‘Sign Me Up’

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, September 10, 2026

 

The first thing anyone will tell you about that day is how beautiful it was. The kind of Tuesday you can go a whole late summer and early fall without getting one of. The kind that by rights should have been a Saturday. Pure blue with little white cotton balls, warmth without humidity, the mildest breeze. In the 25 years since, I can remember maybe two or three that were that beautiful. Honest to God maybe none.

 

It was so nice that my first-period physics class went outside to run some impromptu experiment or other on the football field, so we missed the first announcement over the loudspeaker. When we came back inside, there was a kid in the hall who mumbled the news. He didn’t seem too worked up. We figured a Cessna, something like that, just like everybody else did.

 

When the second one hit, there wasn’t any doubt. That’s when every channel preempted and started looping the first video that came in. It was senior year, Ramsey High School, Ramsey, N.J.

 

I don’t think they officially said we could leave, but a good number of parents who were in a position to do so came and picked up their kids. Most of us stayed, though, even the upperclassmen with cars. What else were you supposed to do?

 

We shuffled from class to class. With few exceptions, the teachers had the TVs on, muted, and none of them said much. Someone from the front office was covering my AP Spanish class — our teacher’s husband had been at work in the North Tower. He made it out.

 

My biology lab partner from the year before — her dad didn’t.

 

I had gotten my first cellphone, a little gray brick manufactured by the Siemens corporation, over the summer. I placed my first-ever phone call from school property and during school hours to my Uncle Richie, who worked in Midtown. I thought I should check in, just to be safe. We’re sorry. All circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later.

 

I want to say the first tower collapsed during political science class, on the nose as it sounds. I say that because I distinctly remember the voice of our white-haired social studies teacher — and defending state champion varsity-baseball coach — cracking as we watched it live. I don’t remember if it was an Oh God or an Oh no, just that it was some vocalized anguish in a register I had never heard from him before and never did after.

 

At lunch a few of us piled into my friend Ed’s piece of junk and went to the McDonald’s on the hill. That’s when we actually saw it, staring south and east down Route 17. The city skyline etched on the horizon, the righthand side of it enfolded in a wall of black smoke.

 

At a bank of plastic tables over Big Macs, one of the guys shook his head slowly and said, “Sign me up.” A few others nodded. I don’t think Ed nodded. But he served in Afghanistan all the same, working on helicopters for the Marine Corps.

 

I didn’t know it at the time, but I saw lots of Marines that day. Some soldiers and sailors and airmen too, but a disproportionate number of Marines. The soccer captain, a good-natured goofball, became an exceptional Marine infantry officer, commanding a platoon and then serving as XO of a rifle company. Ten years later, he and I sat across a bar just a couple of blocks from National Review and he told me things about — Helmand Province maybe? — that filled me with dread.

 

The closest thing my grade had to Zack Morris, a megawatt-smiled guy I’ll call Bryan, was enlisted, and I think he was in Iraq. He still pops up on my Facebook, either to post pictures of his kids or remembrances on the anniversaries of the suicides of his brothers-in-arms.

 

I can count off a dozen or so others in the few grades above me and the few grades below whom I didn’t know as well, but who turned their lives 90 degrees from whatever else they were destined to be to serve their country. So a lot of kids in Ramsey, N.J., said “sign me up” that day, and a lot of them actually meant it.

 

Of those who meant it, some never came home.

 

Staff Sergeant Eric D. Christian, a few years older than me, enlisted in the Corps not long after that day and endured an incredible five combat deployments before being killed in a “green on blue” attack in Afghanistan in 2013.

 

Sergeant Michael Reilly, class of 2000, worked on Marine helicopters like my friend Ed, though in Michael’s case in Iraq. He made it home, but the call of duty brought him to Engine Company 75 of the FDNY, and he died in a roof collapse in the Bronx in 2006.

 

Staff Sergeant Timothy R. McGill graduated a year before me. He deployed to Iraq in 2005, returning to Ramsey on his discharge. Duty called him as it did Reilly, and Tim reenlisted, this time in the Army, where he eventually became a Green Beret. On September 13, 2013, he was killed in a place called Gardez near the Pakistani border. He left Ramsey six foot six, and according to one of the obituaries, his once lanky frame had filled out to 280 pounds. “A gentle giant,” it says.

 

There’s a stretch of Route 17 that today bears his name, not far from the McDonald’s where some of the guys said “Sign me up.”

 

Twenty-five years later, I remember them and all the others, and the sublime sacrifices to which they consecrated themselves on that most sublimely beautiful of days.