The 1997 terrorist attack on Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem's popular pedestrian mall, was my third suicide bombing. I described the scene vividly, gave voice to the country's anguish cries, filed my report and walked to my apartment with the million-dollar view of the walled Old City and fell, exhausted, into bed. I slept deeply.
In
I witnessed none of it. Yet I sleep fitfully.
In the Middle East, I knew none of the victims and had trouble pronouncing their names. In New York they are burying childhood friends. I know their names too well -- Timmy Kelly, Tim Coughlin, Joe and Danny Shea, Eddie Papa, Kevin Cosgrove and more.
Like so many guys from my hometown on
The names and faces from my childhood are not so easily forgotten. Several were classmates of my younger sisters and brother in the Catholic school we attended.
That they are among the missing makes this personal. I am hundreds of miles from ground zero, but I am still too close.
At night, the crickets are maddening; I find no solace in their song. And when air flights resumed over my contemplative, riverside home I felt relief at once again hearing the roar of the jets.
Unlike most Americans, I have seen terror up close, smelled the acrid smoke that clings to your clothes after a suicide bombing, sat with a mother whose teen-age daughter never returned from a shopping trip with her friends.
I think, my days in the Mideast should have steeled me to the pictures filling my television screen, to the sad news from home, to the eulogies I will soon hear.
They have not.
Then I recall an afternoon in Tel Aviv in the spring of 1997, two days after a suicide bomber had exploded his lethal package at a trendy outdoor café, killing three women.
The Apropo Café was reopening. Staffers had scrubbed the patio clean of blood, replaced the bomb-blasted windows and stocked the dessert case with treats.
It was
Four men in ostrich suits arrived at the café. They were greeted by a waitress in a Wonder Woman outfit, a crown on her head, a sword at her hip.
A black-draped chair held three memorial candles for the bombing victims who were being buried that day.
Café owner Nachi Laor told me then he wanted to quickly reopen the café for one reason and one reason alone: "To show that nobody can defeat us."
Ann LoLordo served as The Sun's Middle East correspondent from June 1996 to October 1999. She is now an editor on the Features desk.