I Gde Wiratha
Owner of Paddy's Bar in Kuta, Bali [Indonesia], whose nightclub strip was bombed Oct. 12, 2002. Death toll: 202, mainly Australians and Indonesians.

Of course I heard the bombs. I was at my hotel at the time, finishing a meeting with friends from Singapore. Three minutes later, my friend called my mobile. He'd just landed at the airport and said he'd seen a fireball in the sky. At the airport he'd heard it was Paddy's. So he called me. "You've been bombed," he said. "Stop pulling my leg," I said. Then every two minutes someone called me. They all mentioned the bomb. I realized then it must be true.

After half an hour my brother called me. He said don't go anywhere, our place has been bombed. It was then that I got scared. My 10-year-old son and wife were afraid. So I didn't go anywhere. At 7.30 a.m. I got up and went there. There was blood everywhere. There were still bodies there. I almost fainted.

I thought my staff must have been among the dead. I washed my head with drinking water. I was seeing stars. I didn't know what to think about the staff. They're like family to me. If one of them had died, it would have been like a part of me dying.

It would have been much worse if God had not been protecting us. I believe 100 percent in my temple behind the bar. It was not damaged, including the umbrella in it. The generator next to it collapsed like a Coca-Cola can. And next to it were two [100-liter] tanks full of diesel. If those had exploded  Oh, my God, think what would have been the effect. But they didn't explode, even though the generator was destroyed. God was at work there.

I then called all my staff who could still walk and asked them to gather at the hotel. I asked them how many people had died. Amazingly none of the staff had died.

At 6 p.m. the real flood of questioning started. By journalists, police, military. It went on for a month and a half. I'm now fed up with journalists because they asked me: "Mr. Gde, why was your place bombed? Why are all your staff still alive and so many guests dead?" How can I explain? "Was there no emergency door? Was there no security?"

I said, "How can you talk about security." At the World Trade Center they had a lot of security but there could be an attack there. We have had bombs in Palestine, at the [Jakarta] Marriott hotel. We're just a bar in Bali. Could we protect ourselves more than them?

But the hardest questions came from my son, Putu Kelvin. He asked: "Why must we pay this? There are so many places, why us? Has daddy sinned?" I can't give an answer to this question. "Has daddy sinned so badly we had to be bombed?" This is the question of a 10-year-old. "Or has this happened because daddy is a thief, or corrupt?"

It was very hard to answer. I can't say this is political, or rational, or unilateral. He wouldn't understand. This was the hardest question I had to answer. He can see I work hard, but he doesn't know why I was bombed. I can answer the journalists and the police, but not this.

I don't want to blame someone. They're human beings. Only God can make a decision. If God doesn't agree, maybe it doesn't happen. Maybe it's also karma, against me, against the Balinese, against Indonesia, against Asia. Who knows? They just used our place. So I think: "Right, this has happened. Let's forget it. Let's move on. We've got to lead our lives."

We Balinese have a certain attitude to life. If someone harms me, I should not harm him back. If someone throws shit at me, I will throw back flowers.

I was so proud when I discovered that the bombers were not Balinese. They can take our place, but they cannot take away our soul. Bali is still paradise. It is still like before. It took me four months to decide to reopen. Kuta was quiet. Tourists couldn't go to the area; it was closed off. Business was dead for two and a half months. Many investigators came with so much equipment.

Every time I went to the site the people would ask, "Boss, when are you going to reopen?" The staff were just spending their time playing football and asking, "When? When boss?" So I decided to reopen.

According to the Balinese religion, anywhere that so many people die automatically becomes a cemetery. We cannot use the land.

This [new Paddy's] used to be an open space used for parking. We moved slowly. I didn't have that much money. It was impossible to get credit. My wallet was almost empty because I had no guests, but my costs were the same. Now the traffic jams are returning -- it means the tourists are coming back.

The Balinese say you don't have the same event twice. Or if you do, you are very stupid and deserve it. So the Balinese are really concerned that the security has to be intensified. Now we have volunteer guards from community groups everywhere.

