Summer of Bombs

Finally, it was our turn to be bombed.

All the border towns around our little country had been bombed for months. The invader, greedy for our patch of earth, had neared the core, the Capital where I lived. Maybe a part of me did want the bombing to happen. The tension that had built for weeks had become so unbearable I just wanted to get it over with. I didn’t wish for the scary parts like dying. But going through it unscathed could be interesting.

I had been trapped in the Capital since June. We couldn’t go to Grandma’s because the roads to the South were cut off. Most of the beach towns were occupied and heavily shelled. I was doomed to suffer a sticky summer in the city. All my friends were around but we were not allowed to leave our homes because everyone expected the bombs to start falling any minute.

Mom, Dad, and I watched the news every night. The images of the burning villages, historical monuments, disoriented cattle, and slain people sickened our stomachs. The survivors trapped in bunkers ran low on supplies forgotten by, as the news had said, the international community. We haven’t forgotten them, Dad always added, but we also couldn’t do much beyond keeping them in our thoughts. Mom was convinced that praying the rosary helped, so she made me do it with her every night after dinner. It was annoying but I didn’t want to make her cry. Since the war had started everything made her cry: the news, talking on the phone, cooking dinner, changing my baby sister’s diaper. Sometimes she’d just look at me and start sobbing.

That afternoon, before the air raid siren sounded, I watched The Goonies. I was recording it on a VHS tape for later, to take a break from watching the reports of murder, mutilation, and rubble from the frontlines. Also because I was sure this was what the older kids at school called a cult classic. It had to be. For one, all the actors wore Nike shoes. I also liked the disfigured monster guy. I found it moving that some candy bar called Baby Ruth made him harmless. I wished I could have fed it to the invader and stopped the war. I’d never tasted a Baby Ruth so I couldn’t tell where its superpower came from. Surely some of it had to do with that shiny smooth wrapper, nothing like the drab matte brown cover of the chocolate rum sticks Dad sometimes brought from the store. I mean, the rum sticks were okay and so was living in our little country, but Baby Ruth and America seemed magical. Also not inconvenienced by war. There, kids went underground to hunt for hidden treasure, not to hide from bombs.

Since the war started, the air raid announcements took over the screen. Sometimes the list of alerted towns was short, the usual strategic targets as the news called them, but today the screen was filled with names of many places. I’d never even heard of some of them. The writing crowded on top of The Goonies until the underground water slide scene became an indiscernible backdrop, like busy wallpaper. When the bombings started a few years before, these notices made us nervous; the war felt real and our futures uncertain. Unlike other parents, Mom never tried to deflect my attention from the horrors. “The day we don’t notice the suffering of others is the day our soul dies,” she’d say. She’d make me close my eyes and imagine what it must be like to live in a bomb shelter and have my life violently taken hostage. It was her way of teaching me empathy. But soon the notices came up so often we had to discontinue our empathy sessions if we wanted to get anything else done.

“We can’t stop living just because they had to,” Mom explained any time she was in the middle of making supper or giving the baby a bath. I followed her logic and learned...