Clint Smith, 23, joined the Marine Corps and served two tours in Iraq before enrolling at UT. Smith said 9/11 didn't affect his life at all when it happened, but now, he said, he lacks patience with what he perceives as the ignorance and arrogance of Americans who remain disconnected from the wars in the Middle East. Photo by Tara Haelle

By Tara Haelle
Reporting Texas and the Austin American-Statesman

From the White House lawn to the patio at Cain & Abel’s in Austin’s West Campus neighborhood, college students were among the many who cheered, toasted and drank to the death of Osama bin Laden in the spring. Yet these students were barely a decade old when 9/11 occurred. The attacks — and the wars that followed — have left indelible marks on their childhood, though it’s hard to quantify the impact of growing up in shadow of perpetual war, both real and symbolic.

The words of the students themselves reveal a disquieting paradox: Although they haven’t really known a United States that’s not at war or fighting terrorism, they acknowledge how little their daily lives are affected by the ongoing conflicts. The war on terror is as oddly distant as it is pervasive in their consciousness.

Audrey White, 20, processed the news of Osama bin Laden’s death in much the same way she processed the death of the other figure of evil — this one fictional — she had grown up with: Lord Voldemort of the “Harry Potter” book series. “It was a satisfying sort of catharsis, but when the buzz faded, I looked around to find nothing about my real life had changed,” said White, a journalism-Plan II junior at the University of Texas who was 10 in 2001.

Audrey White, a UT junior, remembers how her 10-year-old mind tried to process 9/11 and Osama bin Laden: "Bin Laden was a Lex Luthor, Voldemort sort of figure to me. He represented evil in a way that seemed bigger than me or my community." Photo by Tara Haelle

“Osama bin Laden was our real-life Voldemort, this big scary idea and this face of all the evil in the world,” White said. “In the same way that we grew up with Harry Potter and Voldemort, we grew up with this scary, nebulous, hidden being with a network of evil followers who walked among us. He was the ultimate scapegoat and puppet in the agenda against terror.”

Bin Laden’s death might have real national benefits in reducing the terror threat and helping clear the path for a U.S. military exit from Afghanistan. Yet for some, it has become part of the same background noise as the wars dragging on in the Middle East. After a decade of real and symbolic war, a larger narrative is emerging: how the experiences of today’s young adults — the children of 9/11 — will shape the future.

“It’s a story of what happens to a generation of people who grow up in a world that has a tremendous amount of abstraction in it,” said Art Markman, a UT psychology professor. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens to those people who are in their 20s now for whom 9/11, and this very abstract ‘war on terrorism,’ influence their leadership style when they get the reins.”

Adults older than 30 probably remember 9/11 with surreal clarity. The world, and possibly their worldview, had profoundly changed. “When we as adults saw planes slam into the side of the World Trade Center building, we could translate that into real human loss,” Markman said. But pointing out that even the images of 9/11 — showing skyscrapers more than individuals — were abstract, he added, “From a younger kid’s standpoint, it’s hard to know what’s happening.”

White tried to gauge how she should feel based on how those around her acted. “I knew people were hurt, but 3,000 didn’t mean anything to me,” she said. “All I knew was something bad happened. The uncertainty was the scariest part.”

Some kids reacted first to the cinematic excitement of the images. Justin Hoffman, a UT business freshman who was 9 in 2001, remembers watching the events on television at school. “I thought there was a cool movie with explosions on,” he said. “I really didn’t understand the whole concept of organizing to hurt people to send a message.”

When he realized the explosions were real, he needed reassurance from his parents that his house wouldn’t get hit by an airplane as well. The way children internalized this bizarre, abstract horror inescapably influenced the way they interact with the world.

Emily Withrow, an ACC student who was 9 when 9/11 happened, remembers the sudden shift in the national mood and the new, disconcerting awareness of what terrorism was. "I was suddenly aware of the fact that there were people in the world who hated us just for being us," she said. Photo by Tara Haelle

“My understanding of terrorism is that it’s bullying on a seriously major scale,” said Austin Community College student Emily Withrow, who was 9 then. “I was suddenly aware of the fact that there were people in the world who hated us just for being us, and that was scariest part because there was no way for me to reach them to tell them or show them or convince them that they shouldn’t hate me.”

Withrow remembers her childhood mind mentally preparing for wars like those she had studied in school. “Mostly I just had an awareness that whatever it was we were going to do, there would be hardships we would have to endure, but that didn’t happen,” she said. “I thought people would be fighting everywhere, in the streets, in our backyards. I didn’t realize that we would be going somewhere and that it really wouldn’t affect our country and its normal stability.”

Now 21, she lacks a connection to the wars that span half her life. “There isn’t anything in this country right now that would tell me we’re in a war except that we know we are and the media is telling us we are,” she said. “That is a very disconnected feeling.”

The experience defies comparison with past American conflicts and generations. “Having grown up as a kid in the ’70s, we literally talked about how the Russians could be coming up the street,” Markman said. “There was this sense of a real enemy out there, but very few kids who have come of age over the past 10 years have a strong image about what it means to be in a war in this age.”

This fact isn’t lost on the young people themselves. “It’s like you can be as involved or as completely unaware as you want,” White said, adding that it bothers her that no one seems to mind that the wars feel endless. “I think it has to do with the way war is romanticized in my head: I have this sense of the country coming together or falling apart, but we’re not doing either. It’s so easy to tune out that you’d have to actually tune in or you won’t be aware of what’s happening.”

