One difference that 9/11 made in a soldier's life could be demonstrated by one officer's experience at Fort Carson, Co.

Emile Buzaid, who grew up in Danbury, graduated from West Point in May 2000, and after graduation, he started to serve five years of active military service. He started his service 14 months before the 9/11 attacks.

He saw military service before 9/11 and after 9/11. It differed.

Part of his job as a combat construction engineer officer was to move trucks and equipment from their garage in Fort Carson to a training facility three miles away. The training terrain stretched on for another 25 miles. The equipment was in such poor shape, it sometimes didn't make it out of the garage. Forget three miles. Rifle practice involved shooting paper targets called, "Ivans," because the Army was training for a fight with the Soviet army rolling across central Europe.

"After 9/11, we knew we were going to attack someone. We didn't know who, and we didn't know where," said Buzaid, who is of Lebanese descent. He speaks Arabic, and received two years of additional Arabic training at West Point. He said after 9/11, the money started to flow into the service. "We started to hear a lot of chatter about Afghanistan and after that we started to hear about Saddam Hussein."

Once the country went to war, Buzaid said, those old vehicles and the roads they traveled were repaired. Money flowed in. His unit improved. His unit eventually drove 700 miles from Kuwait to Mosel in northern Iraq.

"Then our unit was run like it was supposed to run. With the time, the energy, the effort and the resources, it was amazing what we could do," Buzaid said.

For the Army, in Fort Carson's case, 9/11 gave it resources it needed.

Once the Iraqi army was defeated, the war changed. It wasn't one big army fighting a second big army.

Buzaid said at first, the Army was greeted in Iraq and cheered. "They were like, "Yeah, Mr. Bush." After his arrival in Iraq, Buzaid worked in army intelligence. By roughly two years after Iraq's defeat, the insurgency started. An army was fighting terrorism. Buzaid said soldiers had to adapt to what they called the "VUCA" situation, which is vague, unclear, complex and ambigious. "You're there to defeat terrorism, and terrorism isn't an army. It's an idea," Buzaid said.

He said the insurgency started after the Iraqi army was disbanded two years after its defeat, and the former Bath party officials were dismissed from government. That bred discontent and fed the insurgency.

Before reaching Iraq, Buzaid and his unit reached Kuwait. It would't head north for a couple of weeks, so Buzaid hitchhiked on helicopters from other military units, and upon reaching Mosel, he began negotiaing for supplies and for equipment for his unit, which was on the way by road. His unit was building the infrastructure the Army needed to survive in northern Iraq. Those were camps, towers, reinforced bunkers, fences, roads, sewer lines and anything else the army needs.

Once the army was fighting al Qaida, even the vehicles had to change. At first, the army was buying steel plates from Kurdistan metal workers to reinforce the early light Humvee models. "They looked like vehicles out of Mad Max," Buzaid said.