One of my earliest memories concerns the air raid sirens from the first Gulf War, when I was five or six. I remember the Safe Room, which had brown packing tape over the power outlets and around the windows, supposedly to help protect against chemical weapons. Our building didn't have a bomb shelter.
I remember being woken up night after night, to go sit in the Safe Room with the brown plastic tape. There was also a record player and a couple of couches. For some reason—I'm not sure if this is an authentic part of the memory—there was nothing on the walls, just blank, slightly dirty white paint, even though our apartment walls were always full of pictures, books, decorative porcelain plates...
Despite tge tape, we still had to put on gas masks. I had a special one for kids, with a hood and a big blue briefcase looking thing with the filter and a respirator fan.¹
So night after night, go to bed, have a nightmare, get woken up, go to the weird bare room with the packing tape and the record player, and sit there with the gas mask on until the all-clear came.
Eventually, I just refused to go to bed. I put my foot down and told my parents that I won't sleep until after the air raid, because I'm tired of being woken up in the middle of the night every night.
These past few days I can't stop thinking about that feeling. #Minneapolis, this is what you are feeling now. The unbearable tension of waiting for the blow to strike, so that it should come and go already...
This is what war feels like.
And I still don't want to sleep. But I have to, for my babies.
¹This made me mad. I wanted the same cool looking grown up gas masks the grown ups had
Actually, my mother once let me try hers on. It turned out that my little six year old lungs weren't strong enough to pull air through the filter.