Bucks County, Pa. Like everyone else in the New York, New Jersey area, I remember the startling clarity of the day. Picture-perfect blue skies when I left for work, but heartbreaking later that morning as we watched the two towers collapse and the thick black smoke, billowing straight up and soiling the sky.

I also remember my son storming into my plant a few hours later. It was the 2^nd week of his freshman year in college, and as the towers fell, marketing and accounting became the furthest thing from his mind. “We’ve got to get even,” he raged, and in a comment that became gained popularity with a certain group of highly-motivated young men, said “we need to get some.”

But while America ranted, raged, and shopped, he became increasingly disinterested in college as he followed the Spec Ops forces moving into Afghanistan and one October evening, casually mentioned to me he’d enlisted in the Marine Corps, would I sign him out of college, and what did I think?

He told me that college was boring, that it had no challenge, and he needed something to that enabled him to stand out from the crowd. Playing the academic father, I asked him if he’d considered the other service branches…and by the way, Dude, while you and I like to go hunting and shooting…what made you decide to enlist? The other service branches he casually dismissed; “Anyone can do them; I need something that makes me stand out; something that makes ‘me’ me. I need to make a difference.”

He then volunteered that the 9/11 attacks made him think that college and a business career was no longer the be-all and end-all that’s so prevalent in the greater NY-NJ area; 17 people from our county were killed that day, and their hard-earned professions and degrees seemed suddenly unimportant and impotent to him. And how could people not volunteer for the military? Isn’t this our version of Pearl Harbor? He’d been doing some hard thinking since 9/11, he told me, and the more he thought about it, how could he not join the Marine Corps?

He’s coming up on his 9^th year now, and like most of our young Marines, has multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is hoping that the sudden personnel cutback doesn’t include him. An 0811, he takes pride in knowing the M-777 howitzer inside-out, and would love to be selected for an instructor’s billet at Fort Sill. What makes him “him?” It’s being a United States Marine.

What did I think? I reached across the table, grabbed his hand and said “I couldn’t be more proud of you. Do your best. Semper Fi.”