The twentieth anniversary of the first Gulf War sent me back to a war diary I published in the Jewish Observer. The diary rekindled lots of memories. Failing to realize that we had forgotten to bring the baby into the sealed room during the first missile attack until our older kids started screaming was mortifying at the time but elicits a smile at the distance of twenty years.
Other memories are more precious — for instance our children spontaneously dancing in a circle after coming out of the sealed room for the first time on the first Shabbos of the war. How could I have forgotten that?
One thing I did not forget was my eight-year-old daughter saying that leil Shabbos “Saddam Hussein is trying to make us be mechallel Shabbos so that we have fewer merits to protect us. But what he doesn’t know” she quickly added “is that for pikuach nefesh it’s a mitzvah.”
But mostly the diary left me astounded by how little I recall of the emotional intensity of those weeks.
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