by Greg Rollins
Christian Peacemaker Teams

There is a gap in my memory that feels like it is a year, but is less than a second long. It stems from the thought of when will David and Mabel get here, “to what was that explosion?” The explosion shook me, made my ears ring and made time unstable. I turned around and twenty meters away a wall of dust enveloped the street. The dust dispersed quickly. In the middle of the road where someone placed the explosive device, the concrete medium lay burst.

The next thing that I noticed was that the explosion left everyone around me dazed-children and adults alike. You could see it on their faces and in their body language. They slowly shuffled away from the blast sight while they constantly looked back. People yelled at each other, to each other and through each other. Others said nothing but stared. Somewhere behind all this, two Iraqi men ran carrying a wounded third.

Not far past the blast was a stopped car. Its back window was blown in and the back bumper blown off. The two men inside climbed out in unsteady shock. The passenger stumbled away while the driver stood and looked back and forth between his car, and the U.S. soldiers stopped a block away at the time. The driver put his hands on his head as if he expected the soldiers to arrest him, then he put his hands down and shuffled off the road.

I watched all this shock around me through shocked eyes of my own. Time sped up and slowed down. The light was too bright and people moved too fast. I saw young boys walk up to the broken medium for a closer look, and I watched a middle-aged Iraqi man crying as his friend led him by the arm down the street.

Those who stood further away when the blast happened were less shocked then others. A block away the U.S. soldiers slowly approached, their movements more cautious than stunned. I had noticed the soldiers before the blast but had thought nothing of them. One often sees patrols of U.S. soldiers parked at the side of the road. David Milne later learned from a soldier that an Iraqi told them about a suspicious person atop a dilapidated building ahead. The soldiers had called the Iraqi police to investigate but had not foreseen the explosive device.

Many of us around the blast were lucky. The bomb was small. Few people sustained serious injuries but one person died. Those who did receive injuries were only a block and a half from a hospital. My shock wore off with time, as did the shock in the people and on the street. When I returned home, I tried to think back on the moment I heard the explosion but there was a gap in my memory. It moved from waiting for my teammates, to the disorientation of the blast. As short as the time between these two moments was, it was too long for me to remember what had happened.

Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical violence-reduction program with roots in the historic peace churches. Teams of trained peace workers live in areas of lethal conflict around the world. CPT has been present in Iraq since October, 2002. To learn more about CPT, please visit www.cpt.org.
Photos of our projects may be viewed at www.cpt.org/gallery