When the news arrived in Room 114 at Mankato West High School that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, Tim Walz was just beginning his geography class with the usual discussion of current events.

“He was one of the teachers who had a TV in his room, so he turned on the news and we just watched what was happening for the rest of the class,” Megan Reeves recalled to the Daily Beast of that September morning during her sophomore year.

“I remember being confused. What was going on in the world when I was 15 wasn’t at the top of my list of things that really interested me.”

That quickly changed, however, when Reeves and the rest of the class, in a Minnesota town 1,230 miles away, watched the North Tower fire on a 17-inch wall-mounted television. They saw a second plane appear and fly into the South Tower.

“It got everyone a little more pumped up, it got more serious, a little more scary, and (Walz) just stayed calm the whole time,” she recalls. “I remember him reassuring us that we were the strongest country in the world and that we shouldn’t worry because we were safe at that moment.”

Reeves added: “I guess I was a little scared. We had learned about wars in class… And this is kind of the first time I’ve been alive.”

“But I also remember feeling very safe and protected in his classroom because he remained so calm while the students were freaking out a little bit.”

Reeves says she was further buoyed by the knowledge that Walz was in the Minnesota National Guard. She suspects that was partly why students who weren’t in class were coming to his room. Among them was Keenan Robbins, a senior who was in study hall when he first heard about the earth-shattering events that morning.

“A friend of ours came in and said, ‘Hey, you know, something crazy happened, let’s go check it out.'”

He and several classmates passed other classrooms that had televisions, but continued on to Room 114.

“I don’t think it was a coincidence that we ended up in Mr. Walz’s room that morning,” Robbins said. “Of the few older students who ended up there, none of us were technically in his class that morning, but we knew we were going to get an honest assessment of a complex situation, and we knew he wasn’t going to ask us, ‘Where should you be right now?'”

Robbins had not seen the impact of the first plane, but he had seen the impact of the second.

“I asked, ‘Is this a repeat?'” he recalls. “Everyone said, ‘No, this is a second plane.’ That definitely changed the tone of the event.”

At one point, Walz saw Ben Ingman, a senior citizen who lived in the house behind him, walking past in the hallway.

“He came up to me, grabbed me by the shoulders and said, ‘A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center,'” Ingman told the Daily Beast.

Ingman didn’t have Walz as a teacher that year. But Walz was still Walz and Ingman went to room 112.

“Tim had a way of making people feel safe, and that just came through in a moment of extreme uncertainty,” Ingman said. “It felt right to be there.”

Ingman, Robbins, Reeves and the other students were discussing the terrorist attack in small groups. Walz went from one to the other.

“I remember him just jumping back and forth between the groups,” Robbins says. “There was no big speech from the front. But when he talked to us, he said, ‘You know, this is really the case, things are going to change.’ And obviously he didn’t foresee the war on terror and the next 20 years of U.S. foreign policy or anything like that. But he said, ‘I’m going to convene, there’s going to be some kind of change in the way we do things.'”

With each new development on the television, Walz would dart into the adjoining room, 112, where Scott Urban was teaching AP U.S. history. Urban had begun the day by showing a documentary about turn-of-the-century America when Walz calmly delivered the first news of a plane hitting the World Trade Center.

“We would turn off my documentary, turn on the TV or watch a little bit of TV,” Urban recalled. “I thought, my goodness. I remember from American history that in World War II a bomber hit the Empire State Building.”

And that had been an accident. He assumed this was one too.

“It’s tragic, it’s very sad, but we have to get back to what we’re doing. Let’s learn again,” Urban recalls.

A few minutes later, Walz reappeared to tell Urban about the second plane.

“And now it’s something qualitatively different,” Urban recalls.

Urban turned the television back on. Walz came back a few minutes later.

“Mr. Walz comes in and says, ‘They just hit the Pentagon,'” recalls a student named Doug Vose. “He said, ‘You have to pay attention to this. Your generation is going to have to deal with this. Pay attention. This is history.'”

Voase adds: “I think he understands that our everyday lives were under attack that day. That people hate us because we’re Americans. It felt like they were attacking us. They were attacking a Norman Rockwell painting, the idea of ​​the white picket fence.”

Urban remembers that in addition to his role as a fellow teacher, Walz also spoke as a soldier.

“Tim was a sergeant major in the Minnesota National Guard,” Urban says. “And so he said to me at that moment on 9/11, ‘We’re at war. I’m being drafted. I need to talk to the principal.’ And I think he said to me, ‘Could you watch my class? Because I could be drafted at a moment’s notice. I need to be ready. I need to talk to the principal.'”

Urban went next door to room 112 and told Walz’s class that everything was fine and he would be next door if they needed him.

“I went back to my classroom and we watched TV,” Urban recalled. “And we watched TV most of the classes for the next two or three days until the principal finally said, ‘Stop watching.'”

Walz was not immediately called up for active service and resumed his work as a geography teacher, this time with a broader range of current affairs topics.

“Basically everyone remembers a parent or grandparent or something being in a war. So we talked a lot about things like, ‘Is it going to be like the old days when you automatically went to war when you were 18 or older, or do you have to enlist? Is it really going to be a war like in the past, in World War II, the Civil War and things like that?’

“So we talked a lot about how this war would be similar to all the wars we had experienced before, but yet completely different.”

Walz’s battalion was deployed to Italy in 2004 to support the American effort in Afghanistan. Urban, whose wife was in the Marines, was assigned aboard a ship that brought the first Marines to Afghanistan. He remembers Walz being there for the fight. But Walz opposed the war in Iraq, which he said had been started under a flimsy pretext and with nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

“He was just extremely outraged about the Iraq war, which he felt was inappropriate and unnecessary,” Urban recalls.

In March 2005, Walz’s battalion was informed that it could deploy to Iraq within two years. He had already requested retirement after 24 years. In May, it became official.

His unit was deployed in July and some of his comrades, the sergeant majors, grumbled that he had shirked his duty.

His opposition to the Iraq War led him into politics. He ran for Congress and won as a Democrat in a red district.

Walz became governor and is now the Democratic candidate for vice president.

His years as an assistant coach certainly didn’t hurt his prospects, nor did the qualities he demonstrated on September 11.

“Some of the descriptions I’ve heard of Tim as the lucky warrior are absolutely true. I mean, this guy is not a perfect person. None of us are. But in that moment, he was absolutely ready to go or be drafted to defend his children, our school, our community, this nation, to do whatever was asked of him, and he had to communicate that to the principal right away because he also had an obligation to the school, his students, his classes. And I just remember that.”

Urban added, “I will never forget that Minute Man moment.”