Thursday, August 9, 1990

Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

There were no bones in my legs. For days, the only things holding me upright had been fear and a constant rush of adrenaline. I was in a safe spot now, and the adrenaline was gone, but the need to keep going remained. Until I’d found my dad, the nightmare would continue.

The massive glass and bronze door thunked into my back and I realized I’d come to a dead stop in the doorway. The hotel lobby was a huge atrium surrounded by floor-after-floor of white marble balconies reaching up to a multicolored skylight. Free-standing clear glass elevators zipped up and down. I only gave these things a quick glance, though. What really grabbed me was the mass of people crowding the hotel lobby. Whole families huddled together on the floor, holding each other close, brother clinging to brother, sister to sister. Mothers clasped their children tightly, as if they were still protecting them from the horrors they had just witnessed. All but the youngest children stared into space, seeing nothing except the pictures in their mind. I knew what they were experiencing, because I’d seen the destruction and the cruelty first hand. I’d seen families torn apart, and worse. Hard to believe that only eight days earlier, little more than a week, I’d been an ordinary American kid thinking the anger I carried around in my brain was somehow important in the scheme of things. 

 About half of the men in the hotel lobby had on dishdashas, the long robes worn by most Arab men in this part of the world. No one gave me a second glance, as I was wearing a dishdasha myself, the color of desert sand. I had discarded my American jeans and tee-shirt days before, hoping I would escape notice as I fled across the desert. It nearly worked.

Almost all the women wore black silk abayas, so that nothing was showing but their eyes. A few wore western clothes, but the dresses were wrist and ankle-length. Silk scarves covered their heads. It was obvious I’d made it out of Kuwait and into Saudi Arabia where the dress code for women was super strict. What had been my home near Kuwait City was a bare hundred miles away, but it felt like a thousand – a thousand miles of the worst that both nature and man could dish up.

Here in safety, in this luxury hotel, the last week should start to become a fading nightmare. But it had been no dream. The evidence was in the crying babies and in the faces of the refugees huddled on the floor. I could see more evidence when I looked at my bruised and scratched arms and the desert filth that covered my body. And in the memory of new friends found and, all too quickly, lost. Oh yes, it had been very real.

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