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Mar. 6th, 2014 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jianantonicA totally random and kind of ridiculous memory jumped into my head this morning on my way to work. I was listening to Phil Ochs' "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore," and I was thinking about how the generation just before mine never really had a good hippie cause. Vietnam was before their time and 9/11 and the ensuing political hubbub belongs to people my age (for better or worse...). People my brothers' age had the Gulf War, I guess. So I was thinking about that, and how I felt about it at the time, when I was 8 years old. My knowledge of it then was basically that Saddam Hussein decided he wanted to take over Kuwait, and so he invaded, and America and all the other good guys went to bat for Kuwait, and this was Operation Desert Storm, or something. Actually, that's still about the extent of my knowledge of the situation. Anyway, I remember knowing that we were at war, and that Iraq was the bad guy, and Saddam was the really bad guy. And it was on the news all the time so it was definitely a big deal.
One day in 1992, my friend Kathleen was over at my house playing, and we had the TV on while we were doing whatever we were doing, and I got up to go to the bathroom. A moment later, Kathleen burst into the bathroom while I'm on the can to tell me that "they killed Saddam Hussein! The war is over!" And I was so excited in that moment that I wasn't even pissed at her for bursting in on me like that. I didn't really get the whole war thing, but I knew enough to know that war was bad and we wanted it to end. And killing Saddam meant the good guys won. So Kathleen and I are jumping up and down and celebrating this thing we really don't understand, and then she goes "psyche!"
I don't remember the actual ending point of the Gulf War -- my Saturday morning cartoons were never interrupted with the breaking news announcement that the world was all back to normal. It just kind of stopped being the thing that was in the news all the time. As far as I could tell, America stayed the same, Iraq stayed the same, Kuwait stayed the same, and I guess eventually people stopped killing each other about it. (Or so I thought.)
I have no idea why Kathleen thought this would be a good prank, but she got me for sure, and I guess it just goes to show what was on our young minds at the time. We thought that would be our generation's big war. We had no idea...
One day in 1992, my friend Kathleen was over at my house playing, and we had the TV on while we were doing whatever we were doing, and I got up to go to the bathroom. A moment later, Kathleen burst into the bathroom while I'm on the can to tell me that "they killed Saddam Hussein! The war is over!" And I was so excited in that moment that I wasn't even pissed at her for bursting in on me like that. I didn't really get the whole war thing, but I knew enough to know that war was bad and we wanted it to end. And killing Saddam meant the good guys won. So Kathleen and I are jumping up and down and celebrating this thing we really don't understand, and then she goes "psyche!"
I don't remember the actual ending point of the Gulf War -- my Saturday morning cartoons were never interrupted with the breaking news announcement that the world was all back to normal. It just kind of stopped being the thing that was in the news all the time. As far as I could tell, America stayed the same, Iraq stayed the same, Kuwait stayed the same, and I guess eventually people stopped killing each other about it. (Or so I thought.)
I have no idea why Kathleen thought this would be a good prank, but she got me for sure, and I guess it just goes to show what was on our young minds at the time. We thought that would be our generation's big war. We had no idea...
