Being the target of a terrorist
10 years ago I was injured during a terrorist bombing at Brussels Airport. The strangeness of that day will always stay with me. It stopped time and impacted my life in ways I could never imagine.
What happened?
I had gone to the airport early that day for a flight to see my partner. I sat down in a waiting area because the check-in line was long. A few minutes of peace and then the whole world around me changed. A bomb exploded a few meters away from me - just beside the check-in line. So close I could feel the heat of the explosion on my body and I was temporarily deafened by the noise. The whole airport became dark because there was dust in the air. There was another explosion a few seconds later that I just about heard. And somewhere my logical part of my brain told me to escape. I abandoned my luggage and belongings and ran. I only saw one person on the way out - they were stuck trying to roll their luggage out over some debris. I helped them get out. When outside, some sense of normality returned because I was in the light again and after a couple of minutes my hearing fully returned. But the feeling of a return to normality was only beginning. In the coming hours and days I found myself in an information void without much control over my life and feeling strangely separated from the world.
First was me acknowledging what happened. I initially thought it was a gas explosion, I think I did not want to face the reality I maybe already knew. That fiction was harder to believe when security police in balaclavas came to film those of us gathered outside. Weirdly after escaping, I wanted to go back in. I think i wanted to figure out what had happened, see if i could help people and also to get my phone. No phone meant no need and I was picking up scraps of information. And I wanted more than anything to contact my family and partner. But thankfully by that time, the police were blocking the entrance. I say thankfully because i never saw the worst of the impact. What I didn’t know at the time was there was a third unexploded bomb near where I had exited.
After 2 hours or so, an airport worker told me they thought it was a bomb because there were other bombings in Brussels city. And the horror of it finally dawned on me. This wasn’t an accident. The heat I felt from the bomb could have killed me if I was closer. I wasn’t an accidental bystander, I was someone’s target. And they had chosen the check-in line where I was supposed to queue. The gravity of the situation hit - I wasn’t likely to be going on my flight or going anywhere soon.
Am I OK?
Losing contact is the thing that made me most anxious, or perhaps distracted. I managed to borrow a phone to call my family and put an update on facebook. This was minutes before the telephone lines became saturated and nobody was able to call or message anyone.
Despite being wrapped up in your own world, my group of people caught up in the situation were mostly seen as a hinderance to the police and rescue services. If you’re not visibly injured, youre not the priority. So we were abandoned on a highway outside the airport and eventually found a rescue centre in the town near the airport. There were volunteers there that had just been called in from their day jobs to help. They seemed more freaked out than I was. There was an information deficit - nobody knew the full story. I kept wanting to update my family and friends but there was no way. It was then i suddenly realised I was injured - there was a cut on my leg. My brain had completed ignored the pain for 5 hours.
Where am I?
As the day went on, my biggest desire was to get away from the airport. I couldn’t get home to my apartment because my keys were in my luggage. The airline accommodated me in a hotel for the night. Arriving with no luggage, I checked in and immediately fell on the lobby computer and hotel phone to tell people I was ok. My brain was addled. I remember changing my facebook password to log in and then immediately forgetting what password I had chosen 4 or 5 times. I was surviving on adrenaline and was exhausted. That night I had a dinner with another survivor who was supposed to travel on the same plane. She was traumatised and possibly hallucinating - but who knows what’s a hallucination when the world is crazy anyway?
How am I?
After a day I got back into my apartment. After two weeks I went back to work. After a month I got my luggage back. After 10 years im able to speak about it with some level of emotional detachment. I can’t say I’ll ever get over it though.