By Kayla Roberts
Winter 2016 Kaplan Award Winner
One night when I was 10 years old, I dreamt that Osama Bin Laden kidnapped my sister. We were playing in the front yard, and a big unmarked white van pulled up to my front yard. The side door opened, and a tall man climbed out and smiled at us. I knew it was Bin Laden. He started calling out to my sister, telling her to come into the van. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream for help. I just stood there in my front yard, hands out, tears streaming down my face, as I watched my little sister get in the van. Bin Laden turned to me with a smug grin that fell into a stone cold snarl and warned me not to follow.
I remember my dad coming around the side of the house. As the white van drove off, he told me there was nothing we could do.
I still remember waking up with tears streaming onto my pillow, my pajamas wet with sweat. I finally made it into my parents’ room, angry that my dad gave up on my sister, and terrified that Bin Laden could find his way into any suburban neighborhood of the United States.
Osama Bin Laden was a name on the radio. He was a picture in a newspaper. I don’t recall the first time I saw a video of him, or why I associated him with everything bad in the world. I think I wanted to simplify. I wanted to pin the terribly confusing picture of burning sky scrapers on someone.
A computer game came out in 2003 called Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, and my dad played it sometimes. The subtitle read, “Squad based counter terror.” I still remember the cover – men with assault rifles wearing riot helmets surrounded in red. My dad wasn’t a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, and I don’t know why he played it, but it was cool. It was one of those first-person shooter games, and I had never seen anything like it. I was the girl who played Zoo Tycoon and Age of Empires with her friends for hours – the games that gave players the all-knowing, all-controlling perspective. Rainbow Six put a gun and grenades in my hands and a target on my head. There was no recharging body armor. A shot to the head meant game over, and there were no checkpoints.
The one time when I tried to play Rainbow Six, I jumped any time I saw something move. The game had no narration. It was completely silent because you were usually in the snow in Russia somewhere. The goal was to take out 40 terrorists at a compound by yourself, and I just didn’t have the courage to sneak around in such a high pressure situation. As I sat in sweats and a t-shirt on a Saturday morning in a swivel chair, trying to stop my hands from shaking as I snuck around the Russian compound, I realized what war was. It wasn’t lining the blue troops up against the red troops and telling them to shoot like in history lessons. It was our own planes crashing into our own buildings because someone was clever enough to do it. It was sneaking around kicking open doors, where good and bad dressed the same. That is war.
When I was 13, I would babysit my sister and two younger boys after school at my house. One day, when we were tired of playing our hide-and-go-seek and tag mash-up in the backyard, I decided we should try something new. I had my very own digital camera as a gift from my grandparents, and I saw an episode on PBS’s Arthur where the kids made a home video like a James Bond movie. I don’t know how, but I convinced Jack, Connor, and my sister Margot to make a war movie.
We raided the garden shed looking for something gun-like.
“What’s this?” Jack, ten and in my sister’s class, pulled out a long, straight piece of hollow metal with rubber straps hanging off of it. It was a disassembled piece of a bike rack that attached to the minivan. Perfect.
We staged and walked through the movie in the backyard. Connor, eight, would be the hero wearing his brother’s skateboarding helmet. Jack would be the main terrorist standing on a hill in my backyard. Margot was the guard at the terrorist’s compound with a scarf wrapped around her head.
We had to get the whole movie in one, perfect shot because I had no concept of scenes. So we choreographed the lone American soldier invading the terrorists’ base. I ran behind Connor like a reporter embedded in the troops, copying that first-person shooter style I knew from video games. His Vans tennis shoes crunching the rocks, Connor stalked along the fence, pausing to peer around the corner of the shed before sprinting up the hill toward the terrorist stronghold. He took out the guard with the turban first with a simple shot to the head. But the terrorist head was not that easy. Jack yelled something in garbled, angry gibberish with an accent to the effect of – “Hey you American! No!” After a carefully planned fight in which Connor swung his metal bar just in time for Jack to duck, the terrorist leader went down, and Connor limped off wounded yet victorious.
We were so proud. For hours we would perfect our war movie scene, adding a segment to it every time where the terrorists would rise again and attack from a different position. I even made the cameraman a character that got hit from behind and was knocked out for a few seconds. Breathing heavily and covering the lens of the camera with my hand, I fell wildly to the ground, and then took my hand off the lens when Connor’s yelling brought me back to the light. By the heat of my hand, the lens became fogged for a few seconds before clearing up – my very own visual effects. Spielberg would be proud.
Without editing software, we created our own little masterpiece in my backyard at age 13. I directed my cast of warriors in the warfare I knew – terrorist group versus American hero. But Bin Laden was still too terrifying to make eight-year-old Connor go up against. Leave that to the Marines kicking in doors I had seen on TV.
My war movie-making days were not over. It was the early spring of 2011, and I was 18 living with a family for my academic gap-year. The family of five with a British dad, a sweet mom, three kids under 13, and I all ventured to the Snohomish River for an afternoon of exploration. They were an outdoorsy family, and they even inducted me into their ways with a camouflage jacket for my birthday.
I remember the day in sepia tones, with the clear river flowing over brown pebbles and bare tangled brambles overtaking the riverbank. Sidwell, the dad from Britain and a professor of current world affairs, had brought his camcorder, an upgrade from the digital camera I still owned. With our decked out camo outfits, toy guns, and the river all to ourselves, it was the perfect setting for a war movie.
Grant, the 10-year-old, was Bin Laden’s henchman who had captured an American soldier, played by a friend of his sister Alex, a 12-year-old. He took her gun and threw it away, hit her, and interrogated her. After silence from her, Grant said with a giggle, “I’m taking you to Bin Ladey.” And he dragged her away.
Grant was 10 years old, born in 2001, and had no memory of 9/11. Yet he knew the name. He knew who Bin Laden was, and he had seen the news footage. But the fear was missing. When I was Grant’s age, I would see a picture of Bin Laden, and I would become short of breath. I couldn’t even say his name after the nightmare I had. Yet here was Grant, laughing about “Bin Ladey,” but still associating him with war. It was all he knew of the world. There was no pre-9/11 in his world.
May 2, 2011, ten years after my fitful dream, Osama Bin Laden was killed. I wandered downstairs in a giant sweatshirt and dished up some baked oatmeal. Sidwell sat down with a mug of black coffee, pulled out his smartphone, and said, “Well, they killed him. They killed Bin Laden.” Wyatt, 13 and who had always dreamed of becoming a Navy Seal, immediately started asking every tactical question he could think of. Grant continued to eat his breakfast.
On that day, at 19 years old, I felt closure against my nemesis that took my sister in the night. I felt relief. It was naive to think the world could go back to any pre-9/11 status. But I felt that just maybe, I was a bit safer.
Character names were changed to protect their privacy, though all events are true.