I think the first plane hit as my freshman year math class started. So while we were learning about trigonometry, it all kind of kicked off. We probably didn't hear anything - because we didn't have like TVs in every room or anything - until about noon that day. By that time, two planes, towers, the Pentagon, and I believe the plane in Pennsylvania had already gone down. By noon, our principal kind of called us all in and told us everything that was going on. I'm third generation American, and third generation military. My brother's in the army now, but it just kind of seemed like the thing to do. I went to college, tried it for a semester, and it wasn't for me. So at 19 I joined the Air Force, in 2006. I think I'd always thought about it, even when I was younger, but felt like 9/11 hastened that decision to join. In Southern Vermont, not a whole lot has changed. There's no real industry, in fact, industry keeps leaving, so the military seemed like a really good way to get out and start a life. I was in from June 2006 to June 2016. I did financial management and budget analysis. So I got to see where all the money was going - to a certain extent obviously. I was stationed at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, England. And then my final assignment was at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. I had deployments in support of Iraq, Afghanistan. And my last one was Air Force Special Operations in Africa. From the very first time I heard Iraq I was against it. And that hasn't changed to this day. Afghanistan, I understood at the time, that we weren't going to obviously go after Saudi Arabia, that would have been politically infeasible then, now and likely into our future. But obviously, the Taliban government at the time had provided material support to al Qaeda, basically saying, you guys have the run of the country train however you want. So Afghanistan made sense, it felt a bit frustrating to see so many resources being diverted to Iraq, when al Qaeda wasn't there. I would hope that people are cognizant of just how much things have changed, probably not in Vermont, because it's a pretty insular place despite being in mainland America it can feel very much like an island at times. But you know, how much things have changed in terms of, you know, we wouldn't have police departments with MRAPs and, and how there's essentially a throughline from that to Six January, and just how one thing leads to another, it's so hard to get out of the cycle of that sort of thinking. I see that kind of a pervasive thing in my hometown. I can't speak for all of Vermont, but you see guys that I went high school with, they started off on the whole 9/11 Truther stuff, and then it becomes other things, then it becomes QAnon now and all that kind of stuff, and it's so hard to pull yourself back out of that sort of thinking. I think 9/11 started all that.

Keylor Halbur