The Boy Who Was Scared
Last night Justin, kind of out of nowhere, started talking.
Justin: I have been scared about something. Is it okay if we talk about it?
Barbara: Oh no! Of course. You can always talk to us about anything.
Justin: (eyes welling) I am really scared about everything that is happening in Iran.
Barbara: Me too, Justin. It’s okay to be scared.
She went on to explain that sometimes scary things happen. And that being scared is okay. We shouldn’t be afraid of big feelings. And while Iran is an awful tragedy, so far we are safe, Matthew is safe, and Big Justin is safe. And no matter what, we will be here for him.
He’s ten years old.
Ten. He’s supposed to be scared of the dark, or that thing he thinks lives under the bed, or whether his best friend is going to be in his class next year. He’s supposed to have the kind of fears that dissolve in the morning light, the kind his mom can chase away with a hug and a glass of water.
Instead, he’s lying awake thinking about Iran.
I’ve been to places where the bombs land. I’ve sat in the dark and felt the peculiar silence that follows an explosion — the vacuum where sound used to be, before the ringing starts. I’ve seen what happens to buildings. What happens to the people inside them. I came home and I tried to fold all of that into some quiet place inside where it wouldn’t leak out onto the people I love.
And here is this boy, who hasn’t been anywhere near any of it, and it’s leaked out onto him anyway.
That’s what we don’t talk about when we talk about war. We talk about strategy. We talk about deterrence and escalation and theater-level operations and acceptable losses. We talk about victory and annihilation. Somewhere in all that language — in the purposeful coldness and masculine bluster of it — we lose the thread back to what it really means.
It means a ten-year-old boy sitting up in the dark, eyes welling, asking if it’s okay to be scared.
It’s always okay to be scared, my love. It means you’re paying attention.
I’ll be honest. I don’t know how to write about this war the way the news writes about it — the strikes, the countermeasures, the diplomatic temperature, the leadership failures, the cost, the casualties reported as numbers. I’ve tried. I sit down and I start typing and I can feel myself doing the thing we all do, the thing you must do just to keep functioning, which is to process human catastrophe as an abstraction.
I can’t do it today.
Today I keep coming back to Justin.
I keep thinking about the Justins on the other side of it. The Iranian ten-year-olds lying awake in cities that have been in the crosshairs for years now. The kids who’ve grown up watching their country treated as a problem to be solved, a threat to be neutralized, a variable in someone else’s equation. I think about what it does to a person to grow up that way. I think about the fact that we never get to meet those kids, that the whole machinery of war depends, in part, on us not meeting them, on them remaining abstract, on their fear being somehow less vivid, less valid, less human than Justin’s.
Their fear is not less than. It’s the same fear. It lives in the same place in the chest, the heart, the soul.
Here is what I know from having been in it:
Violence does not end the thing that caused it. I know that sounds simple, almost naive, and I know there are people — smart people, people who’ve thought about this longer than I have — who will line up to explain to me why sometimes force is necessary, why sometimes there is no other option, and that I’m just being sentimental and weak. Maybe they’re right. But I’ve been to the end of that logic trail, and I’ve watched what it produces on the ground, and I have yet to see a bomb that taught anyone anything except how to hate more efficiently.
Every war plants the seeds of the next one. Every strike that kills a child creates at least ten people for whom that child becomes a reason. The violence doesn’t conclude. It compounds. Think about how YOU would feel if your child’s school was destroyed and hundreds of kids died. Would that lessen your resolve?
Violence teaches the next generation what fear feels like, and fear — when it has nowhere to go, when it’s surrounded and cornered and has no Barbara to sit with it in the dark — turns. It turns into something harder. It turns into vengeance. Into payback.
We are so bad at this. As a species, as nations, as the people who get to decide these things from a distance. We are catastrophically, heartbreakingly bad at looking at the long arc of what we’re doing.
I don’t have a solution. I want to be clear about that. I’m not going to end this with a policy recommendation or a call to action or a tidy paragraph about what should happen next. I spent a long time in uniform, and I know that the world is more complicated than any single narrative about peace and war. I have enormous respect for the people in uniform – like Matthew and Big Justin - who have to make impossible decisions in real time with imperfect information.
But I also have enormous respect for a boy who is brave enough to say I am scared and ask if it’s okay to feel that.
Because that is the thing. That is the only thing that has ever moved any of this in a better direction — the willingness to sit with the fear instead of turning it into a weapon. Barbara did that last night. She didn’t minimize it or dismiss it or change the subject. She said: me too. She said: it’s okay. She stayed in it with him.
Imagine. Just for a second. Imagine if that were the model.
Justin went to sleep eventually. I don’t know if he slept well. I hope so.
Somewhere in Tehran, or Isfahan, or some village I couldn’t find on a map, some other kid is having some version of the same night. Same fear. Same welling eyes. Maybe someone is sitting with them too. Maybe someone is saying: it’s okay. I’m here. You’re safe for now.
I hope so.
I really hope so.
Thank you. And thanks to your Justin and Barbara and to Matthew and Big Justin. I am scared. I am angry. I am confused and frustrated with myself because I don't know what I can do. I have examined my conscience about previous disasters and thought I would know how to act but here I am and I don't know. I just try to acknowledge those feelings, say my prayers, and then try to show up for my family, friends, and work.