before we came? we never did find WMD, we never did find Osama. So what did we do? What did we accomplish? what did my friends die for? As much as I want those answers I may have to wait until the 20th anniversary of 9/11 before they are answered.