Ten Years Since 9/11: Waukee Graduate and Guard Medic Hopes to Save Lives Someday

Codi Nizzi was just an eighth-grader when terrorists took down the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Today, the Waukee native is a member of the Army National Guard, still fighting a war against those who changed our country’s history forever.

Nizzi, 23, and a 2006 graduate of Waukee High School, remembers that day 10 years ago. She says it opened her eyes to something she knew very little about.

“I didn’t know even know what the World Trade Center was,” she says.  “I had never even been on the East Coast. Before 9/11, I was in this small Iowa bubble. I never knew people didn’t like Americans.”

She enlisted in the Army in 2005, intent on working in the medical field. From August 2009 to April 2010 she served in Taji, Iraq, as a medic in a detention facility, providing health care to detainees and coalition forces.

“Being over there, my perspective has changed quite a bit,” Nizzi said. “War is an abstract idea. Seeing those people who are the ‘bad guys’ made that more real for me.”

Today, Nizzi is working toward a medical degree from the University of Iowa. In a few years, she hopes to be working as a physician's assistant.