The rumor was they hadn’t gotten their vaccines.  

Starting in the late morning, an unusual number of students were getting pulled from my middle school class about 25 miles from NYC. The rest of us noticed the furtive glances shared between teachers, the dwindling student population, the anxiety hanging heavy in the air. “I heard they didn’t get their mandatory vaccines,” one student whispered to me in art class. I nodded knowingly, and found myself repeating that rumor to others as more and more students left over the course of the day. I wouldn’t find out until my mom picked me up at the final bell – it wasn’t vaccines. It was terrorism.  

I was 12 on September 11, 2001. At the age one begins to learn how the world works, how the world works changed. I don’t remember anyone specifically telling me what happened – just that when I got home, my mom turned on cable news, and I saw the towers in flames. I didn’t exactly know what I was looking at. What I remember is not so much fear but confusion – what, exactly, was happening? It would take me months to understand the attacks, and nearly 15 to speak about them without bursting into tears. Sometimes I still do.  

I remember the image of President George W. Bush, sitting in an elementary school classroom in Sarasota, Florida, being informed of the attacks. I remember his speech days later on the rubble of Ground Zero, promising the world would hear us. I remember the high school students, years older than me, previously determined to go to college but opting instead to defend their families and our nation by enlisting into the military. And I remember the pledge I made to myself: never again.  

Though I was only 12, 9/11 taught me a few things. It taught me about human nature – that there are those who would destroy you, even if it would also destroy them. It taught me that the country that I loved was far more vulnerable than I had imagined. And it taught me the best thing I could do with my life is to ensure the values and principles that were under attack that day – our freedom – was protected both at home and abroad.  

September 11 was the day that I decided I wanted to work in foreign policy. It was the day I learned the importance of allies, and what we both had to learn from countries like Israel that had confronted similar threats, and what we owed to countries like the United Kingdom who immediately jumped into the arena with us.  It was the day I understood that values and ideas are not intangibles – they are in fact the more important things, the things some people are willing to kill for, and other people are willing to die for. It was the day I understood what true courage looks like in the men and women lining up to serve. And it was also the moment when I learned how what happens abroad doesn’t stay abroad – that it comes home to affect millions.  

These lessons have all stayed with me through these 25 years, as has my commitment to try to be a part of building a nation that continues to stand, unapologetically, for the principles that were under attack that day, and to defend without rest the security, prosperity, and freedom of all my American brothers and sisters.