“The real war will never get in the books.”

―Walt Whitman

“What about school?” I asked my mom the night before school was supposed to start.

“What if I tell you that you don’t have to go to school? Weren’t you complaining about your homework last year?” she answered cheerfully.

I shrugged my shoulders and walked away, annoyed.

A few months after the invasion, when we were passing by my school, my mom dropped her cheerful act and stayed quiet as she realized that her attempt to protect my innocence had failed. Perhaps there was no lie convincing enough to explain why my school had transformed into a detention center. Or perhaps, she herself was in shock, trying to wrap her head around the fact that her world was collapsing right underneath her feet and that she had no hint of the future that awaited her children. Or maybe she was contemplating whether my dad and her had made the right decision by staying behind. Had they been brave or simply ignorant? Was it fair to subject her children to this cruel reality? Could this be a very rare opportunity to teach them new meanings of patriotism? The same questions must have haunted almost half the population who had fled the country after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990, and the ones who had stayed behind.

I, on the other hand, asked myself different questions as I struggled to understand how everything looked familiar and yet strange as we drove across what barely resembled our homeland. Was God punishing me for pretending that I was sick to skip school? Was it because I complained about my homework that God had taken my school away from me? Every time we passed by my school, I would make all kinds of promises to God, just to get my school back. Six months after the liberation of Kuwait on Feb 26th, 1991, my wish was finally granted. At last, I skipped my way to school. As I looked around at my classmates and friends, I realized that one person was missing—my friend Moneera was nowhere to be found, and no one seemed to know whether she would be coming back.

On our first day back, we were handed our new black and white books. As the country was in a race with time to make sure education was restored in the academic year following Kuwait’s liberation, the focus was on the bare necessities, and colored prints were a luxury we couldn’t afford. The teachers divided us into two groups: the ones who had stayed in the country during the invasion and the ones who had left. Some of the students who left with their families got a chance to continue their education elsewhere and to use their time efficiently, they were tasked with cleaning and refurbishing our school to erase the signs of destruction. The rest of the students attended their classes.

To make up for the academic year we had lost during the invasion, the curriculum of two years was cramped to fit in one. Every teacher who entered the classroom would start by walking us through the material that we would study that semester and the material that we would have to skip. There were also some parts that we had to correct in our books. The teachers passed correction pens, and we were asked to flip through our textbooks and white out all Iraqi flags along with any reference to the country being a sisterly nation.

Over the years, new chapters were added to our books and new terminologies were introduced. The new chapters of our history books identified our new allies—the countries that supported our cause, participated in the war, and contributed to funding it—and our new enemies—the countries that supported the invasion. Our exams would ask us to list the UN resolutions that led to the war, the coalition forces, and the claims that the Iraqi regime had made to justify the invasion and the counterarguments. Our books also included detailed statistics about our 605 prisoners of war (PoWs), who had never come back. They also included a detailed description of the systematic destruction campaign launched during the invasion that had thrown the whole country into havoc. They also discussed the fires that were set in 603 oil wells, which created one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history, and the more than 1.6 million landmines that were planted in this tiny country at a ratio of 1.1 mines per person.

The literature also underwent a shift to reflect our new history. Some details were too graphic to be included in our books, but they became part of the new reality that we had to cope with: the horrifying stories about rape, torture, and killing. As colors made a comeback to our books in the later years, my memories of the invasion stayed crisp and vivid. There was only one memory that faded with time—that of Moneera’s face. And for 13 years after the liberation, I would never leave my home without wearing my pin. It was a small Kuwaiti flag wrapped in a yellow ribbon and read “We’ll never forget our PoWs.”

Some chapters, however, were conveniently excluded from our books. While I am not sure whether they were a part of the textbooks across the border, I am certain they were discussed at length, mourned, and lived. Our textbooks, however, did not have room to discuss the controversy on whether our allies had committed war crimes as they bombed the retreating Iraqi troops in what became known as the highway of death. Nor did they discuss the air bombing during the war of the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad, Iraq, by the U.S. forces, which resulted in the killing of 408 civilians. And we barely touched on the suffocating sanctions that were imposed on Iraq by the UN.

I am also certain that an alternative version of history was also discussed across the border. In that version, the invasion of Kuwait was described as an act of defense against a conspiracy orchestrated by the US and Kuwait to destroy the economy of Iraq and its rising power. According to them, the invasion was nothing but a noble and heroic attempt to correct a historical mistake, in which the west had cut Kuwait from Iraq. This version claimed that the fall of Iraq was what the Kuwaitis had wanted, and by seeking help to force the invading troops out, Kuwait had proved its malicious intents.

It takes years before you begin to realize that the real war never makes it into books. You quickly reach out for your correction pens whenever you write your version of history, maybe more often than you like to admit. In your version, your pain is real, while that of “the other” is dismissed, as you reduce him to an inhuman creature, deserving of his suffering and unworthy of your mercy. It takes even longer for you to realize that the real war starts after all the acts of aggression come to an end as you struggle to collect the scattered pieces of yourself to glue them together to what looks like a disfigured version of yourself.

But one day, when you get tired of pretending that the other doesn’t exist beyond the fences that you have carefully built, you gather whatever strength you have left to give up your protective shell and make your way towards the border to look the other in the eye. You stand still for him to see you—maybe for the first time in a very long time—for who you really are: a human being who is too terrified to trust. You move closer for him to take a good look at you, to see your raw, open wounds, only for you to end up seeing his. And that’s when you finally see him for what he really is—another human being. Only then can you find the courage in your heart to rise above your pain and extend a trembling hand, hoping that he will extend his.

~On the 28th anniversary of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.