Every once in a while, I come across a story that I’m not entirely sure what to do with. It’s not topical. It’s not newsworthy. It doesn’t even really have a clear point. There’s no tidy beginning or satisfying ending. It’s just a snapshot in time. A moment.
Earlier this year, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts when one of the hosts read a story he’d found on Reddit. I don’t know if there’s a point, exactly, but I think it’s more of a demonstration of the way people cope in the midst of really hard situations. Folks don’t always behave like you’d expect.
I found the original post, linked to it on Bluesky, and had someone tell me that the guy in the story was his college buddy, Brett Sheats. He put me in touch, I gave him a call, and Brett told me his story.
I was going to basically type up our conversation, but every time I tried to do that, I came to the conclusion that the original story he posted on Reddit is better than anything I could write. So instead of rewriting it, I’m annotating it. If you just want to read the story and nothing else, fine. If you want to go deeper, sort of like listening to the director’s commentary on a movie, click on the footnotes. Many thanks to Brett for letting me republish what he wrote here.
It’s probably best that you don’t know too much before we begin.
I was commissioned as a 2LT in the Army on May 21, 2001, which was also the day I graduated college. I had been an ROTC cadet at my alma mater, Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, but suddenly I was out of college and in the Army all in one fell swoop.
With every graduating class of ROTC cadets, the ROTC cadre asks one new 2LT to stay on campus for an additional six months to perform a job known as a "Gold Bar Recruiter." Basically you become part of the ROTC cadre and help the more senior officers bring in the new freshmen cadets. You also help the freshmen acclimate to their new military experience and play a bit of a "big brother" role. It's a pretty cushy job that basically allows you to extend your college social experience for an extra six months. As you can imagine, I was very happy to accept the offer to be the Gold Bar Recruiter at Wake Forest for the fall of 2001.
After watching the towers fall and the pentagon hit on 9/11 while at work at the ROTC department1, in the early afternoon the Colonel came by and sat on the edge of my desk. He told me that he was sending me home for the day, and that he imagined that I might be heading away from the ROTC department a few months early. "So be ready" he added as I got up to leave. I had no idea what in the world to do.
I called my Dad and he told me to get some money out of the ATM and fill my car's gas tank up — "just in case things get worse."2 I drove off campus to the nearest BP gas station, just a few minutes away3. In Winston-Salem, NC in 2001 you couldn't pay at the pump, so after I filled up my tank I went inside the station to pay the cashier. There was one customer in front of me standing at the register. I know this man only from behind. He was an older man wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, and an orange baseball cap. He was sweaty and tan. As I walked up behind him I overheard him say to the cashier the most incredible thing I have ever heard a human being say. In a deep North Carolina drawl the gentleman stated:
"As bad as what happened today in New York, I just don't think it'll have the effect on America that the death of Dale Earnhardt did."4
I have often thought about this man and his place in time at 2:30pm on September 11th, 2001. I have thought about how tragic his February 18th, 2001 must have been5. I have wondered if he ever changed his mind. I have wondered about everything that led him to that place and that time. And I feel a strange connection to that faceless man. He was going in one direction and I in another wildly different one. But we shared a gas station with one another before he went home to mourn in his way and I went home to prepare in my own.6
Just before my first combat mission in Afghanistan in 20037, I gathered my soldiers together to give some final orders, advice, and reminders before we left the wire. I had been watching them prepare the humvees, check their equipment, and ensure everything was ready. None of us had ever been in combat before. I briefly considered giving them some sort of rousing "Braveheart" style speech to get everyone pumped up for kickin' ass and takin' names. But as I watched those extraordinary men so professionally prepare for the unknown, I realized they did not need to be pumped up. If anything, they were too tight, too mechanical. They needed a bit of the tension let out. So I got them together and I told them about what happened in that gas station in Winston-Salem on September 11th, 2001. I told them what that man said and then I told them: "Let's go fucking do it for Dale."