Tuning out was nearly impossible during the Vietnam War, which helped shape many of today’s leaders. “You wouldn’t find older teenagers that were oblivious,” said Paul Woodruff, a philosophy professor who served in Vietnam and is now dean of UT’s School of Undergraduate Studies. “Everybody knew somebody who was going, had gone, had come back, so it affected an entire generation in a very deep way. The war was very much brought into the homes of a lot of people. It seems to me there’s nothing like that in the so-called war on terror.”

Paul Woodruff, who served one tour in the Vietnam War and is now Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies, said most students appear removed from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "It's just beneath their radar," he said. "It's not in the news they pay attention to." Photo by Tara Haelle

But Vietnam — aside from claiming the lives of more than 58,000 U.S. service members in eight years, compared with more than 6,000 in the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan — had the draft.

“Because the draft could forever change your life, the Vietnam War always played a massively influential role in young people’s mindset about it,” said Mike Tharp, editor of the Merced Sun-Star newspaper in California. Tharp served in Vietnam and has since reported in several combat zones, including two embedded tours in Iraq.

“You were vulnerable, and so it was easy — even natural — to oppose the war because it so invaded your personal space and defined, temporarily, your options in life,” he wrote in an email. “Today’s volunteer military service removes that extraordinary rationale for a generation to pay close attention to the two conflicts being waged today.”

The media, Tharp said, “have contributed to this lethargy and anomie by self-censoring ourselves in our coverage of the war.” The effect has been telling — even on the veterans themselves.

“I’d sit in Iraq and watch CNN and Fox, and we’d see stuff on kittens,” said Clint Smith, a 23-year-old UT sophomore who served two tours in Iraq while he was in the Marines from 2006 to 2010.

When he enlisted out of high school, it wasn’t for patriotism — it was his best ticket to college from the small town of Sanger, north of Fort Worth. “We would just watch on the news that Timmy fell down a well and Susie’s dog got run over, and meanwhile we’re going to drive through possibly an ambush in five minutes,” he said. “How could we not take it as a big joke when we think: ‘Hey, are we here? The news doesn’t seem to think so.’ We kind of felt like, if we were gone the next day, other than our families no one would care.”

Markman attributes this disconnect to the abstract nature of the conflicts. “Human beings don’t deal well with abstraction,” he said, referring to studies on how humans engage with the world. “It’s much easier to remain passive and relatively unmoved by things that are abstract. Orwell’s real insight was if you use incredibly abstract language, you prevent people from thinking about all the details that would engage their attention and motivation.”

The term “war on terror,” Smith said, creates “an abstract fear so people can feel related to the war since they don’t actually care about troops. Basically, people forgot there are people over there. They don’t see people, they see uniforms. If we live or die, it makes no difference to them except the way it tarnishes the image of America.”

Smith said he isn’t bitter but cynical, surrounded by college students who complain about the war or politics without getting involved or having any real sense of what’s going on.

For students like White, trying to understand the world, generic terms like “war on terror” become a distraction. “It’s just this big nebulous thing that becomes nonsensical,” she said. “The idea of the war on terror has always sounded kind of foolish, unhelpful and unproductive to me. It’s a way to avoid talking about the real wars with real people on the ground.”

Yet the term is so ubiquitous that today’s youth can’t escape it, either. “I couldn’t really imagine the world without some sort of reference to the war on terror,” said Hoffman, the student who remembers the explosions on TV on 9/11. “You watch TV, watch the movies, talk to friends, whatever, it’s kind of become embedded in society.”

Justin Hoffman, a business sophomore at UT, was 9 when 9/11 occurred. He remembers feeling the mood of the country: "I'd never experienced something where everyone was so focused," he said. Photo by Tara Haelle

Perhaps, then, the omnipresence of this abstract war — and the distant wars it encompasses — explain why news of bin Laden’s death offered a pressure valve to finally celebrate something concrete.

Hoffman was one of those who joined the West Campus revelry. “It was a celebration,” he said. “This has been 10 years coming, so the fact that it finally happened was like a big weight off the nation’s shoulders.”

He said college students ran up and down West Campus streets with American flags draped across them, and houses blared Toby Keith’s song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.”

Others reacted more somberly. To Withrow, who found the celebration distasteful, even bin Laden’s death was not concrete. “He seemed kind of like the Joker, this laughing phantom that doesn’t really exist,” she said. “I didn’t think of him as a person. He was just an idea of hatred towards us, not an actual physical being that we could ever find.”

Even some who did celebrate sensed a hollowness in the event, barely a blip on the long timeline of the wars. Akshay Dabeer, a UT freshman, celebrated bin Laden’s death as a tribute to those who died in 9/11, but he said the death doesn’t actually change anything. “It’s irrelevant because it’s only one guy, and the war on terror is a losing battle,” he said. “It’s going to exist forever.”

Regardless of whether that’s true, it’s existed as long as this group has been conscious of the broader world, and this has shaped their view of it. ”I can’t tell you exactly how it will affect me in the future, but I can say the things that have been going on the majority of my life will have an affect on decisions I make in my future,” Hoffman said.

Added Withrow, “I think if you grow up with war being a part of your life, you learn to see it as a really tragic necessity of people living in the world together.”