What happened is part of the story of life and you have to ensure it does not happen again. You must take care of yourselves, your family, your property and your community.

-- John Aglionby

Jason Mosher
A petty officer 3rd class on the USS Cole when the warship was hit by explosives hidden in a small white fishing boat, driven into its hull during a fueling stop at Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000. Death toll: 17 servicemen.

I had just made a journal entry on my computer up in the radar room, and had come down into the mess line for lunch. Do you want to know what I wrote? I'll read it to you: "Since the captain has decided that to tell anyone back home practically anything is some kind of violation of national security, it might be best to tell myself  Right now we are refueling. There are a bunch of men on a little motorboat  One has a sweatshirt that says Free Kuwait (from the 1991 war). It's just kind of weird  We all  think of the whole area as enemy territory."

I was just waiting in line when all of a sudden there was a bang. It sounded just like a really loud pop, and then everything was dark and quiet. Obviously, I knew something was very wrong right away, and I knew the ship had shaken. I couldn't feel it because it happened so fast, but all of a sudden I was crouched.

We fought flooding for another 36 hours before everything stabilized, and some spaces had to be sealed. We didn't have power for three days, not to the whole ship. I had to sleep outside for a few nights because we didn't have air conditioning. Having to get around a ship with a flashlight to take a shower in the dark -- it was almost surreal.

We felt extremely vulnerable, definitely vulnerable. After I did the muster, I went up to the weather deck and the gunners master was just handing out pistols. If you could hold a gun, you got one. And you pretty much stood around the perimeter of the ship, and if anything came within 500 yards you pointed at it. At one point there were a lot of people coming in our direction, and everyone just kneejerked and started aiming at them. We felt very, very vulnerable. We were over there, and it was Yemen.

After that there were no friends there. When I went into town to give blood I was nervous. I was thinking any one of these people could be waiting to blow up this van with people in it to give blood.

But I did get a chance to get down in the ship and see the damage in the mess line where I had been. I saw the spot where I would have been standing if I had been on the other side of the ship.

That it could even have happened! Even though we are in the Navy, and it is the military and there is always the possibility of combat, there is still that element of invincibility -- that it won't happen to me. It somehow never crossed my mind. It had never been done before; we had never heard of a boat pulling up to another point and exploding. There were no references. There was no idea that this could ever happen.

I had never heard of al-Qaida before, or Osama bin Laden, or any of these people. If it's an explosion by a boat, it's obviously terrorism. It wasn't a blatant attack. It was someone who snuck up to the side of the ship and blew themselves up. Who would use trickery like that? How can that be considered a legitimate attack by one nation against another?

Obviously it was a precursor to Sept. 11. Since that time in Aden I've come home to the U.S., doing a desk job before I'm discharged in 2006. I got married and I'm going to technical college. I want to work in biomedical engineering when I leave the Navy.

When I look around, it seems everywhere that groups are polarizing. It seems to me like it is not just with Muslims and Christians, and Muslims and Jews, and Israelis and Palestinians. You are either one extreme or the other extreme  I don't know how that happened, but that just seems to be what is going on.

Maybe that is why we are seeing this kind of terrorism, and seeing this kind of conflict escalate and spread. [The U.S.] was founded by people who were God-fearing men. They were Christians. They wrote the Constitution, wrote on principles that they had because they were upstanding men and Christian men. Extremists are the people like Hamas, groups like that. They will never like America because they are Islamic and some sects of Islam are just completely hateful towards Christianity. Christian people over there are killed daily. There are some Islamic groups that seek out churches just because people believe in Jesus, and they slaughter them just because of their faith. That is what happens, and that is what the extremist factions want. If they met a Christian, they would put him to the sword, so to speak, and no questions asked.

There will always be someone else, I think. It is just a sign of the times and the way the world is going to be. I don't see an end. I don't think it's ever going to end.

-- Suzanne Goldenberg

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