Twas Brillig

Welcome to yet another installment of Flashback Friday!

My daughter found this picture this morning and said, “oh Mommy! That’s a FUNNY hat!”

And today’s Flashback Friday was born.

Because no, Gentle Readers, it’s not just a funny hat. It’s my gas mask–the gas mask that defined a big chunk of my life.

In the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded a little oil-rich country called Kuwait. It was an atrocious invasion and the world was up in arms over the oil unfairness of it all.

President Bush (we call him “Papa Bush” around here) gave Hussein an ultimatum: Get out by January 15, 1991, or we will declare war on you. Hussein’s retort went something like this: If you declare war on Iraq, Iraq will bomb Israel to smithereens.

And, wouldn’t you know it, I just happened to be in Israel at the time.

I was already pretty used to a lot of stuff before all of this happened. There was constant gunfire outside my window. I was so used to it that I remember the day I woke up and realized that I could sleep through it now. I watch many riots. I heard many impassioned marches. I even distinctly remember (because it’s not the kind of thing you ever forget) seeing a man get shot and then watching them drag his body through the streets.

That was just part of living in Jerusalem.

Even so, none of us ever believed that insignificant little Hussein would actually go head to head with the US. We absolutely believed that he would pull out of Kuwait long before war would actually be declared. Call it American Bravado or naivte or just a misunderstanding of how crazy the man really was.

However, “just in case,” everyone living in our Center (a scant group of 10 or so–my brother Jeff and I were the only “kids”–I was 12, he was 15)

(here’s a pic of our center–the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a veritable fortress)

went through a training of what to do if suddenly we were being attacked. We learned all the various sirens: Air raid, chemical warfare, all clear, and so on. We were each assigned a gas mask and we learned how to put them on and practiced and practiced to get the process down to just a few seconds. We packed emergency-preparedness bags, and we learned the quickest, safest routes to the on-site bomb shelter, and little tricks like holding up a blanket every time we ran past a window to protect us from shattering glass.

But as I said, we never thought it would happen.

However, on January 15, Hussein still hadn’t pulled out of Kuwait. And so on the morning of January 16, the US began carpet-bombing Baghdad. And on January 17, Hussein’s threatened retaliation became my reality.

I’ll never forget that first air raid siren. It was at about 2:00 a.m. and we had all been sound asleep. I remember waking up in a blur, and casually heading to the bathroom and beginning to brush through my hair. And then I was hit with the sudden realization of what that noise meant and it sent me into a brief panic where I dropped the brush and ran.for.my.life.

It was always to be assumed that chemical warfare was being used, and so our first item of business upon arriving in the bomb shelter was to put on the gas mask–fast. Here I am with my mom and my brother in the bomb shelter:

Left to right: Me, Jeff, and my mom

It was cold and mucky in the bomb shelter and it had a weird smell, but it would have been silly to complain. As I said, we lived in a fortress and we had an on-site bomb shelter. Many, MANY were not so fortunate, no matter what CNN was trying to lead you to believe. People were dying, hospitals were packed, the country is was in a state of devastation.

And here’s where I feel the need to address something that the mighty Gunfighter said to me in my comments of this post and which he may have thought I was “ignoring.” No, friend. I wasn’t ignoring it. He said something like, “our own government lies to us too.” And it hit very, very close to home.

The news was our lives. We had to watch the news in order to know what was going on. We had three main sources of news: The Jordanian (Arabic) news, which we knew would be full of crap, because that’s what their government was giving them. We heard day after day that Jerusalem had been obliterated and that Saddam was marching on to claim victory. But I could see out my own window that that was an absolute lie. Speaking of that, here’s the view from my window. Not much could happen in the main part of Jerusalem without my being able to verify it from my view:

And so, that was the Jordanian news. Not really a source of news, but often a great source of entertainment.

And then we had American news–in the form of clips from CNN. Guess what, Gentle Readers. CNN lied. A lot. Again, I don’t blame CNN, I blame the government and the LOADS OF CRAP that they were feeding to the news stations. This was a VERY bitter pill to swallow. We were the “good guys,” right? Maybe. But we were also big fat liars. And THAT may have been the hardest revelation of this whole thing.

And then there was the Israeli (Hebrew) news. Honest, though perhaps a bit biassed, but always accurate when it came to destruction and death tolls and what was really going on outside my window. They were our most (only!) accurate source of news. And when your life depends on receiving accurate news, it was disheartening to only have one source.

Anyway, the war went on for about two months. Often we would be sent to the bomb shelter many times during the night. Sometimes we would get the night off. Sometimes the air raids didn’t happen at night at all, but during the day. It was hard to lead a normal life, but we did our absolute best. We kept up in our studies, we kept a schedule. We even enjoyed exploring all of the abandoned tourist sites that would normally have been packed but were now left utterly desolate. And as my mother was a resident expert, we always got the best tour possible. We were too adventurous to be diminished by a little bombing.

It wasn’t really terrifying, oddly enough. Very “high-key” and the whole thing kept us very much on our toes. Looking back it scares me more than it actually scared me at the time. The nightmares came AFTER the war, not during it. I’m not sure why that is…

On Purim, the Jewish holiday that celebrates Queen Esther and her liberation of the Hebrews, the war “ended” (though you will all remember that Hussein was left in power… which was, how shall we say, a little teeny tiny mistake. Thanks Papa Bush. You and your son are such a cute team…). Gas masks were returned, bomb shelters were re-sealed, life went back to “normal.” Sort of. We were all eternally changed. And the death threats and bomb threats from neighboring villages didn’t exactly stop… and being Americans, we weren’t exactly considered “friends” by many. But still. The worst of it was over.

But then the nightmares begin and you forget to “key-down” when you’ve been so keyed-up. Any police siren would stop me dead in my tracks for years, because it sounds so much like an air-raid siren. The sounds of gunfire or anything that might resemble it would make my heart race out of control. During the war, I had literally had to ran for my life. For years after, I wanted to run, but I had no reason to run and I had no where to run to.

Anyway, whew! Flashback Friday was so serious today! Hahaha. Thanks for bearing with me!

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