I was a bougie 10-year-old who conned my parents into a trip to Egypt because I was obsessed with pyramids and pharoahs and shit. We ended up also going to Israel via the Sinai desert (still with bombed-out tanks) and Gaza and then to Jordan (Petra is fucking cool as shit).

It was 1993 and even in Australia the Gulf War had been plastered all over TV and every kid knew about Stormin Norman and Saddam Insane and saw precision bomb footage and had the fucking trading cards and knew it was all about goodies and baddies, but that was all over now. So imagine our surprise when we're in the deserts of Western Jordan and see American jets fly overhead. Back in a shopping centre in Amman, a bunch of guys who thought we were Americans accosted us, more upset than angry, wanting to know why we were still bombing the shit out of Iraq when the war was over. Good fucking question, guys. I obviously didn't understand the nuances or anything, but I think it planted the seed that not everybody loved America and for good reasons, and that the official narratives were kinda bullshit.

Fast forward through a cringey teenage iamverysmart libertarian phase to apolitical drinking and girls phase to September 11 2001, when I was kinda surprised to find that my first thought was "yeah, they had that shit coming"