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There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W. Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Florida.
Seven-year-olds can't understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult's face is telling them something is very wrong and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels' class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can forget the sudden, devastated change in Bush's expression when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered the terrible news of the Al Qaeda attack. Lazaro Dubrocq's heart started racing because he assumed they were all in big trouble with no less than the Commander-in-Chief but he wasn't quite sure why. "In a heartbeat he leaned back and he looked flabbergasted, shocked, horrified," recalls Dubrocq, now 17. "I was baffled. I mean, did we read something wrong? Was he mad or disappointed in us?"
All sorts of similar kid fears started running through Mariah Williams' head. "I don't remember the story we were reading was it about pigs?" says Williams, 16. "But I'll always remember watching his face turn red. He got really serious all of a sudden. But I was clueless. I was just seven. I'm just glad he didn't get up and leave because then I would have been more scared and confused." Chantal Guerrero, 16, agrees: even today she's grateful that Bush regained his composure and stayed with the students until The Pet Goat was finished. "I think the President was trying to keep us from finding out," says Guerrero, "so we all wouldn't freak out."
Even if they didn't freak out, it's apparent that sharing the terrifying Tuesday of 9/11 with Bush has affected those second-graders in the decade since and, they say, made the news of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's killing by U.S. commandos on Sunday all the more meaningful. Dubrocq, now a junior at Riverview High School in Sarasota, doubts he'd be a student in the rigorous IB, or international baccalaureate program, if he hadn't been with the President as one of history's most infamous global events unfolded. "Because of that," he says, "I came to realize as I grew up that the world is a much bigger place, and that there are differing opinions about us out there, not all of them good."
Guerrero, today a junior at the Sarasota Military Academy, believes the experience "has since given us all a better understanding of the situation, sort of made us take it all more seriously. At that age I couldn't understand how anyone could take innocent lives that way. And I still of course can't. But today I can problem-solve it all a lot better, maybe better than other kids because I was kind of part of it." Williams, also a junior at the military academy, says those 9/11 moments spent with Bush conferred on the kids a sort of historical authority as they grew up in Sarasota. "Today, when we talk about 9/11 in class and you hear kids make mistakes about what happened with the President that day, I can tell them they're wrong. Because I was there."
