maxiewawa

Aika and I flew home not directly from Seoul, but via Tokyo. It was much cheaper, and we didn’t mind stopping over for one last time in Aika’s native country before coming back to mine.

We sat next to a nice American guy who turned out to be an officer in the National Guard. He told us his story; he was a reservist before 9/11, and has been a full time soldier since then. He travels the world teaching people how to use a certain kind of American artillery. He showed us pictures of him in Kuwait, Iraq (inside the “Green Zone”, and the room where Saddam was tried), France (Normandy), the USA, and a few others I don’t remember.

He said that he flew around the world a lot, and had obviously been to a lot of dangerous places. He said that LA was one of the most scary places that he’d ever been to… he said that “At least in Iraq I had a gun!” in that Southern USA accent he had.

Anyway, at one point Aika asked him what his most scary day was. He didn’t have to think long at all, he told us this story, which I’m paraphrasing to you.

“While we were in Iraq, we’d have to leave the Green Zone, which is the ‘safe’ zone every day and go out to the Red Zone, where it’s not so safe.

“One day we were driving down this narrow highway, when there was a loud explosion.

“It shook us up, but everyone was ok. Standard procedure when something like this happens is to wait for the explosives team to arrive on the scene, and verify that there isn’t any unexploded ordinance around the vehicle or vehicles.

“So after confirming that no one was hurt, we had to contact the explosives team and wait for them to show up.

“But our convoy was so big that it blocked traffic in both directions. Since we weren’t going anywhere, neither was anybody else, so the entire convoy, and an increasingly large and angry line of Iraqi civilian vehicles was backing up behind and in front of us.

“As the sun started to set, I started to get worried. At a certain time around dusk, it gets too dark to see what’s happening around you, but too light to use your night vision goggles.

“So someone out there had already attacked us with some kind of improvised explosive. They probably had set the device specifically to attack us. – They would have known that we were travelling down this road, and would have had to manually detonate the bomb.

“So they, without a doubt, knew where we were, and were trying to kill us.

“And the only advantage we had, our night vision goggles, weren’t working.

“After about 4 hours of this, the team finally arrived. Lucky they did too, because they found that there had been not one but two anti tank mines that had been set on the overpass that we had just driven under. Only one had gone off.

“This was lucky for us; one mine was strong enough, but had both mines detonated at the same time, we probably wouldn’t have survived.

“That was a bad day.”

I remember the way he said that last line with a wry grin on his face. He was at pains to say that not all days were “bad days”, but I understood that that was a particularly “bad day”.

I’m not sure if I’ve captured the drama of his story, as I mentioned I’m just paraphrasing. But the next time Aika or I feel scared by sudden turbulence on a flight, I’ll picture myself in an American hum-vee, squinting in the fading light
for someone who’s just tried to kill me and might try again very soon, trying to concentrate through the din of the blasts thousands of gridlocked Iraqis, with my trusty night vision goggles sitting useless on the seat next to me.

Turbulence probably won’t seem so bad when compared with that!