Newest troops in Afghanistan barely old enough to remember 9/11

The newest wave of troops hitting the Afghan battlefields are 19 or 20 years old, meaning they were roughly between 8 and 10 when al Qaeda crashed planes into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. The fourth- and fifth-graders knew something big had happened but were often unable to understand why it mattered until years later. Such a mismatch hasn’t happened since the country was founded, largely because its greatest wars have tended to be brief interludes, not semipermanent features…

Lance Cpl. Dave Long, 20, a machine-gunner from Pottstown, Pa., vaguely recalls hearing something about 9/11 on TV. “I was kind of young at the time,” he says. “It didn’t really affect me much.”

Lance Cpl. Graydon Phillips, a 19-year-old rifleman from Ozark, Ala., was in reading class when his teacher got the news. “The Twin Towers have been bombed by terrorists,” he recalls her saying. He wasn’t clear what that meant. But he remembers being scared that terrorists would go after Ozark next.