On another occasion K’s youngest son “was up the street at his friend’s house and when the warning went, he called me to tell me he was running home. I stood on my porch and watched him run for his life to get home before the attack. I felt like barfing.”
She said this most recent conflict was “beyond” frightening. “It's one thing to have lived through missiles from Gaza and the Houthis all this time…We have faith in our Iron Dome and we learned to live with the stress of those. But this most recent war with Iran engendered “a whole new level of stress.”
“We've all have had our safe rooms packed with extra food, batteries, candles, a solar radio, tons of water…”
Notwithstanding her fear, “we had to maintain a level of normalcy for ourselves, for the kids, in order to function.”
Two of her children volunteered for the war effort. One took an intensive medic course in the hopes of helping in hospitals. He is in an elite commando unit based up North and her daughter “is a commander for young men who have had hardships in their lives.”
K explains that at first Israelis got a 15 mins warning and then when the Iranians launched more sophisticated missiles, it became only a 6 minute or less warning. “If you are out and about during that warning, you had very little time to find shelter. And it couldn't be just any shelter it had to be one that could withstand a ballistic missile.”
On the morning of the first day of the war, K’s daughter called from her base saying it was being evacuated so she would be home in time. Bust she got notice that the time of arrival was much earlier. Her daughter called to say she was stuck in Tel Aviv with no public transportation as it all had stopped, and she was not able to find a cab. So my husband had no choice but to go get her and five of her army buddies. Saying bye to him that morning, not knowing if I would see him again, what would happen, was horrible. Thankfully he managed to drive like a madman to Tel- Aviv and back in 45 mins and there were no missiles yet “
K, who was not sleeping well at all adds, “We lived in constant fear. Real fear for our lives. The sounds of the booms and the shaking of our houses with interceptions were terrifying. Never heard it like that before. And then seeing the news of the impacts on buildings. Suddenly we didn't feel as invincible as we did before with our Iron Dome. Iran, man, that's been a threat for the world for most of our lives, even in Canada. And who are we? Some sliver of a country defending ourselves from this massive threat? Crazy.”
She points out, “We got good at "War Math". Basically we would calculate that after every missile attack, we had a few hours to do other things out of the house because they didn't seem to launch multiple attacks one after another.”
For the first couple nights of the war, K indicted she would share one bed with her daughter and dog, and her husband and youngest son slept on the other beds on the floor. Her eldest son was on his base during the war and her middle son was in Portugal with his friends on a vacation when the war began.
But in spite of it all, K and her family are resilient, “My daughter and her boyfriend have been talking about getting engaged and decided that we all needed good news so they got engaged during the war. It was super special… We weren't able to have too many people here in case of a siren, but we decided to have a party anyway with close friends and the family of the groom to be. .. a siren did go off while we were celebrating, so whoever lived close left in a hurry, and about 25 of us were in our safe room singing and dancing (squished and hot!) during the attack. Take that Iran.”
