Story from A Picture

I have never been so scared in my life. I have never been so sure that each breath I took would be my last. I have never been so angry at the great injustices of the world as I was on that late Sunday afternoon.
Throughout my life, from a young child playing in the streets of Basra, to a devote teenager kicking around a soccer ball in the hot, dirt field outside the city, to a young student seeing America for the first time as I found my way to Columbia for the first day of classes, to a new engineer starting a family, I have always felt blessed. Everything I did required dedication and hard work, and none of it was easy, but I always had the opportunity to get where I wanted. I always knew that I was fortunate to be born into the religion of the president, and to parents of the party; and I always knew how bad things were for some in the Iraq of my early life. In some sense, I suppose it was overall a good thing for Saddam to be overthrown, on the other hand, my neighborhood had always managed to go unnoticed by the government. We quietly paid our dues and said the right things to get the resources we needed, but were otherwise left alone.
As for myself, I never remember looking down the barrel of a gun before the arrival of the U.S. I never remember losing friends to roadside bombs meant for foreign soldiers, or feeling unsafe at the market because any second the whole place could go up in flames, because one of the vendors was suspected of selling weapons. I never remember the tears on my wife and children's eyes when I make it safely home from work each day.
I understand that perhaps things will be better for us all in the future. Maybe one day no one will live in fear, everyone will practice their religion freely, and Iraq will be both free and safe. For now anyways, I wonder if things were not better before. One or two "disappearances" every once in a while was certainly a lot better than hundreds of causeless deaths each and everyday.