I remember it...

Rating: Null/10 (22 March 2002)

The Gulf War was not a war in my mind; it was just something happened when I was young that they put on the news every night- I didn't think that the hundred (or more) men and women who died counted... people were/are shot and stabbed in my city every day- it's on the news, and that's what the Gulf War was too... news. Not until I was twenty did I realize that when people die, it's a shattering thing. Unfortunately this lesson came in the form of a movie (an excellent movie for what it's worth)- particularly a scene towards the end when one of the soldiers stranded at a downed helicopter is overtaken and killed by the Somali horde. He is dragged into the street, stripped and pulled along by his feet as the crowd chants *and laughs*. Sitting in the dark of the theatre I remembered seeing the actual footage on the Nightly News at age eleven... and I started to cry. Men died in a war fought over money! They died in horrible ways that I never imagined one human could do to another. Men died bleeding, crying, babbling because they forgot their own language... and they were American.
My neighbors are American, my mother and father are American, the kid sitting next to me in lecture is American- any of us could have been there- any of us could have been dismembered and tortured that day. I'll never see BHD again because I can't bear to go back to that realization again... but it was amazing and EVO-lutionary; someday they'll show this on the history channel. It'll be broken down by Gulf War historians and called cruel. And it is, and it was.