"Let's talk to some people," says Vernon. We move back out to the street. A little boy wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle T-shirt taps me on the leg. He asks me if I am a reporter. "I guess," I tell him. "Tov, zeh heleck may ha-til [This is part of the missile]," he says, as he produces a contorted burned SCUD remain, "Birtzinut? [Is it really]", I ask, "Betach! [of course]" he responds, very matter of factly.
8:22 a.m.
One old lady, Sara, 70, calls to us with tears in her eyes. Her husband Shlomo is inside and can't move. We walk into a three room flat. There is Shlomo, on the bed he bed he had been in when the missle hit. He is covered with the glass that had shattered from the window above him. His eyes are wide open as he looks around nervously. He peers at me, sees my green army pants and asked If I was from the Defense Ministry. I tell him I'm not but that I'd help him up. He begins to explain to me what the explosion had felt like in his home, which was about 50 yards from ground zero. His ears are still ringing, he says, and I have to shout so he can hear me. Vernon writes furiously. "Yihiye beseder [it will be fine]," I try to reassure the Cohens. Then the medics come in and take them away.
8:50 a.m.
It has now been only an hour and 35 minutes since we heard the first siren at the Hilton. We continue to talk to people, all of whom express outrage at having been targeted by the Iraqis. "Why are they trying to kill our children and not our soldiers?" is a common refrain. All of them are sure that the IDF and the IAF could make short work of the coward who attacks innocents in their homes. "That son of a bitch," one old woman calls him. Anger and indignation, not fear, is the dominant emotion here. In classic Mideastern fashion, people grab me by the shirt lapels as they make their points. Many compare Saddam to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Like Eichmann, whom the Israelis captured, tried and executed in the '60s, so too would Saddam be punished for attacking innocent Jews, they vow.
9:03 a.m.
As we head toward the car, calm returns to the neighborhood. The IDF, police and civil defense units go efficiently about their business--assessing damage to property, evacuating people recently rendered homeless, treating the wounded and comforting the shaken. Army radio announces that ten were wounded in the three missile landings that morning. As we are about to get in the car to locate the other impact sites, I speak to a man wearing a large black Kippa (skull cap). "You know, one Arab state attacks another, the Americans and the Europeans declare war and we pay the price. It's all very absurd," he notes wryly. Indeed it is.