SARASOTA, Fla. — News of Usama bin Laden’s death has unleashed a flood of memories for a generation of young Americans who grew up in the shadow of 9/11 — especially for a group of schoolchildren, now teens, who were with former President George W. Bush on the morning of September 11, 2001.
In interviews with Time magazine published this week, they recalled the Commander in Chief’s sudden change in expression as he learned of the terrorist attacks.
“In a heartbeat, he leaned back and he looked flabbergasted, shocked, horrified,” 17-year-old Lazaro Dubrocq told Time.
Dubrocq was in the Sarasota, Fla., classroom where White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card famously interrupted Bush’s reading of “The Pet Goat” and whispered the news that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center.
“I was baffled. I mean, did we read something wrong? Was he mad or disappointed in us?”
Mariah Williams, who was also a student at Emma E. Booker Elementary School, described a similar bewilderment. “I don’t remember the story we were reading — was it about pigs? 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,” she told Time.
Critics disparaged Bush for remaining in the second-grade classroom for several minutes to finish the book after learning of the grave attacks. But the students defended his decision to stay.
“I’m just glad he didn’t get up and leave, because then I would have been more scared and confused,” Williams, 16, told Time.
Chantal Guerrero, also 16, agreed. “I think the president was trying to keep us from finding out so we all wouldn’t freak out,” she told the magazine.
When the children did find out what happened — their teacher rolled a television into the classroom after Bush left — they started to put the pieces together.
“It was pretty scary and I remember thinking, ‘So that’s why the president looked so mad,'” Williams told Time.
Dubrocq told the magazine he “had to wait a few years before I could digest what had really happened and why they attacked us,” adding, that he “grew up to have nothing but contempt for Usama bin Laden.”
Guerrero, now a Junior ROTC member at the Sarasota Military Academy, said the experience in the classroom “has since given us all a better understanding of the situation, sort of made us take it all more seriously.”
She told Time that learning of bin Laden’s death Sunday was “so reassuring, after a whole decade of being scared about these things.”