Really :bugeye: you have a hateful sense of "humor", Roman. I remember when a little Maronite girl who couldn't have been more than 7 fell over dead with a hole in the top of her head. It didn't seem to happen very often, but it did happen. I never knew anyone who thought it funny when someone was hit, and I'm glad for that- I know that such heartlessness is a part of war and warmaking still uglier than scenes of death and destruction- because dark hearts are the very seed of such scenes.
One evening when I was playing tennis in the mountains, Israeli F-4s went by below and (their amazing new gifts from the USA) F-15s were wheeling and glinting majestically in the bright sun high above. Finishing our tennis game just before it got dark, we heard a few fluttering whizz-bangs, but didn't think much of it. Those sounds were accompanied by tremendous fireworks, as the Israelis attacked the PLO and anyone else within a few dense city blocks of them- we stopped to watch (with the accustomed detachment) the silent flashes of yellow light, and to feel the delayed thudding as the dust and smoke rose up far below us, where countless everyday people were enveloped in invisible, scarcely imaginable fear, suffering, and dying. The next day, people were talking about the 8 30mm rounds that were imbedded (sideways) into the asphalt in and around our tennis court. When I looked at those scorched rounds lying 3 inches deep in the green asphalt, it may have been my first moment of Zen. Then my hobby of the time took my attention, and I dug one out with some effort.
Down in Beirut, it wasn't unusual to see cars with the signature holes from tumbling bullets. No episodes involving a death could seem funny, but the ones that could have been (but didn't turn out deadly) seemed strangely humorous when we'd recall such experiences shared. I had a few slightly closer scrapes than that, and there is something addictively exciting about having something potentially deadly not quite turn out that way. Being young, I naturally assumed that nothing could possibly happen to me, and I avidly took in the side of war that is really more prevalent than death (what war leaves behind in the vast majority of the munitions are deathlessly expended). From scenes that were not bloody, I gathered an impressive collection of curious expended and unexpended munitions, schrapnel, and brass in my bedroom -after any episode of fighting, it was laying around everywhere, in the most random places, like bullets on your doorstep, or a big chunk of artillery shrapnel found scraping under a ski in que for the chairlift. One stray round smacked into my history teacher's chalkboard while he was writing on it. He was a Vietnam vet, and it pissed him off (which I wouldn't advise- the next year, that particular, and conspicuously USAmerican teacher fended off an abduction attempt with his 9mm handgun).
That's what all the guns carried personally were for (protection) but most of the time for me, they were just everyday things that you didn't give much thought to when you saw them in casual contexts. Having someone aggressively draw down on you, or even take a shot is a very different, more profound feeling that I only rarely experienced.
One evening when I was playing tennis in the mountains, Israeli F-4s went by below and (their amazing new gifts from the USA) F-15s were wheeling and glinting majestically in the bright sun high above. Finishing our tennis game just before it got dark, we heard a few fluttering whizz-bangs, but didn't think much of it. Those sounds were accompanied by tremendous fireworks, as the Israelis attacked the PLO and anyone else within a few dense city blocks of them- we stopped to watch (with the accustomed detachment) the silent flashes of yellow light, and to feel the delayed thudding as the dust and smoke rose up far below us, where countless everyday people were enveloped in invisible, scarcely imaginable fear, suffering, and dying. The next day, people were talking about the 8 30mm rounds that were imbedded (sideways) into the asphalt in and around our tennis court. When I looked at those scorched rounds lying 3 inches deep in the green asphalt, it may have been my first moment of Zen. Then my hobby of the time took my attention, and I dug one out with some effort.
Down in Beirut, it wasn't unusual to see cars with the signature holes from tumbling bullets. No episodes involving a death could seem funny, but the ones that could have been (but didn't turn out deadly) seemed strangely humorous when we'd recall such experiences shared. I had a few slightly closer scrapes than that, and there is something addictively exciting about having something potentially deadly not quite turn out that way. Being young, I naturally assumed that nothing could possibly happen to me, and I avidly took in the side of war that is really more prevalent than death (what war leaves behind in the vast majority of the munitions are deathlessly expended). From scenes that were not bloody, I gathered an impressive collection of curious expended and unexpended munitions, schrapnel, and brass in my bedroom -after any episode of fighting, it was laying around everywhere, in the most random places, like bullets on your doorstep, or a big chunk of artillery shrapnel found scraping under a ski in que for the chairlift. One stray round smacked into my history teacher's chalkboard while he was writing on it. He was a Vietnam vet, and it pissed him off (which I wouldn't advise- the next year, that particular, and conspicuously USAmerican teacher fended off an abduction attempt with his 9mm handgun).
That's what all the guns carried personally were for (protection) but most of the time for me, they were just everyday things that you didn't give much thought to when you saw them in casual contexts. Having someone aggressively draw down on you, or even take a shot is a very different, more profound feeling that I only rarely experienced.
Last edited:
Exactly. His World History class was pretty much like that. A lot of protocols were different from what I understand of High School in the USA. The first time I ever got sloppy drunk, my friends took me to his place to sober up. He had a look in his eye that could sober one right up. Wow, could he teach history.