9/11 happens while Buttigieg is an undergraduate and the rest of the book's Harvard portion is spent musing on war and peace. One of the few things that does disturb him about the school is that its students are no longer expected to serve in the military. (In an extreme conservative tone, he suggests there was no excuse for a student like him not to voluntarily join the armed forces.) He says that he would spend time looking at the names of Harvard students who died in the Civil War, and that "I sometimes paused to recite a few of them, under my breath, between eating breakfast and going to class." After the World Trade Center fell, he says, he realized that: