"I Will"

"Breathe. Keep breathing. Don't lose your nerve."

Radiohead ~ "Exit Music (For a Film)"

It's become one of those nights. Training went well, and after coming home, we showered, treated the kids to late night happy hour appies at our local taphouse, brought them back home again, tucked their sweet, sleepy heads in bed, then settled down at respective computers for some wind-down time, my soundtrack of choice somehow hitting a certain trajectory featuring a ridiculously cheerful mix including Buckley's "Hallelujah," Band of Horses' "Funeral," and a happy-butterfly, fluffy-unicorn selection of Radiohead songs.

The melody of "I Will" had been sparkling gently in the quiet recesses of my mind of late, so I finally put it on and simultaneously looked up the lyrics. Some digging around led to comments speculating this song referred to 9/11, and Chef Boy sent me this discovery from Wikipedia. It comes from the entry on Amiriyah shelter massacre, and seems to make more sense as it came off the album, Hail to the Thief, an ode to the instigators of the Iraqi War. It made me weep.

At 4:30 am the morning of 13 February, two F-117 stealth fighter/bombers each dropped a 2,000 pound GBU-27 laser-guided bomb on the shelter. The first cut through ten feet of reinforced concrete before a time-delayed fuse exploded. Minutes later the second bomb followed the path cut by the first bomb. People staying in the upper level were incinerated by heat, while boiling water from the shelter's water tank killed those below.

At the time of the bombing there were hundreds of Iraqi civilians in the shelter. More than 400 people were killed; reports vary and the registration book was incinerated in the blast. The dead were overwhelmingly women and children because men and boys over the age of 15 had left the shelter to give the women and children some privacy. The blast sent shrapnel into surrounding buildings, shattering glass windows and splintering their foundations.

The shelter is maintained as a memorial to those who died within it, featuring photos of those killed. According to visitors' reports, Umm Greyda, a woman who lost eight children in the bombing, moved into the shelter to help create the memorial, and serves as its primary guide.

From there on in, I suddenly heard the words, "Women and children first" clearly in my head, and after about a second, it came to me: Idioteque. Of course. "Who's in the bunker?"

Such a far cry from my original ruminations on the song.

And oh, my God. To think of the men and boys who came running back to the flaming inferno containing the bodies of their children, little brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, wives, girlfriends, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, neighbours, friends... It is absolutely unfathomable. Sickening.

More reading and searching, and then this image and story from Getty.

Perspective, and a soul-crushing, gut-punching sense of despair for this world. No one wins. People get screwed on both sides, every side, all the time. Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up optimistic and hopeful and ready to fight for it once again, but for now the world and its fucking corrupt leaders and the machines that drive them are shit. Hope wears thin sometimes. And then I think of the sweet, big-hearted kids sleeping upstairs, and I feel both happy... and scared.

This isn't much of a writey anything tonight, just a sharing of a mood. A very down one, unfortunately, but there it is. There's not much to say, and yet there's also so much.

Perspective. Perspective.

Keep breathing.

(photo credit at top: a carbonized imprint of hands burned onto a wall at Amiriyah by an uncredited photographer.)