The smiling photographs of Elian reunited with his father, stepmother and stepbrother cannot erase the memory of the storm troopers. Memory holds panic. It makes little difference to the boy whether the federal trooper's finger was on the trigger. The boy looking down the barrel didn't know that. Elian's eyes express the terror any one of us would have felt.
Memory holds dread.
How secure can Elian feel at night, tucked in his bed, when he hears a noise in the night. His terror, after all, was real, not the stuff of a childish nightmare. Every mother who has ever cradled a frightened child in the middle of the night knows how difficult it is to shoo away the monsters. Janet Reno insists she would do it exactly the same way again, with the same show of force, given the same circumstances.