They laughed. I laughed and nearly cried8. We went out and we did our job, over and over, for that next year. All of us came home.9 And I like to think we made the man in the orange hat proud.10
Worth pausing to note that Brett instantly realized the importance of that moment. “I've had a lot of people ask me: How long did it take me to get what was going on and the effect it would have on me?” he told me. “It literally took, I would guess, less than five seconds for me to make the connection from what I saw on the screen to what that meant for the country and then what that meant for me personally.” He’d figured he’d spend his four years in the military up in Alaska mountain biking and skiing. “It literally just took me a couple seconds to be like: That future no longer exists. That is not going to happen.”
Just to show you how tense and frightening things were at that exact moment, there was a line on campus at the ATM full of people who were pulling money out. Brett was wearing camouflage. “I remember a woman was sort of quickly walking behind me, almost jogging. She saw me and she gasped,” Brett said. “She said, ‘Oh my God, if you're wearing that already. We're in horrible trouble.’ I remember trying to to kind of shout out to her: ‘No ma'am. This is what I wear to work every day. You're okay.’ She did not want to hear me.”
For you Winston-Salem folks, this is the BP on University Parkway, right up the street from the LVJM Coliseum.
Okay, yes. That is an incredible statement. For the record, Brett does not think the man was joking. He sounded serious. But he also sounded like a guy who already knew the cashier. It didn’t seem like he was just going around shouting this opinion to people on the street.
For those of you who weren’t around for it, yeah, Dale Earnhardt’s death was a “I remember where I was when it happened” moment for a lot of people, including me (I was in my then-girlfriend’s dorm room in college when I opened ESPN’s website on her computer and saw).
Over time, Brett started to hear other stories from that day that feels just as strange as his own. One of them was about a man who bowled a perfect 300 game on September 11th. “As you can imagine,” he said, “this this story has made me extremely interested about sort of non traditional 9/11 story, not to try to devalue the whatever one could think of as a normal 9/11 story or a 9/11 story from survivors or folks in New York or DC or Pennsylvania.”
We’re skipping WAY ahead here. After 9/11, Brett went to jump school, then on to an airborne infantry battalion up in Alaska. In fall 2003, they flew to the Afghan-Pakistani border and went to Forward Operating Base Salerno, which is just outside of Khost, Afghanistan in Waziristan.
One note: The mission that followed that night was entirely uneventful. The firefight they’d been anticipated (thankfully) never happened.
Brett was a business major at Wake Forest, and thought the ROTC would help give him leadership experience, but he didn’t expect to be fighting in a war. Afterward, he went to law school and has worked for veterans’ causes ever since, mostly in the Washington, DC area. “I became an attorney because I just became fascinated that of this place that had no basis of law,” he said of Afghanistan. “And how I took that for granted in the United States.”
Brett has told this story many times, mostly in person. I asked him how it usually goes over. Initially? Not well. “I've told the story and people did not feel comfortable giving themselves the room to laugh, giving themselves the room to chuckle on its absurdity,” he told me. “They simply they heard 9/11 and they had been trained that there was no way to look at this other than horrific, deep despair. A couple times earlier on, people did not appreciate it. They did not see the interesting humor and absurdity of it.
“For a long time I was very careful with who I told it to. Certainly in a place like DC or in New York, you have to be extremely careful, because you might run into people who lost someone or know someone that died in that day, and it's tough for them to see anything humorous about that day whatsoever.
“Now, with time, I think it's easier. People give themselves the permission to laugh about the absurdity of something like that. But also, as time continues to go on, the story will be just like a moment. Like, if you get to someone young enough, both 9/11 and Dale Earnhardt are devoid of any any understanding, and it becomes a meaningless story.
“So it's firmly of its time. But it needed a little time to kind of cook or to ferment before people were willing to kind of hear it. There's no other there's no other moment or story in my life like this. And I seriously doubt there ever will be.”
Doing it for Dale is a subtle nod to the times before. It seems like a distant memory but in his prime the Internet was a gadget and NASCAR had gained national attention on ESPN, etc. We still had guys like Benny Parsons and Ned Jarret calling the race. Davy, Neil and Alan were all there.
As a kid who grew up in the shadow of Charlotte Motor Speedway I went to the track to see my heroes, and I never appreciated the risks. When Mike Helton made the announcement everything changed, just like 9/11. The irony is that Dale Earnhardt would have not liked the comparison, but history has written his legend and it is what it is.