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The Day That Peace Broke Out >> | |
| | | Subject: War never ends
Posted May 24, 2003 by wenke
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| | I was born in Norway during the last year of WW2 and of course I donīt have any direct memories of that time. As I grew up my mother always told me stories about the bombings, and about how she still jumps and gets almost in panic each time she hears loud sirens, even now, 50 years after those events, because it automatically makes her feel as if the bombings will start again.
When I was young I listened to her in disbelief. I thought she was a silly wimp - hey, come on, how can an innocent factory or ambulance siren do something like that to you? - she should pull herself together and stop acting funny... The war has been over for ages, for God's sake!
But on the 11th September 1973 I was in Santiago, Chile, during the Pinochet coup d'état, and lived through the soulwhacking experience of the bombing of the presidential palace just a few hundred metres from where I stood.
Apparently, it didnīt do me any harm, except for the momentaneous panic. Or so I believed. More than ever I thought that my mother was a wimp for complaining about her sirens from the past...
Until one quiet afternoon just a few years ago, when I was blissfully having a nap on the couch in my home, which lies near a beach, and some silly airforce pilots decided to fly their Hawker Hunters loooooow down over the ocean close to the beach, and I woke up in panic, in the middle of the Santiago bombing! The sounds, the smells, the cries, the fear - everything I had experienced during a few hours of a single day 25 years earlier was conjured upon the room in a split second.
I sat there on the couch, desperately trying to get my bearings, my heart pounding, the rational part of my brain trying to convince me that "it was just an airforce exercise, you are not in Santiago, the war has been over for 25 years, just take it easy..."
Only then did I really take my mother seriously. Only then did I really understand the weird stories I had heard from dozens of people who have survived wars without having paricipated in any combats and are apparently unharmed (physically) but who carry with them invisible scars in their souls for the rest of their lives.
War never ends.
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