It was five years ago today I woke up turned on the TV and saw dozens being burned alive, live! We live a mile or two away but soon realised we could hear the choppers & smell the smoke. I’ll never forget it. We didn’t know anyone personally, but later learnt a friend of a friend walked away unharmed.
Have you ever witnessed a major disaster: war, bombs, fatal car-crash etc where you were in the middle of ugly death situation that wasn’t hollywood but the real thing?
I remember being alone at home on the afternoon of the Manhattan Twin Towers attack. That was unbelievable! but not the same.
Yes, the worst because I was in the middle of it was Bloody Friday July 1972 when the IRA filthy pigs launched a series of bombings in Belfast. I was in the Oxford St. bus station. The thing that will haunt me for ever was a leg on its own. I’ve seen several other awful things over the years but the sight of that solitary leg was somehow the worst. Me? Unscathed, at least physically.
Not personally. Many decades ago I was in a couple of severe earthquakes in Iran and Afghanistan but I didn’t see any of the casualties. Though in the latter I did check out of a mudbrick hotel to an “earthquake proof” one opposite.
During World War Two air raids I would not take shelter on the way home from school but collect pieces of warm shrapnel. I had enough sense not to tell my mother about this. That was not the only way in which I have been extremely lucky in my life.
