#education

We could never go back to how things were on the day before 9/11, but maybe I could go back to who I was. ↗

— Tucker Elliot

#education

In Korea I’d been so afraid that Sami would lose her dad. She did, but she didn’t get a flag. He went to Doha, then to Baghdad, then to Kabul, then to someplace else, and then to a different someplace else, on and on. He’d come home, leave again, come home, leave again, until one day he came home a different person altogether. Sami lost Angel, lost her family, and then she lost herself. ↗

— Tucker Elliot

#education

I’m clinging to one last thought: pain is the harbinger of hope. You have to be alive to feel pain. If you are alive, then you have purpose. If you have purpose, then you have hope. ↗

— Tucker Elliot

#education

This is who I was, before I was dead. When I cared, when I was relentless. ↗

— Tucker Elliot

#education

In total this journey will take five flights and fifty-five hours, but in reality it began four decades and two generations ago when my uncle died in Vietnam. ↗

— Tucker Elliot

#education

If I can be perfectly blunt, his humanities teacher was an ass. ↗

— Tucker Elliot

#education

Military life is hard, even cruel—especially for the kids. ↗

— Tucker Elliot

#education

The only thing worse than his arrogance was his incompetence. He was a bully, behaving like an ass. I saw Angel though, not him. The memorial was right there, just outside the window. It’s in the flowers, and it makes me angry. Angel liked to sit on the couch, watch TV, eat chips. She hated outside. Maybe I should have been a bully and an ass to Angel’s parents. Maybe Angel and Grace would still be alive if I’d behaved like this piece of shit teacher. ↗

— Tucker Elliot

#education

It’d be easy to blame everything on 9/11 or the wars that came after. It’s really about the choices we made. By necessity we adapt to the realities of the world we live in, but if we forget that how we live shapes and influences the world around us, then we’ve already lost. ↗

— Tucker Elliot

#education

The last two days I’ve been on long bus rides, driven through the countryside on the back of a motorbike, and crossed rivers on wooden boats, traversing currents into a different century. It’s late and dark, but I’m so close now. My uncle died five kilometers from here. ↗

— Tucker Elliot

#education