A morning like no other: Local veteran remembers confusion, emotion of Sept. 11

Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-day series commemorating 9/11.

OTHELLO — Aaron Garza was standing post that Tuesday morning.

“In civilian terms, that’s like standing guard,” Garza said.

He had joined the Marine Corps in 2000, which meant on that Tuesday he ranked low enough to be standing post first thing in the morning — 5:45 a.m. local time, to be exact.

It was Sept. 11, 2001.

An Othello native, Garza served a four-year hitch in the U.S. Marine Corps. Today, he is a sergeant in the Othello Police Department.

Garza was stationed at a Marine base in Washington state (which he didn’t name) the day of the terrorist attacks, and was alone in a guard tower when he got a call from the dispatcher just before 6 a.m.

“My dispatcher at the time called me on the radio and told me, ‘Hey, this isn’t a drill. We’re not joking, something actually happened. A plane just collided into one of the World Trade Center (towers) in New York.’ I guess my first reaction was kind of shock, a lot of confusion.”

But there was more to come.

“They called me again and said, ‘Hey, it happened again.’ It kind of compounded my confusion,” he said.

It was hard to know what was happening that morning, he said. He was up in the guard tower, by himself, getting occasional updates from the dispatcher. A few hours later, a second guard was sent, but news was still sparse.

After he was relieved, he found a television and learned what had happened, he said.

“I had this weird feeling of ... I couldn’t even explain it. I was at a loss for words. There were Marines all lined up, watching TV, showing the Twin Towers there, the smoke. Everybody was just wide-eyed, jaws dropped, just like, ‘Wow, is this actually happening?’ I can’t explain the moment, but it was just ... emotion filled.”

As a Marine, Garza said he understood he and other Marines could find themselves in harm’s way.

“We’re trained to go to war. We’re trained to carry out these tasks, these missions. But until it actually happens, it’s just training. So, when this actually happened, that compounded the confusion, too,” Garza said.

No one knew, at first, who had carried out the attacks. Garza and the Marines in his unit didn’t know whether they would be shipped out, and where they might go if they were deployed.

“It was a very emotional time. There was a lot of uncertainty,” Garza said.

“I will say, though, there was a strong sense of unity, of brotherhood, of coming together and saying, ‘Hey, our nation was attacked, and we’re going to answer the call if we’re called upon,’” he said. “That was the resounding opinion, at least among the Marines I was in contact with. ‘Hey, we signed up (to serve) our country. This happened on our watch, and if we’re called, we’re going to go.’”

And there was a more personal reaction, he said, starting on Sept. 11.

“From then on, it was, ‘What does this mean for me?’” he said.

Eventually, Garza was deployed, sent to Iraq from February to November 2004.

“When I joined the Marine Corps, it was always in the back of my mind. ‘Hey, what if we did go to war?’ But it’s always just a thought. You’re mentally prepared for it, I guess to the extent your mind can take you. But until it actually happens, now it becomes reality. And it’s a lot different than just thinking it could happen, to it actually happening and you actually have to be doing something. It was life-changing, it definitely was,” he said.

Garza was part of the second wave of soldiers, sailors and air crew into Iraq, after the initial invasion.

“Before I left, we had a training buildup, a few months where our unit trained with Marines that had gone before us,” he said. “They trained us on what to expect.”

The Marine Corps has extensive facilities, and the commanders put all of them to use to give the units going into the country as much experience as they could. But there was still a learning curve.

“Did we know what to expect? Yeah, to an extent we did. But it (training) is definitely different than the real thing,” Garza said.

“When I was there, the biggest threat to us, other than just being shot, was IEDs. Driving through the convoy routes and there being an IED, which is an improvised explosive device — basically a bomb. A makeshift bomb,” Garza said.

The insurgents would rig explosives along the side of the road, some on the shoulder, others buried a few inches deep. While Garza was never wounded, some of the squads in his platoon were hit.

“A few times there were close calls,” Garza said.

As for the Iraqi people, their reaction was mixed.

“Some of them were welcoming to us, and some weren’t,” Garza said. “And we just dealt with it the best we could.”

He said his military and combat service left him with a little different perspective.

“I want to say it gave me a better appreciation of what’s important in life,” he said. “It gave me a bigger sense of being grateful, a greater sense of appreciating what I have.”

He learned that some things weren’t as important as they seemed, he said.

“Not that I didn’t already appreciate things, because I did. But it gave me a stronger sense that, ‘This is important, so let’s focus on this, and that little thing over there that might be bugging you? Just let it go, because it’s not that important,’” he said.

Looking back, he said he was impressed by the sense of unity in the country.

“The number of American flags you saw, just walking through the neighborhood. You saw American flags everywhere. It was really cool to see that,” he said.

“I just really appreciated the patriotism of the American people,” Garza said. “I think it showed what we’re capable of.”